History of England 1-6

On the day on which the dissolution of parliament was announced James was riding in the park at his palace of Theobalds when his horse stumbled and threw him into the New River that flowed through the grounds; the ice of January broke beneath him and he sank into the water until only his boots could be seen. He was rescued, and was none the worse after the incident, but it is an apt image of a hapless sovereign.

9

The Spanish travellers

Prince Charles was becoming impatient with the slow progress of the negotiations concerning his betrothal to the Infanta Maria Anna of Spain. The marriage itself had been contemplated twelve years before. Yet there had been endless wrangles about the status of Catholics in England, a sensitive affair that became embroiled with the disputes over the Palatinate and the general state of religious warfare in Europe. There was still some doubt whether the Spanish were in earnest about the match, and disputes arose over the size of the dowry; these doubts were not assuaged by the accession of Philip IV in 1621. It was not at all clear, to put it no higher, that parliament or people would support their sovereign’s wishes in the matter. When in 1622 the king ordered that Catholic recusants should be released from prison, after they had given security for any subsequent appearance in court, the fear and anger of the Protestant majority were evident.

It was proposed that Buckingham, now lord high admiral, would himself sail to Madrid; it was also whispered that ‘he intended to take his friend with him in secret, to bring back that beautiful angel’. The friend in question was Charles himself. The plan was dropped only to be replaced by another.

In February 1623, Charles and Buckingham approached the king with a scheme of their own devising. It would take too long for a fleet to be prepared for the voyage to Madrid. The effort of obtaining travel warrants for France would be immense. Their plan was to travel to Spain in disguise, with the intention of wooing and winning the most eligible woman in the world. For them it was a great adventure, a grand European romance. The king, sick and weary, seems to have assented; he rarely withstood the blandishments of his favourite or the urgent entreaties of his son.

On the morning after this interview, however, the king was not so sure. Cautious and wary as he was, he anticipated the perils with which the two young men would be surrounded. The heir to the throne would be in foreign hands. Animated by Charles’s presence among them, the Spanish ministers might make further demands. An attempt might even be made to convert him. So he remonstrated with them both, and outlined the dangers that they might incur. In response Buckingham merely said that, if he broke his promise of the day before, no one would ever believe him again.

Whereupon James called for one of his principal foreign advisers, Sir Francis Cottington, who was himself a supporter of Spain and the Spanish marriage. ‘Here are Baby Charles and Steenie,’ the king told him, ‘who have a great mind to go by post into Spain to fetch home the Infanta, who will have but two more in their company, and have chosen you for one, what think you of the journey?’ Cottington replied that such an expedition was dangerous and unwise; the Spanish were certain to impose new conditions upon the marriage. At this James threw himself upon the bed. ‘I told you this before,’ he shouted. ‘I am undone. I shall lose Baby Charles!’

Buckingham remonstrated angrily with Cottington until he was interrupted by the king. ‘Nay, by God, Steenie, you are much to blame to use him so. He answered me directly to the question I asked him, and very honestly and wisely: and yet he says no more than I told you before he was called in.’ Reluctantly, however, he renewed his assent to the perilous journey. It was also agreed that the three travellers should be joined by Endymion Porter, a courtier who had been brought up in Spain and might act as translator.

On the morning of 18 February, Charles and Buckingham set off from Buckingham’s mansion in Essex; they were wearing false beards and travelled under the names of Tom and John Smith. It was all wildly improbable. They gave a boatman at Gravesend a gold piece and rode away without asking for change; the man convinced himself that they were duellists about to fight each other on a foreign field, and advised the magistrates of the town. An officer was dispatched to intercept them, but he failed to find them. As suspected assassins they were stopped at Canterbury. Buckingham had to take off his false beard in order to assure the mayor that he was the lord high admiral going secretly to inspect the fleet. Eventually they reached Dover, where Porter and Cottington had secured a boat. Soon after their departure the sighing king wrote to them. ‘My sweet boys and dear venturous knights, worthy to be put in a new romance, I thank you for your comfortable letters, but think it not possible that you can be many hours undiscovered, for your parting was so blown abroad.’ In Buckingham’s absence the king had made him a duke, so that he was now pre-eminent even among the eminent.

The two incogniti sailed from Dover to Boulogne and, after two days in the saddle, they reached Paris. Two weeks later, after hard and weary riding, they eventually arrived in Madrid and knocked on the door of the English ambassador to Spain. John Digby, newly created earl of Bristol, was described by Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, as a man ‘of a grave aspect, of a presence which drew respect…’ He kept his countenance at the unexpected arrival of these two great men, and treated them with all deference and courtesy. But the news of Charles’s arrival soon reached the ears of Gondomar, the erstwhile Spanish ambassador who had returned home the year before. He went to the Spanish prime minister, Olivares, with a brilliant smile. Olivares told him that ‘one might think you had the king of England in Madrid’.

‘If I have not got the king, at least I have got the prince.’

Olivares and Gondomar now approached Philip IV with the astounding news that the prince of Wales had come in person to claim the hand of his sister. But what did Charles mean by travelling all this way to Spain? The grandees came to the conclusion that he was now ready to change his religion. Philip and Charles then agreed that they should meet in the open air, thus avoiding all the pomp and circumstance of a formal audience. The prince did not have a large enough retinue to appear with dignity. So he was invited into the king’s carriage, and a few days later he was conducted to the apartments reserved for him in the royal palace.

It was now widely believed that Charles was ready to convert, and indeed he gave no sign to the contrary. He continued to temporize on the matter, eager at all costs not to offend the Spaniards before he had obtained his wife. ‘We think it not amiss’, he and Buckingham wrote to James, ‘to assure you that, neither in spiritual nor in temporal things, there is anything pressed upon us more than is already agreed upon.’ They could not have been more wrong. The infanta herself declared that she would never agree to marry a Protestant. She had been told that she would be sleeping with a heretic who would one day burn in the fires of hell.

The foreign policy of England was now also entangled with Dutch affairs. On 27 February 1623, the principal merchant of the East India Company was tortured and then beheaded in Amboyna, now the Maluku islands of Indonesia; he was executed by order of the local Dutch governor, on the grounds that he was planning to attack the Dutch garrison. Nine other English merchants suffered the same fate, and the report of the incident provoked outrage in the nation on an unprecedented scale. It was the subject of plays and ballads, chapbooks and woodcuts, inflaming public opinion against the country across the North Sea.

In the following month some Dutch men-of-war chased privateers into the harbour of Leith and began firing at the town itself; this was considered by James to be an unwarrantable infringement of sovereign territory. A second incident of a similar kind occurred at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. For the king the actions of the Dutch were intolerable. In retaliation he sent a letter to his son in Madrid, asking him to open negotiations with the Spanish for a joint attack upon the Netherlands which the two countries would then partition. On few occasions has so small a pretext been used for so great a war. Yet it came to nothing. James’s anger cooled, and a compromise with the Netherlands was reached. His initial proposals, however, demonstrate how implicitly he still relied upon Spanish support; the whole episode also displays his impulsiveness and unpredictability.

*

Charles had not yet been given any opportunity of greeting his proposed bride, and so at the beginning of April he was invited to an audience with the queen of Spain and the infanta. The conversation was supposed to be limited to a few formal words of address, but the prince went so far as to speak of his affection for her. This was a grave breach of protocol in a court that maintained the strictest rules of behaviour. Charles realized that he had offended, and fell silent. The infanta herself was not impressed. The prince, however, had been profoundly affected by the sight of her; he wrote to England that she was even more beautiful than he had expected.

It was urged by his hosts that Charles might at least receive some instruction in the precepts of Catholicism. So he agreed to participate in a religious discussion with four Carmelite friars. Their meeting began in silence and, when one of the friars asked if he had any matter to propose for debate, he replied, ‘Nothing at all. I have no doubts whatsoever.’ Charles even went so far as to ask that the reformed English service might be conducted for him in the palace, whereupon Olivares sent for Cottington and told him that the entry of English chaplains would be resisted by force. This did not bode well for any settlement.

By May it had become clear to Buckingham and the prince that they had made a grave error in travelling to Madrid. If they had remained in England, all the conditions and qualifications could have been discussed by experienced diplomats; they themselves were simply confused and angered by all the demands now being made upon them.

Towards the end of that month a Spanish ‘junta of theologians’ decreed that the infanta must remain in her native land for twelve months after the marriage had been solemnized. In that period the king of England must prove his good intentions by allowing his Catholic subjects the free exercise of their religion; all penal laws against them were to be suspended. It was further suggested that the prince might also prefer to spend the following year in Spain. He would then enjoy to the utmost the fruits of the marriage.

Sir Francis Cottington returned to England with the news. ‘My sweet boys,’ James wrote, ‘your letter by Cottington hath stricken me dead. I fear it shall very much shorten my days; and I am the more perplexed that I know not how to satisfy the people’s expectation here, neither know I what to say in the council … Alas I now repent me sore, that ever I suffered you to go away.’ He was in fact more concerned about his son than the changes of policy that the ‘junta’ had demanded. One observer noted that ‘the king is now quite stupefied’. ‘Do you think’, he asked a courtier, ‘that I shall ever see the prince again?’ He burst into tears.

The prince himself was mired in indecision. He was told that the delay between the marriage and the infanta’s departure for England could be shortened by six months. In an audience with Philip IV on 7 July, Charles assented to the terms. ‘I have resolved’, he said, ‘to accept with my whole heart what has been proposed to me, both as to the articles touching religion, and as to the security required.’ A few days before, he had made statements of precisely the opposite intent.

James knew well enough that parliament would never allow English Catholics permanent immunity from prosecution; and yet he feared that, if he did not sign the agreement demanded by the ‘junta’, his son would never be permitted to leave Madrid. He summoned the members of his privy council and pleaded with them to take an oath to uphold the Spanish terms. Faced with the importance of maintaining the king’s authority, and alarmed by the prospect of the heir apparent being detained in the Spanish capital, the council reluctantly agreed to take the oath.

The decision of the king, taken in confusion and anxiety, was perhaps not a wise one. It taught the English Catholics that they must rely for their safety on a foreign power, and it told the English people that James was willing to make a bargain with Spain against the obvious wishes of parliament. The Roman Catholic Church, for many years after, was identified with contempt for the rule of law. It was believed by many that, while the prince was detained in Spain, Philip could extort any terms he wished. John Chamberlain wrote that ‘alas our hands are bound by the absence of our most precious jewel’. It was widely noted that the crucifix, once the symbol of papistry, had been reinstalled in the royal chapel. Another chapel was even then being erected in St James’s Palace for the imminent coming of the infanta. Buckingham’s mother converted to Rome. When the archbishop of Canterbury told the king that the toleration of Catholics could not be permitted ‘by the laws and privileges of the kingdom’, it was related that the king ‘swore bitterly and asked how he should get his son home again’.

Two weeks after this reported conversation, on 25 July 1623, Charles and Philip signed the marriage contract. James dispatched jewels of great price to his son as gifts for the expected bride. When the prince asked for horses to be also sent to him, the king answered that his coffers were now empty.

Yet, after all this intrigue and resentment, the marriage never took place. The prince had changed his mind once more. His affection for the infanta had been gradually displaced by his resentment at his treatment in Spain; the king and his courtiers were endlessly prevaricating on the departure of Maria Anna. His companion, Buckingham, had been regarded with ill-concealed distaste. On 28 August he took an oath committing himself to the marriage, but he had already decided to leave Madrid without her. Three weeks later he and Buckingham set sail from Santander to England. The news of their landing at Portsmouth, on 5 October, was the cause of general rejoicing; the blessed prince had been rescued from the jaws of the dragon. He had escaped the wiles of the harlot of Rome. Spain would no longer be able to command the councils of the king. When Charles crossed the Thames he was greeted with carillons of bells; the wealthy laid out tables of food and wine in the streets; debtors were released from prison and felons rescued from death. It was a day of rain and storm yet one contemporary counted 335 bonfires between Whitehall and Temple Bar; 108 bonfires were lit between St Paul’s and London Bridge alone. A contemporary ballad set the tone:

The Catholic king hath a little young thing

Called Donna Maria his sister,

Our prince went to Spain her love to obtain,

But yet by good luck he hath missed her.

A shorter rhyme was also carried from street to street:

On the fifth day of October,

It will be treason to be sober.

The two men rode straight from London to the royal hunting lodge at Royston where king, son and favourite all wept. Yet not all was well with the happy family. Buckingham, an erstwhile supporter of Spain, fell into a fury at all things Spanish; the contempt for him in Madrid was now common knowledge. One Spanish courtier, speaking of Buckingham, had said that ‘we would rather put the infanta headlong into a well than into his hands’. Charles was equally dissatisfied with his treatment at the hands of the Spanish court; they had denied him his bride and treated him like a fool. ‘I am ready’, he told his father, ‘to conquer Spain, if you will allow me to do it.’ At a stroke James’s well-considered, if not always well-executed, policy of twenty years would be destroyed.

Yet Charles had learned some useful lessons in Madrid. He had been impressed by Spanish formality and protocol that emphasized the divinity hedged about a king; he had also become an admirer of the art collected by the Spanish royal family and took back with him, to England, a Titian and a Correggio among other notable paintings. In his own reign the taste of the court would be generally elevated even if some of these ‘gay gazings’, as the paintings were called, smacked of the old religion.

The popular prejudice against the Catholic cause was strikingly demonstrated when a garret attached to the French embassy in Blackfriars collapsed on 26 October 1623. A Catholic priest was preaching to a congregation of some 400 people when the floor gave way, pitching the people into the ‘confession room’ beneath. Over ninety were killed, among them eight priests and fifteen ‘of note and rank’. It was widely believed that the accident was the direct result of God’s particular judgement against the papists, and the bishop of London refused to allow any of the dead to be buried in the city’s churchyards. A mob had also gathered outside the residence of the French ambassador, shrieking execrations against the old faith. Some of the survivors were assailed with insults or assaulted with mud and stones.

The press for war against Spain was growing ever stronger. The situation of the Protestants in Europe was worse than it had been for many decades. The imperial troops were undertaking the forced conversion of the people of Bohemia, while Frederick’s erstwhile subjects in the Palatinate were suffering from religious persecution. The defeat of the forces of Christian of Brunswick, one of the last Protestant leaders still standing, heralded the supremacy of the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, and his fellow Habsburg Philip IV of Spain. Thomas Gataker, an English Protestant theologian, declared that ‘the last hour is now running. And we are those on whom the end of the world is fallen.’

The king himself was growing weaker. A memoir on the king’s health drawn up at the end of 1623 reported that he was ‘easily affected by cold and suffers in cold and damp weather’; he used to enjoy hunting but ‘now he is quieter and lies or sits more, but that is due to the weakness of his knee-joints … His mind is easily moved suddenly. He is very wrathful, but the fit soon passes off.’ He was now opposed by his son and by his favourite; Charles and Buckingham, as impetuous in their hatred of Spain as they had once been recklessly in favour of a Spanish match, were now directing the pressure for war.

For Buckingham the chance of fighting a pious crusade against the heretic promised great rewards for his domestic reputation as well as for his private fortune; his post as lord high admiral guaranteed him a tenth of all prizes won upon the seas. The policy of ‘the sharp edge’, as it became known, might also allow the young prince to acquire some sort of military glory without which, as the example of his father showed, kingship lost half of its lustre. It was Charles, therefore, who began to assume command of state affairs. He took the chair of the privy council while his father preferred to remain in the country, where Buckingham was able to insulate the king from any Spanish overtures. The Venetian ambassador told his doge and senate that ‘the balance of affairs leans to the side of the prince, while Buckingham remains at Newmarket to prevent any harm…’

A parliament assembled in February 1624, when the king’s opening speech was tentative and hesitant. He could neither disown his son-in-law and the freedom of the Palatinate nor press for war against Spain and the imperialists. He did not know where to turn. In private he had ranted and sworn, pretending illness to avoid difficult decisions, demanding repose and even death to end his sufferings. In his public speech to parliament, he asked for help. He said that as a result of his son’s fruitless journey to Madrid ‘I awaked as a man out of a dream … the business is nothing advanced neither of the match nor of the palatinate, for all the long treaties and great promises’. In the past James had earnestly upheld his sole responsibility for the conduct of foreign affairs as part of his royal prerogative. But now ‘I shall entreat your good and sound advice for the glory of God, the peace of the kingdom, and weal of my children’. Five days later Buckingham met the Lords and Commons in the Banqueting House where he whipped up their anger against the duplicitous Spaniards.

A peace party still existed at the court and council. The lord treasurer, the earl of Middlesex, was adamantly opposed to any war with Spain. There was no money left. It would be folly to embark on a foreign enterprise when there was not coin enough to pay the servants of the Crown in England. Charles and Buckingham, therefore, found it necessary to destroy him. At the beginning of April the earl was charged with various counts of financial corruption; he had no chance. ‘Remove this strange and prodigious comet,’ Sir John Eliot declared of him, ‘which so fatally hangs over us.’ He was impeached by the Commons and judged to be guilty by the Lords. James himself was much more aware of the dangers of such a proceeding than his son. He declared that Charles had set a dangerous precedent that would in time weaken the power of the throne. The prince, in other words, had invited parliament to collaborate with him in the destruction of one of the king’s own ministers. Would it not be tempted to exploit some of its newfound power? James’s prophecy would soon enough have the ring of truth.

For the time being, however, Charles and Buckingham could effectively lead the common cause described by one of their supporters as that of the ‘patriots’; it was defined by its anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish animus abroad, together with its supposed fight against court corruption at home. For the first, and perhaps the last, time in his life Charles was in broad agreement with the gentlemen of the Commons and the country. At the end of February 1624, the Lords asked that any negotiations with Spain should be broken off. A deputation to the king in the following month requested the fitting of a fleet and the repair of maritime fortifications; the occupation of the Palatinate by Spanish and Bavarian troops should be ended.

For these measures James needed money and, at his urgent request, he was granted £300,000. But how was any war to be fought, and against whom was it to be directed? Against the Holy Roman Emperor or against the king of Spain? Or against Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, who now controlled the Palatinate? The king prevaricated in his usual manner. ‘But whether I shall send twenty thousand or ten thousand, whether by sea or land, east or west, by diversion or otherwise, by invasion upon the Bavarian [Maximilian I] or the Emperor, you must leave that to the king.’ The parliament might wish for war with Spain, but it might be in the interests of the English king only to threaten war; the Spaniards might then agree to restore Frederick to his throne. Many in the court and council were themselves wary of a direct war against the Spanish; battles on sea or on land cost money, and money could only be raised by imposing fresh taxes.

The Spanish envoys had meanwhile found their way to the king through the connivance of certain courtiers. It soon reached the king’s ear that they accused Buckingham of ‘affecting popularity’, and charged him with drawing up a plan that would effectively imprison James in a convenient country house so that the prince might rule in his name. They suggested that the favourite believed the king to be a poor old man unfit to govern. There may or may not have been truth to these claims but the king took the unexpected step of interrogating his councillors on the matter. All of them swore that they had never heard a whisper of treason from Buckingham. The favourite was saved.

James had signalled his willingness to prepare himself for the possibility of war ‘if he could be seconded’. The only possible ally was Louis XIII of France; the French king, at least, had the power to stand against the Spanish or the imperialists in Germany. Soon after parliament had assembled, two envoys were sent from London to Paris with the instruction to seek the hand of the French king’s sister, Henrietta Maria, for Charles. Their proposals were indeed welcomed; it was in the interests of France permanently to separate England from Spain. Louis was a better Frenchman than he was a Catholic, and had no reason to shrink from conflict with his co-religionists. Yet the French court insisted, at the beginning of the negotiations, that English Catholics be given the same liberties as the Spanish had demanded for them in the previous marriage treaty.

This was of course a perilous matter. It would test once more the king’s good faith. By marrying a Catholic princess, also, Charles might alienate the very ‘patriots’ whom he had previously courted. The king therefore decided to prorogue parliament before news of the French demands became known. It had not been an unproductive assembly; it had passed thirty-five public Acts and thirty-eight private. The private Acts alone are evidence that the members were representing local demands and grievances on a significantly increased scale. But parliament had achieved more than that. With its impeachment of the lord treasurer, and its active collaboration with Charles and Buckingham, it had proved itself to be an indispensable limb of the body politic.

Preparations for war with Spain were begun. The Spanish ambassador noted ‘the great joy and exultation of all the cobblers and zealous bigots of the town’. Cobblers were well known for their radical Protestant sympathies. The English ‘mice’, as they were called, were ready to take on the Habsburg ‘cats’. On the departure of the Spanish legation from London the citizens cried out: ‘All the devils in hell go with you, and for those that stay behind let Tyburn take them!’ London and the suburbs were now the venue for newly recruited soldiers, all of them waiting for the happy beat of the drums.

A defensive league was formed with the seven United Provinces; envoys were sent to the kings of Sweden and Denmark with proposals for a holy crusade against the Catholic powers. This served further to excite the martial enthusiasm of the populace. The more realistic of the king’s councillors doubted that the Palatinate could be fully recovered, or Spain defeated, but they hoped at least to assert English power and subdue Spanish pretensions. In the summer of 1624 a play by Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, was staged at the Globe where its satire of Gondomar and the Spanish clique at the English court was an unprecedented success; crowds besieged the theatre for nine days, while the laughter and general hubbub could be heard on the other side of the Thames. ‘Sir, your plot’s discovered!’ one of Gondomar’s aides bursts in to tell him. The ambassador asks him which of the 20,958 plots he means. He explains his methods.

With pleasant subtlety and bewitching courtship …

To many a soul I have let in mortal poison

Whose cheeks have cracked with laughter to receive it;

I could so roll my pills in sugared syllables

And strew such kindly mirth o’er all my mischiefs,

They took their bane in way of recreation.

Thus spoke the erstwhile Spanish ambassador on the stage.

An Anglo-French league was now likely but by no means certain. The French still insisted in principle that penal measures against English Catholics be lifted, and that they should be allowed to practise their religion in peace. Both the king and his son, however, had promised the last parliament that no articles in favour of the Catholics would ever be entertained. It was considered that, in the last resort, it would be better to go to war without the aid of the French than to force a crisis between Crown and parliament.

All the flexible skills of diplomacy had now to be deployed. An English envoy at the court of Louis XIII suggested to James that the French demands were made for ‘their own honour’ only, and that ‘it will always be in your majesty’s power to put the same in execution according to your own pleasure’. It was a policy of hypocrisy and prevarication but none the worse for that. Buckingham was equally sanguine. He was so intent upon martial glory in any Protestant crusade that he urged the king to accept the French terms. James was not willing to concede so much, but he was prepared to write a private letter to Louis in which he promised that his Catholic subjects ‘shall enjoy all the liberty and freedom which concerns the secret exercise of their religion which was granted by the treaty of marriage made with Spain’. It was not quite enough. The French insisted upon their original demands, with the enthusiastic support of Buckingham. The king finally yielded, with the proviso that he should sign a letter and not a contractual engagement. It was vital now that parliament should not intervene; a promised summons in the late autumn was therefore postponed until the following year.

On 12 December 1624, the marriage articles were signed; the king’s hands were so crippled with gout that he was obliged to apply a stamp rather than a signature. To this document Charles appended a secret engagement to the effect that ‘I will promise to all the Roman Catholic subjects of the Crown of Great Britain the utmost of liberty and franchise in everything regarding their religion…’ Twelve days later the courts were forbidden to prosecute recusants under the penal laws; all Catholics in confinement for their faith were then released from the prisons of England.

In this month the king wrote a plaintive letter to Buckingham.

I cannot content myself without sending you this billet, praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you, and that we may make at this Christmas a new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter; for, God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you, than live a sorrowful widow life without you, and so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that you may ever be a comfort to your dad and husband

James R.

It was the last letter that Buckingham would ever receive from the king.

*

The time of war was approaching. Ernest, count of Mansfeld, the principal German ally of Frederick, came to England in search of troops; the soldiers of the previous summer, in their gay feathers and buff jerkins, had been volunteers. Now the county officials had to conscript local men for service and, naturally enough, they preferred to choose those for whom they had the least use. Some of the conscripts preferred radical action to avoid being pressed for service. One hanged himself for fear, while another ran into the Thames and drowned; one cut off all the fingers of his right hand, while another put out one of his eyes with salt. An observer wrote that ‘such a rabble of raw and poor rascals have not lightly been seen, and they go so unwillingly that they must rather be driven than led’.

It had been said that an Englishman could not fight without his ‘three Bs’, namely bed, beef and beer. All three were, on this occasion, in pitifully short supply. Dover had no such commodities in large quantity, and only a few vessels had arrived to transport the men. Their eventual destination was, in any event, not at all clear. James had wished the men to land in France, thus implicating Louis XIII in the war against Spain and the empire; Louis refused them the possibility. So Mansfeld, at the end of January, was obliged to sail for Flushing and begin a march through Holland; his men were to go to the aid of the Dutch fortress city of Breda, then under siege by the Spanish.

Yet the English troops were ill-trained and ill-equipped; they had few provisions, and soon enough a hard frost descended on them, provoking contagious sickness. ‘All day long,’ one of their commanders, Lord Cromwell, wrote, ‘we go about for victuals and bury our dead.’ By the end of March a force of 12,000 was reduced to 3,000 armed men. Yet the folly was not blamed so much upon Mansfeld as upon Buckingham, whose military enthusiasm did not include attention to the details of policy or planning. The disaster did not bode well for the conduct of a more general war that the king would not live to see.

James had recovered from the gout that had afflicted him at the beginning of the year. Yet on 5 March 1625 he was attacked by what was known as a tertian ague, of which the symptoms were chills, fever and profuse sweating. He feared the worst but refused to accept the advice of his physicians. Instead he relied upon a posset drink recommended by Buckingham’s mother, which seemed to do no good. It was whispered that, at the urging of her son, she had in fact poisoned him; she fell on her knees at the king’s bedside and asked for justice against these accusations. ‘Poisoned me?’ the king asked fearfully. At which point, he swooned.

The end was now very near. On 25 March he suffered a stroke that affected his face and jaw. It was reported that his tongue had become so enlarged that he could not make himself understood. He was also beset by bouts of dysentery that left him drenched in his own filth. Two days later he left this life. With the great lords and prelates of the realm about him, according to a later memorial, ‘without pangs or convulsions at all, dormivit Salomon, Solomon slept’. Unlike his mother and his son, James I died lying in his bed rather than kneeling on the scaffold. The surgeons, on opening the body, found no evidence of poison. In a letter of the time, by the Reverend Joseph Meade, it was reported that all of his vital organs were sound ‘as also his head which was very full of brains; but his blood was wonderfully tainted with melancholy’.

His death was not greeted with much dismay or sorrow among the people. His foreign policy had been an utter failure, and his relations with parliament were at best acrimonious. His finances were in disrepair, and the sexual scandals of his reign were common knowledge. The day of his funeral was marred by foul weather so that any bystanders were greeted with muffled coaches and flaming torches. His passing was greeted, perhaps, with relief. The new king might prosecute the Protestant cause with more vigour and determination. Sir John Eliot wrote that ‘a new spirit of life possessed all men’.

There was an alternative vision of the late king’s rule. At his funeral service in Westminster Abbey, on 7 May, the bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, preached a sermon in which he praised James’s direction of religion. The King James Bible is lasting evidence of his achievement. The bishop also remarked upon the fact that ‘manufactures at home are daily invented, trading abroad exceedingly multiplied, the borders of Scotland peaceably governed…’ In the reign of James, too, the English people had reached out to Virginia and New England; the merchants had visited the ports of Africa, Asia and America. Certainly, the central achievement had been that of peace, the one condition that the king sedulously strove to maintain. A courtier, Sir Anthony Weldon, left a less than flattering account of the king as indecisive, hesitant and cowardly; it was he who reported the opinion that James was ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. Yet he appended to his description the more favourable comment that ‘he lived in peace, died in peace, and left all his kingdoms in a peaceable condition’. This would not be the epitaph of his son.

10

An interlude

At the beginning of 1625, while his father was still incapacitated by gout, Charles had organized what the Venetian ambassador called ‘a splendid masque, with much machinery, and most beautiful scenery’; the prince and his companions danced for four hours after midnight, perhaps in anticipation of the regal splendours to come.

The masque was the great ceremonial occasion of the court, performed once or twice each year, that came to define Stuart kingship. A group of the nobility advanced upon an especially designed stage, their ornate and artificial dress perfectly consonant with the elaborate scenery all around them. Gold was a token of perfection, white was the colour of faith and blue represented the infinite heavens; shame was crimson while lust was scarlet. The colours which took most wonderfully to candlelight were white, carnation and sea-water green. Oil lamps and candles of white wax were used to impart brilliance to the scene. The old Banqueting House had in fact been destroyed by fire in 1619 when ‘oiled paper’ and other combustibles used in the entertainment were ignited.

Inigo Jones was the sole deviser and designer of the court masques, and he brought to his practice all the refinements of his art. The discipline and formality of his architecture prevailed in his stagecraft; he was particularly adept at contriving the mechanical devices or ‘machines’ that were the wonder of the age. ‘If mathematicians had lost proportion,’ it was said of one of his productions, ‘there they might have found it.’ He wished to create harmonies in spectacle just as in his architecture he evoked the harmonies of stone.

The texts of the masques were generally composed by Ben Jonson who chose to deploy moral statements and sentiments within euphonious and carefully crafted verse. The two men were not natural collaborators, however, and Jonson soon wearied of a form in which visual display took precedence over sense. He wrote in one poem, ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’:

O shows! Shows! Mighty shows!

The eloquence of masques! What need of prose

Or verse, or sense t’express immortal you?

You are the spectacles of State!

Inigo Jones himself admitted that the masques were ‘nothing else but pictures with light and motion’.

The stage itself was designed to create the illusion of an infinite perspective, moving from the reality of the king and assembled court into an idealized world where everything had its place and proportion. These perspective stages were a wholly new thing in England, introducing novel principles of symmetry and order. The power of art represented the art of power. The masque was conducted in a formal space in which the laws of nature could be chastened and subdued by the king himself, who sat on the line of perspective from which everything could be perfectly seen. Only in his presence could the seasons miraculously change, or trees walk, or flowers be transformed into human beings.

It was the perfect complement to the doctrine of the divine right of kings that James had professed early in his reign. He sat in the centre of the especially constructed auditorium so that the eyes of the audience were as much upon his regality as upon the performance itself. James had already written in his instruction manual to his elder son, Basilikon Doron, that a king ‘is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures all the people do gazingly behold’. Inigo Jones himself wrote that ‘in heroic virtue is figured the king’s majesty, who therein transcends as far common men as they are above beasts’.

The stage had three habitations. At the highest level was a metaphysical world populated by divine or allegorical figures; below this was the world of the court, in which the monarch was the emblem of order and authority; beneath these two worlds lay ordinary reality which, with its emblems of Vice and Disorder as well as various ‘low’ figures, provided the material for the ‘anti-masque’. The anti-masques represented mutability and inconstancy; they embodied the threat of chaos that was wonderfully removed from the world of the idealized court. The king defeated all those who threatened or abused him. As Sir William Davenant wrote in his masque Salmacida Spolia:

All that are harsh, all that are rude,

Are by your harmony subdu’d;

Yet so into obedience wrought,

As if not forc’d to it, but taught.

The scene might suddenly change. A palace might become a bower, where fairy spirits tread upon trolls and other wicked things; Oberon may appear in a chariot, drawn by two white bears, before ascending into the air; a statue might breathe and walk; a feather of silk may become a cloud of smoke, surrounded by several circles of light in continual motion. A scene might be set in a courtyard or in a dungeon, in a bedchamber or in a desert. All was framed by a proscenium arch, the direct forebear of the modern theatrical space. That is why the English drama favoured interiors.

A courtier and diplomat, Dudley Carleton, noted of an early production in 1605 that ‘there was a great engine at the lower end of the room, which had motion, and in it were the images of sea-horses with other terrible fishes, which were ridden by Moors … at the further end was a great shell in the form of a scallop, wherein were four seats; on the lowest sat the queen with my lady Bedford; on the rest were placed the ladies … their apparel was rich, but too light and courtesan-like for such great ones’. James never took part in the masques, but his wife and children delighted in them; they rehearsed their parts for as long as two months, emphasizing the importance that they placed upon them.

The speaking roles were performed by professional players while the music and song were provided by court musicians; the dancers and masquers, among them members of the royal family itself, remained mute. At the end of the proceedings they advanced into the dancing space, before the king, and invited members of the especially invited audience to dance with them. The concord of music therefore concluded a display in which the virtues of reason, order and good governance are all conjoined.

The dancers of the masque thus celebrate the restoration of an ideal order, a magical ritual designed to emphasize the Stuart vision of kingship and continuity. The masques therefore became known as ‘court hieroglyphics’. It is not unimportant that foreign ambassadors were an integral part of the audience, since the masque was also a form of mystical diplomacy. It was meant to convey, by the expense of the production, the wealth and liberality of the sovereign; the more money spent, the more the glory and the more the praise. In 1618 James spent the unparalleled sum of £4,000 on one production. The fourteen ladies of another masque needed, for their costumes, 780 yards of silk. Yet the masques appealed to appetites other than sight. A lavish banquet, complete with orchestra, often preceded or accompanied the performance.

It was an age of music. In the years between 1587 and 1630 over ninety collections of madrigals, airs and songs were published. Madrigals were compositions for several voices without music, and airs were solo songs accompanied by instruments; the madrigal was the most artificial, and therefore considered the most delightful. Catches were sung by gentlemen in their taverns, by weavers at their looms and by tinkers in their workshops. A man who could not take part in a madrigal, or play the lute, was considered to be unfinished. Lutes and citherns were available in barbers’ shops for the diversion of waiting customers. Music books were customarily brought to the table after supper was ended.

No epoch in the history of English music can excel the diversity of genius that flourished in this period. It was the age of Dowland and of Morley, of Campion and of Byrd, of Bull and of Gibbons. It was also the age of songs such as ‘Lady, Lie Near Me’, ‘If All The World Were Paper’, ‘New, New Nothing’ and ‘Punk’s Delight’. In the time of James, the island was filled with sounds and sweet airs.

In the closing months of 1611, the private theatre at Blackfriars echoed to such harmonies. Shakespeare’s The Tempest was a work of musical theatre with professional singers and a consort of instruments. The stage directions tell their own story, requesting ‘solemn and strange music’, ‘soft music’, ‘a strange hollow and confused noise’. ‘Enter Ferdinand, and Ariel, invisible, playing and singing.’ Ferdinand asks, ‘Where should this music be? I’ th’ air, or th’ earth?’ It was everywhere, being ‘dispersed’ music that came from various parts of the stage. In this play Stephano sings sea shanties, while Caliban croons drunken catches. Music was played in the intervals between the acts, and at the close a ritual dance was performed by all of the actors. Music was also played as an accompaniment to scenes of wonder and of pathos, on Prospero’s grounds that ‘a solemn air’ is ‘the best comforter to an unsettled fancy’.

The music of the instruments was diverse. The soft and mournful notes of the recorder were accompanied by a consort of strings including viols, lutes and citherns. An organ was suitable for the solemn music of supernatural change and awakening. Ariel often enters with pipe and tabor. Thus Caliban reveals that

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices …

The last song of the play is sung by Ariel. The words are those of Shakespeare and at a slightly later date they were given a setting by Robert Johnson, a musician attached to the court of the king. It is clear, however, that the melodic inspiration came to Shakespeare from folk tunes or ballads that were in the air at the time.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I,

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

This is a song of freedom, chanted just before Prospero releases Ariel from his service; perhaps the spirit danced at the close. The part was performed by a boy, or a light-voiced singer, and the role may have been taken by the seventeen-year-old ‘Jackie Wilson’ who later handed down the settings for the song. Blackfriars was known as a ‘private’ theatre because it was enclosed by roof and walls; in such a setting, the music would have a more powerful and intimate effect.

The Tempest was also performed before the king at Whitehall on 1 November 1611, and owes some of its ritual and sweet melody to the masques of the court; actors from Shakespeare’s company also took part in those masques. There was a marked cultural or courtly style in the early years of the seventeenth century.

The great plays of Shakespeare’s maturity were written during the reign of James, Othello and King Lear, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale among them. The witches of Macbeth were in part inspired by James’s own interest in the phenomenon. The king was a more enthusiastic patron of the drama than Elizabeth had ever been. Six days after his arrival in London, from Scotland, he called together Shakespeare and the other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company and issued to them letters patent that allowed them to perform as the King’s Men. The actors were appointed to be grooms of the chamber a few months later.

The era of James I also encouraged other forms of drama. A cardinal, dressed in crimson silk, with a tippet or shoulder cape of sable, comes upon the stage. He is meditating upon a book.

Cardinal: I am puzzled in a question about hell:

He says, in hell there’s one material fire,

And yet it shall not burn all men alike.

Lay him by. How tedious is a guilty conscience!

When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden

Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake

That seems to strike at me.

It does not occur to the cardinal that it may be his own reflection.

The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster, is a defining drama of the period, and is one of a number of plays that subsequently have been brought together under the collective title of ‘Jacobean tragedy’. Since it is the only literary genre that carries the name of the age, it may be of some importance for any understanding of it. It signifies melancholy, morbidity, restlessness, brooding anger, impatience, disdain and resentment; it represents the horror of life. The exuberance and optimistic inventiveness of the Elizabethan years have disappeared. The joy has gone. The vitality has become extremity and the rhetoric has turned rancid.

The duchess herself asks, ‘Who am I?’ To which comes the reply: ‘Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little curded milk, fantastical puff paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in – more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage?’ This is perhaps the quintessence of Jacobean dramatic style and can be compared to John Donne’s contemporaneous verse on:

This curdled milk, this poor unlitter’d whelp,

My body …

The Duchess of Malfi was written for Shakespeare’s company and was first performed towards the close of 1614 at the theatre in Blackfriars before a fashionable audience that would catch most of the allusions to the plays and poems of the day. In a theatrical world of death and murder, of graves and shrines, music was once again an essential element for conveying suspense and intensity.

The plot itself is a poor thing. The duchess, a widow, wishes to marry the steward of her household in a union which might be perceived to dishonour her. Her two brothers – Ferdinand, duke of Calabria, and one known only as the cardinal – conspire to be revenged upon her. By means of a spy and secret agent, Bosola, the duchess is captured and subjected to a range of mental tortures designed to induce insanity; she is presented with the severed hand of her husband, and a gaggle of mad people is brought into her presence. A curtain is drawn to show a tableau comprising the dead bodies of her husband and children. It is revealed in an aside to the audience that they are waxworks, but not until the frisson of their discovery has subsided. The duchess is in the end strangled, but not before being shown the cord that will dispatch her.

Duchess: What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut

With diamonds, or to be smothered

With cassia, or to be shot to death with pearls?

On sight of her body Ferdinand utters what are the most famous words of the play:

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

Out of guilt and despair he then descends into murderous madness.

One met the Duke ’bout midnight in a lane

Behind St Mark’s church, with the leg of a man

Upon his shoulder; and he howled fearfully;

Said he was a wolf …

The final scene concludes with a bloody conflict in which both Bosola and the cardinal are killed, bringing the sum total of fatalities in the play to ten. Enough has been quoted, perhaps, to convey the sensibility of the time as well as the taste of the Jacobean audience.

It is a world of secrecy and madness, where characters hide and wait. The duchess sees a trespasser in the mirror and trembles. The broken phrases are forced out. ‘What is it?’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh fearful!’ ‘Why do you do this?’ ‘What’s he?’ A common exclamation is ‘Ha!’ Some of Webster’s favourite words are ‘foul’, ‘mist’ and ‘dunghill’. The dialogue, when not fabulously ornamental, is direct and rapid, almost a whisper. ‘Can you guess?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do not ask then.’

The play might be described as morbid or as grotesque, the English version of Grand Guignol, were it not for the fact that it is possessed by a wild and almost frantic energy. That energy is part of the characters’ desperation, their vitality and misery mingling in frightful images of fever and of death. They seem to be possessed by will and desire rather than belief; they are united only in the quest for survival in an unstable world. They run towards darkness. This is in fact a most significant image of the age and one to which, as we shall see, Hobbes’s Leviathan is addressed. Indeed, this is a world from which God seems to have departed, leaving it in ‘a mist’. There seems to be no meaning in the abyss of darkness that opens beneath their feet. It was also a time when, in the work of Francis Bacon, the natural world was being stripped of its association with the divine presence.

Where some like Bacon were possessed by the possibilities of progress in the natural sciences, others believed that the world was in the process of fatal decline. When in 1612 Galileo discovered the presence of spots upon the face of the sun, it was considered to be proof that even the heavens were in a state of dissolution.

Yet proof of decay also lay closer to home, and much of the atmosphere of The Duchess of Malfi is conveyed by the image of a corrupt court.

A Prince’s court

Is like a common fountain, whence should flow

Pure silver-drops in general. But if’t chance

Some cursed example poison’t near the head

Death and diseases through the whole land spread.

This is likely to be an indirect allusion to the court of James I, already rendered suspect by whispers of corruption and malfeasance. The loss or abdication of authority is a context for the disorientation and instability that afflict all of the characters. That is why it is a play of scepticism, disillusion and disgust united in an overwhelming pessimism.

Pleasure of life, what is’t? Only the good hours

Of an ague …

The figure of melancholy, therefore, might be used as the frontispiece to the play. Melancholy was the time’s delight, its presiding deity. It had its own dark dress and its own music in the compositions of John Dowland such as ‘In darkness let me dwell’ and ‘Flow my tears’. That pensive, fearful and tearful mood also had its greatest celebration and exposition in the reign of James with the publication of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton was the master of melancholy in all its moods and phases. His great volume – more than 1,200 pages in its modern form – was first published in 1621 and went through six editions in his own lifetime.

Burton professed that ‘all the world is melancholy, or mad, dotes, and every member of it’. We sense here the curiosity of his prose, at once precise and unsettled; it is a characteristically Jacobean touch. Melancholy is a disease both grievous and common, which he describes as ‘a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion’.

So Burton follows it through all its declensions and divisions, its intervals and digressions; he creates three ‘partitions’ with a variety of sections and subsections into which the various types and forms of melancholy are arranged. There are sections entitled ‘Miseries of Scholars’, ‘The Force of Imagination’, ‘Poverty and Want’, ‘Unfortunate Marriage’ and ‘Old Age’. He devotes a passage to ‘Symptoms of Maids’, Nuns’ and Widows’ Melancholy’. Hundreds of pages are consumed by ‘Love Melancholy’ and ‘Religious Melancholy’. The madness, if such it is, can be caused by stars or spirits, by the quality of meat or wine, by catarrh or constipation, by bad air or immoderate exercise, by idleness or solitariness, by anger or discontent, by poverty or servitude or shame.

All was grist to his capacious mill, and he striates his narrative with stories, anecdotes, digressions, quotations, aphorisms and the most colourful detail. ‘A young merchant going to Nordeling Fair in Germany, for ten days’ space never went to stool; at his return he was grievously melancholy, thinking that he was robbed, and would not be persuaded but that all his money was gone … a Jew in France (saith Lodovicus Vives) came by chance over a dangerous passage or plank that lay over a brook, in the dark, without harm; the next day, perceiving what danger he was in, he fell down dead.’

He describes the inner working of obsessive temperaments who are ‘to your thinking very intent and busy, still that toy runs in their minds, that fear, that suspicion, that abuse, that jealousy, that agony, that vexation, that cross, that castle in the air, that crotchet, that whimsy, that fiction, that pleasant waking dream, whatsoever it is’. He piles up heaps of words and throws himself into them; he has different voices, and different tones; he elaborates, and then qualifies his elaborations; he can be inconsistent and even contradictory. No opinion is stable, no judgement is certain. On eventually finishing the volume, you may feel that you know everything or that you know nothing.

He anatomized himself. He professed that ‘I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy’. He was a student of Christ Church, Oxford, until the time of his death, and he confessed that ‘I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, mihi et musis [for myself and the muses] in the university, as long almost as Xenocrates in Athens…’ He was a cormorant of books whose library of 1,700 volumes of forgotten lore was both his refuge and his inspiration. Burton was the magpie scholar, curator of the world’s learning, a lord of books who hoped that by quilting together references and allusions and quotations he could stitch so strong a cloth that he would be able to cover himself with it. He makes reference to more than 1,250 authors. His is a book in praise of books and a literary fancy in praise of reading. He wished to fashion an incantation to exorcize melancholy. The book concludes with an aphorism, ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’, and an epigraph:

SPERATE MISERI

CAVETE FELICES

You that are unhappy, hope. You that are happy, fear.

We are close, perhaps, to the religious spirit of the age. Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Winchester, had on many occasions preached before James in the royal chapel and was well known to the court as he mounted the pulpit at Whitehall. He was tall and slim, with a long narrow face and expressive hands; he had a neatly trimmed beard and high forehead. In the winter of 1622 he had preached from the words of the text taken from St Matthew, ‘vidimus enim stellam Ejus’, ‘For we have seen his star’:

Vidimus stellam. We can well conceive that: any that will but look up, may see a star. But how could they see the Ejus of it, that it was His? Either that it belonged to any, or that He it was it belonged to. This passeth all perspective: no astronomy could show them this. What by course of nature the stars can produce, that they by course of art or observation may discover. But this birth was above nature. No trigon, triplicity, exaltation could bring it forth. They are but idle that set figures for it. The star should not have been His, but He the star’s, if it had gone that way. Some other light, then, they saw this Ejus by.

The style is hard and elliptical, almost tortuous in its slow unwinding of the sense. It relies upon repetition and alliteration, parallel and antithesis. It is knotty and difficult, almost impossible for the hearers fully to understand. Yet it is the devotional style of the Jacobean period, fully mastered by a king who prided himself on his scholarship and erudition. Andrewes hovers over a word, even a syllable, eliciting its meaning by minute degrees; he is constantly questioning, refining and rephrasing. He does not express a thought but, rather, the process of thought itself; he dramatizes the act, or art, of creative reasoning. This is the luxuriant etymology of Jacobean scholarship, similar in its strenuous tone to the prose of Francis Bacon.

‘Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and especially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali, O the very dead of winter.’ The prose is disciplined and pure, evincing clarity of thought and expression as well as a great power of ordered analysis. It may not possess the inspired eloquence or impassioned fervour of the great Elizabethan preachers, but it is marked by what T. S. Eliot described as ‘ordonnance, precision, and relevant intensity’. Andrewes moves forward in pulses of light; he stops and repeats a phrase for more lucidity; he is always reaching out for the full revelation of the interior sense. An association of words can lead him further forward, caressing or coaxing their intention; he professed that such meanings can ‘strike any man into an ecstacy’.

The soaring cadence and expressive emotionalism evident in the sermons of John Donne may seem a world away from the concerted pressure of Andrewes’s words; the articulations of any one culture, however, will not be very far apart. On 13 November 1622, the month before the bishop of Winchester gave his sermon to the king on the journey of the Magi, John Donne, the dean of St Paul’s, entered the pulpit of the cathedral.

The first word of the text is the cardinal word, the word, the hinge, upon which the whole text turns. The first word, But, is the But, that all the rest shoots at. First it is an exclusive word: something the Apostles had required, which might not be had; not that; and it is an inclusive word; something Christ was pleased to afford to the apostles, which they thought not of; not that, not that which you beat upon, But, but yet, something else, something better than that, you shall have.

The rapid associations are like a sudden peal of bells.

For Donne the sermon was a species of erudite oratory, a performance that like the plays of the Jacobean tragic stage would surprise and delight the audience. He must remind his auditors of the damnation of being ‘secluded eternally, eternally, eternally, from the sight of God’. He must move and direct their emotions or else he had failed. That is why he exerts all the power of the macabre that John Webster had employed. So in one sermon Donne reminds his hearers that ‘between that excremental jelly that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last; there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature’.

The settled truths of the old medieval faith had utterly gone. It was now necessary to argue and to convince. In this endeavour Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne were united. Yet this meant that they were sometimes engaged in tortuous and self-involved trials of the spirit; this was in many respects a sceptical, ambiguous and ambivalent age, at least in direct comparison with its predecessors, and against that unstable background both preachers protested and declaimed.

The syntactic parallels and paradoxes of both churchmen are attempts to riddle out individual truths and certainties from ambiguous matter. They needed to convince as much as to inspire their hearers. Yet the sermons are characterized by the caustic rhetoric that is so much part of the period. Donne preached that ‘sects are not bodies, they are but rotten boughs, gangrened limbs, fragmentary chips, blown off by their own spirit of turbulency, fallen off by the weight of their own pride…’ The immediacy and urgency of the language, with its rough cadence, are also part of Donne’s secular poetry. We may note the pessimism and melancholy, anatomized in an earlier part of this chapter, that also underlie his being in the world. In one of his meditations he enquires about the source of his disease. ‘They tell me that it is my melancholy. Did I infuse, did I drink in melancholy into my self? It is my thoughtfulness; was I not made to think? It is my study; doth not my calling call for that?’ This is the true music of the Jacobean period, now come to a close.

11

Vivat rex

Charles Stuart had become king of England at the age of twenty-four. He was proclaimed on the same day as his father’s death, 27 March 1625, and a contemporary at Cambridge wrote that ‘we had thunder the same day, presently on the proclamation, and ’twas a cold season, but all fears and sorrows are swallowed up in joy of so hopeful a successor’. Had the new king not put himself at the head of the anti-Spanish alliance in England?

He was more severe and reserved than his father, with a strong sense of formality and order, and the change of tone at court was soon evident. Charles announced that during the reign of his ‘most dear and royal father’ idle and unnecessary people had thronged the court, bringing ‘much dishonour to our house’. There were to be no more bawds or catamites. The new king had been impressed by the decorum of the Spanish court, where he had spent many months; he appreciated the privacy by which the royal family was protected, and the gravitas with which courtly affairs were conducted. The moral tone appealed to a young man who had become dismayed by the laxness and libertinism of his father’s court. He began to dress in black. In the preface to his orders for the royal household he remarked that his purpose was ‘to establish government and order in our court which from thence may spread with more order through all parts of our kingdom’. This art of control, however, might be more congenial in theory than in practice.

The Venetian ambassador noted that within days of his accession ‘the king observes a rule of great decorum. The nobles do not enter his apartments in confusion as heretofore, but each rank has its appointed place.’ The ambassador also reported that the king had drawn up rules and regulations that divided his day, from first rising, into separate compartments; there was a time for praying and a time for exercising, a time for business and a time for audiences, a time for eating and a time for sleeping. He did not wish his subjects to be introduced to him without warning; they were only to be sent for. Servants proffered meals to him on their bended knees, and such was the protocol around royal dining that he seldom if ever ate a hot meal; food took too long to serve. Whenever he washed his hands, those parts of the towel he touched were raised above the head of the gentleman usher who removed it from the royal presence.

Charles set to work in earnest at the beginning of April when he asked Buckingham and other grandees to review all aspects of foreign policy; the fraught relationship with Spain, and a possible alliance with France, were to be considered in the light of Charles’s desire to recover the Palatinate for his brother-in-law. A committee was established, a few days later, in order to supervise the nation’s defences in case of war. The new king then set up two further commissions to investigate financial fraud by the collectors of the customs and to examine the trade of the East India Company with Russia. It was a businesslike start but, as is generally the case with the work of committees and commissions, it achieved very little.

Buckingham was still the principal councillor, as he had been in the reign of James; he stayed in the company of the king all day, and slept in a room next to the royal bedchamber. He possessed the golden key that allowed him entrance to all the apartments of the palace. It seemed that nothing could be done without him. He had an almost viceregal status and was in part able to compensate for the king’s unskilfulness in persuasion and management.

Charles had a stutter which, together with his want of natural fluency in conversation, led him to confess once that ‘I know I am not good to speak much’. When he was a child his doctors had tried to cure the problem by putting small stones in his mouth, but this had provided no benefit. He tried to form complete sentences in his mind before uttering them, but the impediment remained. He was always shy and hesitant in speech. So he communicated with his household servants by means of gestures as much as words.

One of his principal advisers at a later date, the earl of Clarendon, noted that his insecurity led him to adopt the suggestions, or yield to the influence, of men who were in fact less capable than himself. He never really discerned the true merits or vices of those around him; he tended to confide in those who were merely boasters and adventurers while ignoring those of real, if silent, merit. The council about him consisted of professional courtiers, many of whom had been close to his father, while the others were friends or trusted servants. The principal decisions, however, were diverted from the full council to selective small groups or committees; suspicion and jealousy were therefore rife.

His first public appearance, in April, was at the port of Blackwall, on the north bank of the Thames, where he visited the royal fleet. He was small, just a little over 5 feet in height, and might be described as rather delicate than otherwise. Yet he had disciplined and trained himself in healthy exercise, so that his slight exterior was deceptive. He was of a pale complexion, set off in his youth by curly chestnut hair; he had a long face with grey eyes and full lips. He was of temperate habits, preferring plain beer to spiced wines, and of an apparently cool and dispassionate nature. He always blushed if he overheard indecent talk. If he could command his own passions, however, he might be able to control those of his kingdom. He collected aphorisms from the Stoics and neo-Stoics on the importance of cultivating detachment from the pressing issues of the moment. ‘We have learnt to own ourself by retiring into ourself,’ he once said. Yet acute observers, among them portrait painters, were able to sense that he concealed secret or hidden tension. His pace was rapid and hurried.

The potentially dangerous matter of his marriage to the French Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, soon became the principal topic of London gossip. Many in the court, and in the country, deplored the alliance with a devotee of Rome and conjured up old fears of papal domination. Yet Charles was not inclined to heed any warnings. He had a Scottish father, a Danish mother, and a half-French grandmother in the person of Mary Queen of Scots; he was the perfect representative of the fact that the royal families of Europe were not necessarily nationalist or religious partisans.

The marriage was celebrated by proxy, on 1 May 1625, in front of the west door of Notre Dame; on the same day the king issued a declaration that ‘all manner of prosecution’ against Roman Catholics should ‘be stayed and forborne, provided always that they behave themselves modestly therein’. This had been one of the stumbling blocks in the Spanish negotiations of previous years and a contemporary, John Chamberlain, now complained that ‘we are out of the frying-pan into the fire’. In the middle of the month Buckingham himself travelled to Paris in order to accompany Henrietta Maria across the Channel and to expedite the proposed alliance between England and France; he hoped to persuade the French king to treat his Protestant subjects, the Huguenots, with the same tact as Charles was now displaying to the Catholics. He also wished to draw the French into open warfare against the Spanish. In both respects he was unsuccessful, and in any case his flair or arrogance was not to the taste of Louis XIII. He is reported to have worn a white satin suit sewn all over with diamonds, and to have flirted with the wife of the French king; he also danced a saraband in front of her dressed as a Pantaloon.

Henrietta Maria eventually arrived at Dover on 12 June and was taken to the castle where Charles rode to meet her. She seemed to be taller than he anticipated, and she noticed him glancing at her feet in case she were wearing shoes like stepladders. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I stand upon mine own feet; I have no helps by art. Thus high I am, and am neither higher nor lower.’ She had spirit, therefore, and was described by an English observer, Joseph Mead, as ‘nimble and quick … in a word, a brave lady’. She was fifteen years old. Soon after her arrival she was discomfited by too much company in an overheated room. Mead reported that ‘with one frown … she drove us all out of the chamber. I suppose none but a queen could have cast such a scowl.’

*

A new parliament for the new reign was of paramount importance. Charles would have been happy to recall the old one, since it had favoured his anti-Spanish cause, but he was informed that the death of James had brought it to an end. He should have known this element of constitutional practice. A parliament had been called for May, but the onset of the plague in thirteen parishes of the city led to its postponement for a month. Charles opened the assembly with a speech in which he pressed for money to finance the recovery of the Palatinate. It is not at all clear, however, that the members wished to be drawn into a continental war and instead they seemed intent on domestic matters. After they had observed a day of fasting, they delivered to the king a ‘pious petition’ in which was demanded the immediate execution of ‘all the existing laws against Catholic recusants and missionaries’. The king had married a Catholic princess and, against the opinion of the country, had granted toleration to her co-religionists. The wrath of the Commons was then turned against one of the king’s chaplains, Richard Montagu, who in a theological tract effectively denied the Calvinist notion of predestination; the book was declared to be in contempt of the house, and the unfortunate divine was taken into custody.

Only now were the king’s finances given consideration. His plea for wartime expenditure was not taken very seriously, on the good grounds that no proper plans or policies had been brought forward. The incompetence of Buckingham, in the ill-timed and ill-executed march towards Breda at the end of the previous reign, was also borne in mind; why give money to inept commanders? ‘We know yet of no war,’ Sir Robert Phelips said, ‘nor of any enemy.’ Parliament proposed to give to the king only one tenth of the sum which he had anticipated and, to compound the offence, the customs duties of tonnage and poundage were granted for only one year. All of his predecessors, ever since the time of Henry VI (1421–71), had been awarded them for the duration of their reigns. It is likely that the duties of one year were in fact only a temporary measure, until parliament had the opportunity to debate a permanent settlement. Yet this session had set a precedent. The resistance to increased taxation, and opposition to the king’s religious policy, would be the prime movers of later discontent.

Charles was indignant at his lack of success, but he had no strategy to deal with any parliamentary opposition; he had simply expected that his orders would be followed. Before any remonstrance could be entertained, in any case, the plague intervened. One courtier told his son that ‘I … in earnest do marvel that anyone who may be called reasonable would be now in London’. The tolling of the neighbourhood bells could clearly be heard in the chamber of the Commons. Joseph Mead wrote, on 2 July, to one of his correspondents that ‘my Lord Russell being to go to parliament, had his shoemaker to pull on his boots, who fell down dead of the plague in his presence’. On 11 July parliament was adjourned, to be convened once more in Oxford at the beginning of August.

The change of location did nothing to curb the rising hostility of the members to king and court. On a motion of Sir Edward Coke at the beginning of the session, the subsidies to the king were set to be thoroughly investigated, thus implying that parliament had the power to regulate the king’s income at will. Another member rose brandishing a pardon the king had issued to a Jesuit, just the day after he had promised to uphold the ‘pious petition’ against Roman Catholics. A general silence followed. This affected the integrity and honour of the sovereign. It was agreed that they should wait to hear Charles’s response. Charles had made contradictory promises to the French king and to parliament. Which would be the first to be broken?

Charles arrived from Woodstock three days later, and summoned the members to meet him in the hall of Christ Church. His mind was on matters of finance rather than of religion. He needed money for the fleet that Buckingham had collected, but the exchequer was bare. He found that his ‘credit’ was as yet too slim ‘to set forth that navy now preparing’. He was, as usual, spare of words. He said that he would answer the religious petitions in two days’ time.

It was still not at all clear how much money was required and to what purpose it would be put. Was a naval war against Spain contemplated? Or would an army be transported to aid the Palatinate? No one in the administration spoke with a certain voice. Why should the members of the Commons support a policy that they did not understand and upon which they had not been consulted? One declared that it would be better if parliament concentrated upon domestic and financial affairs, of which it did have cognizance, rather than concern itself with foreign imbroglios.

Buckingham now came under attack. It could be inferred from the speeches against him that he was incapable of controlling the government or of organizing any credible war effort. So now he bent with the wind. The information was conveyed that he and his master had never really believed in religious toleration for its own sake; it was merely a device to woo the Spanish and then the French. Buckingham was supposed to believe that the religious treaty drawn up with Louis XIII was merely for the sake of form, a piece of paper to appease the pope. The king, with his connivance, was ready to cultivate the Commons by turning on the Catholics.

‘If you mean to put the laws into execution,’ an envoy from the French court, Father Berulle, told him, ‘I neither can nor will endure it, whatever sauce you may be pleased to add.’

‘Begone,’ Buckingham is supposed to have replied. ‘I know that you are only at home in your breviary and your Mass.’

But the duke’s evident lack of principle or consistency did not necessarily endear him to parliament. He had gathered together a fleet to boost his standing in the popular cause of war against Spain, but there was no money fully to prepare it. He was deemed to be too young, too rash and too inexperienced. In the ensuing debate, Sir Francis Seymour called out, ‘Let us lay the fault where it is.’ He then named the duke of Buckingham. Sir Edward Coke, sensing misgovernment and self-serving administrators, declared that ‘the ship hath a great leak’. This was coming too close to the king. On 11 August he and his council decided that it was not fit for this parliament to continue. The excuse of the plague, steadily encroaching upon Oxford, was used to save Buckingham from possible impeachment. Where Charles believed that he was defending an honest and faithful minister, the parliamentarians were of the opinion that they were protecting the nation against a selfish and incapable favourite. The Oxford parliament had lasted eleven days. Charles blamed a few troublemakers and ‘seditious men’ for the turmoil, a miscalculation he would also make in later years.

It is already possible to gauge something of the king’s character. He truly believed that his regal authority was paramount and that parliament was merely a compliant instrument to finance his requirements in war and peace. The simple declaration of his wishes was sufficient to command obedience. On state papers he would scrawl, ‘Let it be done. C.R.’ He had certain firm convictions that could not be altered by arguments or by events; if you agreed with him, you were a friend, but any who questioned his judgement were enemies from that moment forward. Once he had formulated a policy, he maintained it to the end. He could never see the point of view of anyone but himself, and this lack of imagination would one day cost him the throne.

He was so convinced of the rightness of his cause that he never acquired the easiness and bonhomie of either his father or his son. He remained to most of his subjects cold and reserved. The Venetian ambassador wrote that ‘this king is so constituted by nature that he never obliges anyone, either by word or deed’. In succeeding years he would become enmeshed in the problems caused by his inability to use tact or craft in the affairs of the world. He once told a churchman that he could never have become a lawyer because ‘I cannot defend a bad, nor yield in a good, cause’. He was in other words too righteous for his own good, or for the good of his kingdom.

The official war against Spain was declared in the early autumn of 1625, and in the same period a treaty was established between England and the Dutch republic. Yet the perennial problem of finance had not been solved and, as a desperate remedy, it was proposed that the crown jewels should be sold. The soldiers had been pressed into service but they remained unpaid; they roamed about Plymouth, where the people of south Devon would not or could not supply them with food. So the hungry men killed the available sheep and oxen in front of them. Three of their captains were named Bag, Cook and Love; the joke soon spread that they were Bag without money, Cook without Meat and Love without charity. This was a period when rumours spread throughout the country that the king had been touched by the plague; the report was untrue, but it represented the uncertain atmosphere of the time.

The English fleet under the command of Sir Edward Cecil, who had first seen service in the reign of Elizabeth, finally left harbour on 8 October after much abortive sailing through wind and rain. Its principal purpose was as yet undecided, except that it should in some way strike a blow against the Spanish coast. A council of war was called while the ships were at sea, when it was decided that an assault should be attempted upon Cadiz. The spirits of the men were raised when, at the advance of the English, the Spanish vessels fled the scene. The fort of Puntal, guarding the entrance to Cadiz harbour, was taken; but the attack had alerted the Spanish authorities to the dangers faced by the town.

While a blockade of Cadiz was attempted, news reached Cecil and his commanders that a large Spanish force was on its way to save the town; the English soldiers were disembarked and hurried to meet the threat, but the report was false. No enemy was in sight. Their forced march under a hot Spanish sun, however, had left them without provisions. Casks of wine were taken from neighbouring villages and dwellings; the men gorged themselves on the drink until they were senseless. It was said that every man became his own vintner. The Spanish defenders of Cadiz fell upon them and engaged in a general frenzy of slaughter. The siege of Cadiz, and the occupation of Puntal, were therefore abandoned in embarrassing failure.

The English vessels had also been charged to intercept the Spanish silver sailing from Mexico, but they were in no condition to confront anything. Their hulks were rotten, and their tackle frail. Whether through corruption or neglect, their supplies had been insufficient from the beginning. The drink, possibly a medley of wine and water, was foul; the food was evil-smelling ‘so as no dog in Paris Garden would eat it’. Paris Garden was part of the noisome suburb of Southwark. In the middle of November Cecil ordered his ships to return to England. It was a complete, and humiliating, fiasco. An enquiry was held, but such was the conflicting evidence and prejudiced testimony that it was considered best to bury the matter in a public silence.

An attempt was then made to avert the wrath of the country. At the beginning of November the execution of the penal laws against the Catholics was instituted once more; the fines and confiscations were to be used for the defence of the realm. It was reported that at Whitehall ‘they look strange on a papist’. Yet there was no stronger papist than the queen. Charles’s disillusion with Louis XIII for failing to assist him now seems to have extended to his sister, and especially to her entourage of Capuchin friars. Their rituals and orisons were not welcome at the English court, in which Buckingham was still hoping to lead a Protestant league against Spanish and imperial pretensions.

The king and queen were dining together when her Catholic confessor tried to anticipate the grace being said by a Protestant cleric. He began praying in Latin, in a loud voice, according to Joseph Mead, ‘with such a confusion, that the king, in a great passion, instantly rose from the table, and, taking the queen by the hand, retired into the bedchamber. Was this not a priestly discretion?’ Charles was heard to state that a man must be master in his own house. But he had also to prove himself master of his own kingdom.

12

A fall from grace

The day of Charles’s formal coronation came on Candlemas, 2 February 1626, a little under a year since his accession to the throne. Henrietta Maria refused to accompany her husband to what she considered to be an heretical service, and so he proceeded alone; the queen watched some of the events from an apartment in the gatehouse of the palace yard. Charles did not go on the customary procession through the streets of London, however, and there was neither banquet nor masque after the ceremony; the plague was still leaving its mark. There was little rejoicing at the service itself. When the newly crowned king was presented to the people, they remained largely silent. The earl of Arundel, the lord marshal, then ordered them to cry out ‘God save King Charles’ at which juncture a few shouts of homage were heard.

Charles wore a cloak of white rather than a robe of regal scarlet; this was considered by many to be an unfortunate innovation in an ancient ceremony. The coronation oath was also carefully changed by William Laud, the bishop of St David’s, with a prayer that the king might have ‘Peter’s key of discipline, Paul’s doctrine’. This was not at the time considered to be ominous but, at a later date, Laud was accused of conferring absolute power upon the king to the injury of the people. Any ill will or resentment was at this time, however, largely directed against Buckingham rather than his sovereign.

Parliament met four days later in a state of seething discontent at Buckingham’s mismanagement of the expedition to Cadiz. He may have tried to waive blame by pleading that he had been conducting diplomatic negotiations at the time in The Hague, but this did not satisfy the angry members. Sir John Eliot, member for St Germans in Cornwall, had witnessed the return of the fleet to Plymouth after the debacle; he had seen the men, diseased and half-starved, staggering off their ships. He had also seen some of them die in the streets, mortally infecting the people of the town. He did not forget these scenes of suffering, and he placed all the blame for them on the folly and pride of the king’s favourite.

The king opened proceedings with a customary short and blunt speech. ‘I mean to show what I should speak’, he said, ‘in actions.’ He offered no apologies or explanations for what had transpired; he simply asked for more money. When Eliot rose to speak he demanded that no further supply should be granted until an account had been given of previous sums. He called for the inspection of the admiralty ledgers which, as vice-admiral of Devon, he was uniquely well placed to examine.

But he made a wider plea to the king. ‘Sir, I beseech you cast your eyes about! View the state we are in! Consider the loss we have received! Weigh the wrecked and ruined honour of our nation!’ Eliot might be described as one of the first great parliamentarians in English history, ready to curb the abuses of the royal prerogative. He went on to say that ‘our honour is ruined, our ships are sunk, our men perished; not by the sword, not by the enemy, not by chance, but, as the strongest predictions had discerned and made it apparent beforehand, by those we trust’. The aspects of international affairs were not promising. The Catholic forces of the Holy Roman Emperor were advancing through Bohemia and Germany; the Protestants of France were being threatened, and even destroyed, by the French king.

A committee was established in order to enquire into the problems of the state finances, but it came to no settled conclusions. On 10 March, therefore, Charles let it be known that he wished for an immediate supply for the necessities of the state without any further questions of his past or future conduct being raised. The statement raised the temperature of the debates. The member for Boroughbridge, Sir Ferdinando Fairfax, wrote to his father that ‘if we give nothing, we not only incense the king, who is in his own nature extremely stiff, but endanger a ruin of the commonweal, as things now stand; and if we do give, it may perhaps not be employed in the right way, and the more we part with, the more we shall want another time to bestow’.

It was now generally believed that the cause of all grievances was the duke of Buckingham. He had appointed incompetent officers and was responsible for the calamity at Cadiz. He had taken Crown lands for his friends and family. He had sold many of the offices of state and acquired others for his own aggrandizement. His mother and his father-in-law were both recusants, and might be considered enemies of the state. He was the man to be named.

The king replied to the parliamentarians at Whitehall five days later in a speech in which he declared that ‘I would not have the House to question my servants, much less one that is so near me’. He added that ‘I would you would hasten for my supply, or else it will be worse for yourselves, for if any ill happen, I think I shall be the last that shall feel it’. Sir John Eliot, addressing his colleagues two days later, counselled steadfastness. ‘We have had a representation of great fear,’ he said, ‘but I hope that shall not darken our understandings.’ The king once more ordered them to desist. ‘Remember’, Charles told them, ‘that parliaments are altogether in my power for their calling, sitting, and dissolution; therefore, as I find their fruits good or evil, they are to continue, or not to be.’

The Commons, in no mood now for retreat, still pursued the duke; they were hounds slipped off the leash, all the more confident because they knew that the Lords were supporting them; the nobility, too, had had enough of the overweening favourite. The old peerage were incensed by his control of patronage and by his domination of the king. The earl of Bristol, who as ambassador at the court of Spain had witnessed the conduct of Buckingham in Madrid, brought his own testimony against the favourite. He charged him with the attempt to change the prince’s religion; he accused him of kneeling to the sacrament ‘to give the Spaniards a hope of the prince’s conversion’. He was in effect denouncing Buckingham for treason.

The king was irate at what he considered to be the vainglory of the houses. Yet they were not to be diverted. On 10 May a deputation was drawn up to prepare the articles of impeachment against Buckingham; one of its members, Sir Dudley Digges, stated in perhaps unprecedented terms that ‘the laws of England have taught us that kings cannot command ill or unlawful things. And whatsoever ill events succeed, the executioners of such designs must answer for them.’ Digges also compared Buckingham to a comet, exhaled ‘out of base and putrid matter’. When the members of the deputation presented themselves to Buckingham, however, it was reported that he laughed in their faces. The duke knew the loyalty, or rigidity, of the king. Charles would never abandon him.

The day of the impeachment debate was an occasion for passion and theatrical confrontation. When one member, John Glanville, delivered an exordium in favour of parliament Buckingham ‘jeered and fleered’ him. ‘My lord,’ Glanville replied, ‘do you jeer me? Are these things to be jeered at? My lord, I can show you a man of greater blood than your lordship, as high in place and power, and as deep in the favour of the king as you, who hath been hanged for as small a crime as the least of these articles contain.’

Sir John Eliot rose to launch a general invective against the favourite. ‘What vast treasures he has gotten! What infinite sums of money, and what a mass of lands!’ The banquets, the buildings, the costumes, the gold and the silver were the visible tokens of his greed; his wealth was keeping the sovereign, and the nation, poor. Eliot then hinted at the prevailing rumour that Buckingham and his mother had poisoned James I. He compared the duke to a legendary beast, known to the ancients as Stellionatus, that was ‘so blurred, so spotted’ that it was filled with foulness. By this extraordinary speech, the king was of course much offended.

On the following day, 11 May, the king visited the Lords where he tried to exonerate Buckingham from all the charges attached to him by the Commons. ‘I can bear witness,’ he said, ‘to clear him in every one of them.’ On the same day the lower house broke up in turmoil when it was discovered that Sir John Eliot and Sir Dudley Digges had been taken to the Tower. When the Speaker rose on 12 May to commence business he was told to ‘sit down’. There was to be ‘no business until we are righted in our liberties’. The French ambassador warned the king that if his power did not prevail, he would be as impotent as the doge of Venice, who could do nothing without the approval of his senate.

Parliament stood firm and finally prevailed. Within a week both Digges and Eliot were set at liberty. It was not a good precedent for the king, who appeared to be resolute but in truth prevaricated. He then compounded the offence by appointing Buckingham to be chancellor of the university at Cambridge; such was the displeasure of the Commons that they drew up a general remonstrance for Buckingham’s dismissal from public life.

The war of words now intensified. Charles responded with the demand that parliament should proceed immediately to pass a Subsidy Bill, furnishing him with more funds, or he would be obliged ‘to use other resolutions’. The Commons debated the matter and decided that the remonstrance should come before any bill for subsidies. They had not in fact proved the charges of venality and corruption laid against Buckingham, but they now pressed for his forced resignation on the sole grounds that the Commons did not trust him. If they succeeded in their purpose, their authority would then outweigh that of the sovereign himself.

If parliament on the other hand were forced to yield, and to grant Charles supply without the redress of grievances, it would set an unfortunate precedent in which the king might be the permanent victor; the members did not, in a current phrase, wish to give posterity a cause to curse them. Court and parliament, at cross-purposes one with another, had reached an impasse. A conversation between the king and Buckingham was overheard and widely reported. ‘I have in a manner lost the love of my subjects,’ Charles is supposed to have told him. ‘What wouldst thou have me do?’ On 14 June the king determined to dissolve parliament. The Lords begged for two days more to resolve the situation. The king replied quickly enough. ‘Not a minute.’

The day before the dissolution of what was called ‘this great, warm, ruffling parliament’ a storm of thunder, lightning and hail fell upon the Thames at Westminster and created the phenomenon of a ‘whirlwater’ or ‘water-pillar’. The water was dissolved into a mist and formed a great revolving funnel some 30 yards across and 10 feet in height; the interior was hollow and white with froth. This prodigy of nature crossed the Thames and then began to beat against the walls of the garden of York House, the residence of the duke of Buckingham; as it struck against the bricks it broke into a thick smoke, as if it came from a chimney, and rose high into the air. It then vanished out of sight with two or three peals of thunder. It was considered to be an omen, and perhaps a warning to the duke himself.

Handbills were printed on clandestine presses and distributed through the streets of London.

Who rules the kingdom? The king.

Who rules the king? The duke.

Who rules the duke? The devil.

Three days after the dissolution the king ordered that all copies of the parliamentary remonstrance against Buckingham should be destroyed. By continuing to favour the duke, Charles had provoked a determined and vocal opposition in parliament; the antagonism did not as yet directly touch the person of the king himself, but there were some who looked ahead to possible changes in public affairs. A great constitutional historian, Leopold von Ranke, once suggested that the coming conflict between king and parliament was the product of ‘historical necessity’; whether we accept the phrase or not, it is at least evident that there were forces at work that could not easily be contained or averted.

*

In the course of this parliament, amid the turmoil of domestic affairs, the bishops had also been considering the issues of religion. In particular they had debated the controversy between the puritan members of the Church and those who were already known as ‘Arminians’. These latter were the clergy who believed in the primacy of order and ritual in the customary ceremonies; they preached against predestination and in favour of the sacraments, and had already earned the condemnation of the Calvinists at the Synod of Dort seven years earlier. Some of them were dismissed as mere papists under another name, but in fact they were as much estranged from the Catholic communion as they were from the puritan congregation; they wished for a purified national Church, and their most significant supporter was already William Laud, a prominent bishop now in royal favour. The English Arminians in turn became known as ‘Laudians’, with one of their central precepts concerning ‘the beauty of holiness’ by which they meant genuflections and bowings as well as painted images. There was even room to be made for an incense pot.

The Arminians had been in an equivocal position during the previous reign because of James’s residual Calvinist sympathies and his unwillingness to countenance doctrinal controversy. His son was made of sterner, or more unbending, material. In the weeks after James’s death, Bishop Laud prepared for the new king a list of senior churchmen, with the letters ‘O’ or ‘P’ appended to their names; ‘O’ meant orthodox and ‘P’ signalled a puritan. So the lines were drawn.

The powerful bias towards ‘adoration’, with all the ritual and formality it implied, was deeply congenial to the young king who had already brought order and ceremony to his court; just as he delighted in masques, so he wished for a religion of splendour and mystery. Charles had in any case a deep aversion to puritanism in all of its forms, which he associated with disobedience and the dreadful notion of ‘popularity’; he thought of cobblers and tailors and sharp-tongued dogmatists. Above all else he wanted a well-ordered and disciplined Church, maintaining undeviating policies as well as uniform customs, with the bishops as its principal representatives. It was to be a bulwark in his defence of national stability. Laud himself used to quote the phrase ‘stare super antiquas vias’ – it was important to stand upon ancient roads.

With a sermon delivered in the summer of 1626, Laud aimed a direct hit against the puritans by claiming that the Calvinists were essentially antiauthoritarian and therefore anti-monarchical. In the following year George Abbot was deprived of his powers as archbishop of Canterbury and replaced by a commission of anti-Calvinist bishops. When one Calvinist bishop, Davenant of Salisbury, delivered a sermon in which he defended the doctrine of predestination, he was summoned before the privy council; after the prelate had kissed the king’s hand, Charles informed him that ‘he would not have this high point meddled withal or debated, either the one way or the other, because it was too high for the people’s understanding’. After 1628 no Calvinist preachers were allowed to stand at Paul’s Cross, the centre for London sermons. A joke soon followed, asking a question about the Arminians’ beliefs.

‘What do the Arminians hold?’

‘All the best livings in England.’

Yet the Calvinists, and the puritans, did not go gently into the dark. The victory of the Laudian cause in the king’s counsels, more than anything else, stirred the enmity between opposing religious camps that defined the last years of his reign. It should be added, however, that these doctrinal discontents wafted over the heads of most parish clergy and their congregations who attended church as a matter of habit and took a simple attitude towards the gospels and the commandments.

Within a few weeks of the dissolution of parliament Charles finally determined to banish his wife’s priests and ladies-in-waiting from his court. While parliament had still been in session the queen’s religious counsellors advised her to go on a pilgrimage to Tyburn, in bare feet, in order to pray for the souls of those Catholics who had been executed there. It was soon murmured she had offered up her prayers for the cause of dead traitors rather than of martyrs.

Resentment, and even anger, had already risen between husband and wife. She was merry enough with her French followers but in the presence of the king she was sullen and morose; she apparently took no delight in his company. They quarrelled over her wish to distribute some of her lands and houses among her entourage. ‘Take your lands to yourself,’ Charles himself reports her as saying. ‘If I have no power to put whom I will into these places, I will have neither lands nor houses of you. Give me what you think fit by way of pension.’

‘Remember to whom you speak,’ the king replied. ‘You ought not to use me so.’

They continued to argue and, in the king’s own recollection of the scene, ‘then I made her both hear me and end that discourse’. The court, too, had ears.

At the beginning of August, after a meeting of the privy council, Charles called for the queen. She declined the invitation on the grounds that she had a toothache. So with his council in attendance he proceeded to the queen’s private chambers where he found her French attendants, according to a contemporary letter-writer, Mr Pory, ‘unreverently dancing and curvetting in her presence’. He summarily brought the party to a close, and took Henrietta Maria to his own chambers where he told her that he was sending the French attendants back to Paris ‘for the good of herself and the nation’. The queen was momentarily bewildered but then, in a fit of temper or frustration, broke the windows in the chamber with her bare hands in order to speak to her people in the courtyard below. Whereupon the women ‘howled and lamented as if they were going to an execution’.

The loudest protests could not prevail against the king’s angry will. For some days the French refused to leave the queen’s court. At that point Charles lost all patience. He commanded Buckingham ‘to send all the French away tomorrow out of the town; if you can, by fair means – but stick not long in disputing – otherwise force them away, driving them away like so many wild beasts until you have shipped them, and so the devil go with them! Let me hear of no answer but the performance of my command.’ He could use a peremptory tone even with his favourite.

Eventually, under the escort of the Yeomen of the Guard, the French boarded the vessels for their return. As they went down to the Thames by the river stairs of Denmark House, a crowd of Londoners hooted and jeered at them; one of them threw a stone that knocked off the hat of Mme de Saint-Georges. The whole episode incensed the French king, who told the English envoy that his sister had been cruelly treated. It was not a propitious moment to alienate Louis XIII.

The dissolution of the parliament, for example, led ineluctably to urgent attempts to raise money for the king’s war against Spain. A loan of £100,000 was requested from the merchants of London, with the crown jewels as security. The appeal was denied. In the following month it was proposed that the freeholders of the various counties would provide a ‘free gift’ to the Crown; the clergy were ordered ‘to stir up all sorts of people to express their zeal to God and their duty to the king’. Charles also decided that he must continue to levy the customs revenues of ‘tonnage and poundage’ even though parliament had not given its consent. When contributions to the ‘free gift’ were about to be collected in Westminster Hall, the cry was raised of ‘A parliament! A parliament!’ Throughout August and September the refusal to contribute to the king’s coffers became widespread. It was then decreed that the king’s plate should be sold.

In the middle of August 200 pressed soldiers and sailors made their weary way from Portsmouth to London in order to demand the money still owed to them. By chance or design they came upon the duke of Buckingham’s coach; they stopped it and pleaded for redress. Buckingham promised to deal with their demands later in the day, but he escaped by way of the Thames and returned to the security of York House. This was in any case a time of deep distress among the general populace. The great nineteenth-century historian of prices, Thorold Rogers, stated that ‘I am convinced, from the comparison I have been able to make between wages, rents and prices, that it was a period of excessive misery among the mass of the people and the tenants, a time in which a few might have become rich, while the many were crushed down into hopeless and almost permanent indigence’. The condition of England now looked to some to be beyond repair. One contemporary asked, ‘Is it not time to pray?’

13

Take that slime away

The king’s war against Spain and the imperial forces was not going well. Christian of Denmark had depended upon subsidies from his nephew, Charles, but of course no money was forthcoming; on 27 August 1626, his demoralized forces were defeated by the armies of the Catholic League at Lutter in Lower Saxony. As a result the Protestants of northwest Europe could become the prey of the imperialist armies. On hearing the news of the battle Charles abandoned his summer progress and returned to London where he told the Danish ambassador that he would defend King Christian ‘even at the risk of his own crown and hazarding his life’. The king’s council wished to send four regiments, each comprising 1,000 men, to Denmark, but how were they to be paid?

After the failure of the ‘free gift’ proposed for the king, and the small sums of money raised by the sale of his plate, the time had come for more severe and aggressive measures. In the autumn of 1626 the king imposed what was essentially a forced loan, and demanded from the counties the equivalent of five parliamentary subsidies. His decision was in part prompted by his deep reluctance to call another parliament. He would manage his finances without the meddling of certain malicious members. He wrote to the various lords-lieutenant of the counties ordering them to put forward the names of their local dignitaries, with details of the amounts they could afford; he also wrote to the peers, asking them to be generous in their financial support. He condemned those who cried out against the loans as ‘certain evil-disposed persons’; he declared that he must have the money to subsidize himself and his armed forces and that the duty of all true subjects, in the absence of parliamentary agreement, was ‘to be a law unto themselves’. He might have added, in a phrase of the period, that ‘need knows no law’.

The general response of the country seems for once to have been favourable. The exigencies of the country, and the possible defeat of the Protestant cause, prompted most communities into payment. It was granted that, in an emergency, the king had the right to call upon special aid. The people of Thetford in Norfolk, for example, ‘were all very willing to yield’. By November the forced tax had raised something close to £250,000, sufficient for the king’s immediate requirements. Charles himself admitted that the money had been ‘more readily furnished than I could have expected in these needy times’.

The judiciary was uncertain about the legality of any forced loan, however, and refused to sign a paper of consent to its imposition. The king called in the chief justice and dismissed him from his office as a warning and encouragement to others. He threatened to sweep all recalcitrant magistrates from their benches, but in so doing he damaged the authority of the judges as well as his own. It was reported that from this time forward they were no longer considered to be impartial or disinterested, and it was long remembered that the king had demanded the resignations of those who refused to accede to his requests. If they possessed opinions of their own, they were to be treated with contempt.

Some were still unwilling to pay the forced loan. The wealthier of these recalcitrants were summoned before the privy council, where they were either dispatched to prison or confined in private houses away from their homes and families; the poorer of them were pressed into the army or navy, where their bodies might serve instead of their money. Among those who refused payment were five knights, who decided to challenge the legality of the loan in the courts and were subsequently placed in their county prisons. They would become the cause of much discontent against the king.

Another opponent acquired great popularity in later years. John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire squire and former member of parliament, was summoned at the end of January 1627 to explain his refusal to pay the forced loan. ‘I could be content to lend,’ he replied, ‘but fear to draw on myself that curse in Magna Carta which should be read twice a year against those who infringe it.’ He was claiming, in other words, that the king had challenged the fundamental rights and liberties of the people. He was consigned to the Gatehouse prison at Westminster for a year and was so strictly held that, according to a contemporary account, ‘he never did afterwards look like the same man he was before’. Fifteen years later, in the same prison, Richard Lovelace wrote that:

Stone walls do not a prison make,

Nor iron bars a cage …

Hampden’s mind remained at liberty. He became a celebrated parliamentary commander in the eventual civil war.

Charles’s angry will may have begun to cloud his judgement. On the urgent submissions of the duke of Buckingham, it was now proposed to send a naval expedition against France in order to help the rebellion of the Huguenots against Louis XIII. For some months an unofficial maritime war had been taking place between the two countries, leading to the seizure of goods and ships in mutually escalating fashion. At the beginning of December 1626, an order was issued for the capture of all French vessels found in English waters. Three weeks later it was discovered that six or eight ships purchased by Louis from the Low Countries were now at Le Havre ready to sail against England; they had to be either taken or destroyed.

The king was at this time contemplating a war against both France and Spain. To fight against one power was serious enough, but to fight against two at the same time might have been considered akin to folly. In the spring of 1627 new levies of men were dispatched to Portsmouth. It was the old story. Many of them were described as ‘base rogues’; there was no clothing for them, and the surgeons had not been paid. Their lordships in the council were happy to issue general orders without caring to follow them up; they were incapable of estimating military costs, and were often ignorant of local geography. They sent regiments to be billeted without informing the relevant county authorities. They were preparing to send wheat to the proposed army in France, but provided no means to grind it. The absence of any working bureaucracy proved fatal. The confusion could have been prevented only if local self-government had been somehow rendered compatible with national conscription. How could a war in Europe be maintained by the men and administrative machinery of the parishes and counties? A national army raised to fight overseas could be managed only by some form of central administration. The conditions of Stuart England made that impossible. So chaos ensued. The pressed men appeared at Portsmouth:

With an old motley coat and a malmsey nose,

With an old jerkin that’s out at the elbows,

And with an old pair of boots drawn on without hose,

Stuffed with rags instead of toes.

The talk of a further expedition against France meant that London, according to Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, ‘was full of soldiers, and of young gentlemen who intended to be soldiers, or as like them as they could; great licence used of all kinds, in clothes, in diet, in gaming’. It was a city of dice and whores.

On 11 June the king himself reviewed the fleet at Portsmouth and dined aboard the admiral’s vessel, where all were merry. The jokes and antics of the king’s fool, Archie, were said to have been memorable. The notion of English superiority at sea, despite the failure at Cadiz, persisted. The fleet sailed on 27 June 1627, with two principal purposes. The first was to contest the ambition of Richelieu, the pre-eminent minister of Louis XIII, to make his sovereign the master of the sea. That role was reserved for England. The second aim of the enterprise was to transport certain regiments to the port of La Rochelle, on the Atlantic coast of France; the Huguenots of that town had taken over its administration and were engaged in a struggle for their religious liberty with the French king. The neighbouring island of Rhé was already under royal control. Buckingham’s strategy was to occupy that part of it which managed the approaches to La Rochelle.

So on the afternoon of 12 July the men leapt into the landing craft, covered by the fire from their ships. Buckingham was everywhere among them, encouraging them and urging them on. Yet his bravado was not enough. The men themselves were ill-disciplined, and not all of them were inclined to fight; some lingered on board and others did not take up the positions assigned to them. Those who reached the shore were in no hurry to move against the enemy. Buckingham went among them with his cudgel to drive them forward. All this was to no avail.

The French seized the opportunity and rode down upon the English bands, threatening to drive them into the sea. Yet somehow a line of defence was established and the French forces, in difficult and swampy terrain, decided to retreat to the safe fortifications of the citadel of St Martin. Buckingham then ordered that the fort should be placed under siege.

The siege turned into a blockade, but the suffering multiplied on both sides. The women and children within the fort cried out for mercy and for pity, where none were available, while Buckingham’s men were worn down by disease and lack of rations. He sent urgent messages to London for more troops and more supplies but the exchequer was, as always, empty. As winter came closer, the English forces grew weaker; they were now practically without food, money, or ammunition. It was reported in the middle of October that the English officers on Rhé were ‘looking themselves blind’ by scanning the seas with their telescopes for the sight of English ships.

A last desperate assault was made upon the fort, but it was discovered that the scaling ladders were too short. There was nothing for it but to retreat. Yet even this was bungled. On 30 October the English were about to cross by wooden bridge to a smaller island from which they hoped to embark upon their ships; but it was not properly defended. Under prolonged fire the infantry and cavalry were lost in confusion. Many of them were shot down, while others drowned. It was estimated that 4,000 Englishmen had been killed, while the rest eventually made their weary way back to Portsmouth or to Plymouth. La Rochelle had not been relieved. A contemporary, Denzil Holles, observed that ‘every man knows that, since England was England, it received not so dishonourable a blow’. It was written of Buckingham himself:

And now, just God, I humbly pray

That thou wilt take that slime away.

It was the second signal disaster, in the space of two years, under the duke’s command. His flags were now hanging in the cathedral of Notre Dame as a token of the nation’s shame. The people were soon calling him ‘the duke of Fuckingham’. Yet the king greeted his favourite with a cheerful face and effectively placed all the blame upon his own shoulders. ‘In this action you have had honour,’ Charles told him, ‘all the shame must light upon us here remaining at home.’ In truth Buckingham was not entirely culpable. He was a brave man but he was no strategist, a failure compounded by his scant attention to detail. Much of the fault, however, must lie with the administration at home that signally failed to provide the requisite money and supplies to its army overseas.

The king called a council of war in which he pressed for money to finance another expedition to La Rochelle which he had bound himself in honour to defend. His advisers counselled him once more to call parliament. It was the only way to raise money without a thousand complaints and legal challenges. Despite the fact that he expected only remonstrance and debate and petition from its members, he suffered himself to be persuaded.

The atmosphere of parliament in 1628 was not promising. At the beginning of February, a month before the members met, letters had been sent out by the king explaining the necessity for ‘ship-money’ to furnish another fleet. ‘Ship-money’ had been a medieval device by which at times of crisis the navy was supplied with boats from the maritime towns; Charles now wished to extend ship-money over the entire country, and to raise it in terms of coin rather than craft. He ordered that the relevant county officials should ‘proceed according to the true worth of men’s lands and estates’. The fresh attempt to levy taxes, on a dubious legal principle, provoked furious discontent. Many of the towns and counties refused to pay. Lincolnshire rejected ‘the unusual and unexpected charge’; Somerset excused itself on the grounds that it ‘will be a precedent of a charge which neither they nor their predecessors did ever bear’. Charles, realizing that his will would be openly flouted and his orders disobeyed, conceded the matter a few days later. He had decided ‘wholly to rely on the love of our people in parliament’.

He was deluding himself. Love was in short supply at Westminster. The king and favourite had not prepared the ground adequately for further demands upon the nation’s resources, and the court had made little effort to pack the Commons with its natural supporters at a time of crisis. A large number of those who met on 17 March 1628 were local men with local grievances; those who had refused to support the forced loan, for example, were almost sure of seats. A dependant of the duke of Buckingham, Sir Robert Pye, was named for one of the constituencies. The rallying cry went up for ‘A Pye! A Pye! A Pye!’ To which his adversaries called out ‘A pudding! A pudding! A pudding!’ and others joined in with ‘A lie! A lie! A lie!’ It was believed that the ‘patriots’ might trump the ‘court party’, and that parliament would not last eight days. It was even suspected by some that Charles and Buckingham had engineered such a result. If the parliament did not vote funds to the king, he would dismiss it and blame it for weakness and incapacity at a time of national danger.

When the king opened proceedings he declared that ‘these are times for action’; he wanted money, and was not interested in ‘tedious consultations’. He then piled insult upon insult by claiming that he did not intend to threaten them ‘for I scorn to threaten any but my equals’. It was becoming clear that the major confrontation would not be with Buckingham, the object of the previous parliament, but with the king himself.

The mood of the Commons was not helped by the captivity of the five knights who, in the previous year, had been imprisoned for declining to pay the forced loan to the king. It was pleaded on their behalf that to refuse an illegal loan was no crime; if there was no crime, they could not remain in prison. The knights brought forward writs of habeas corpus to free themselves from illegal detention and declared that, according to Magna Carta, ‘no man should be imprisoned except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land’.

The king’s defenders stated in return that the knights were imprisoned at the especial command of their sovereign, and that no other cause was necessary. There followed suitable obfuscation from the judges of the case. They decreed that they would not give the prisoners bail, but that the crown prosecution should at some stage show cause for their further detention. It was an ambiguous judgment but contemporary observers interpreted it as a victory for the king. He would now be able to commit his subjects to prison without due cause. No redress against his sovereign will was permitted.

Sir Edward Coke therefore brought in a bill that prohibited anyone from being detained in prison without trial for more than two months; but this was not enough to avert the growing anger of the Commons. If the king could imprison his subjects for not providing him with money, as he had done in the case of the dissenting knights, where would his dominion end? ‘Upon this dispute,’ Eliot declared, ‘not alone our lands and goods are engaged, but all that we call ours. These rights, these privileges, which made our fathers free men, are in question.’ Thomas Wentworth, soon to become one of the most prominent men of the age, stood up to argue that there should be no more illegal imprisonment, no more pressing of men for foreign service, no forced loans and no billeting of soldiers on unwilling households.

At the beginning of April a committee of the Commons agreed three resolutions to be put to the king. No free man might be consigned to prison without cause; everyone had the right to a writ of habeas corpus; every prisoner was to be freed or bailed if no cause could be shown for his detention. The king was growing impatient. He wished the members to vote him financial supply without any delay. He did not understand why they were so insistent upon their so-called liberties. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘why should any hinder them of their liberties?’ Parliament was not to be moved. The members decided to draw up a bill on the liberty of persons and property before even considering any matters of money.

Charles seemed to believe that this was no longer a simple matter of grievances to be redressed in the ancient fashion, but an attempt to limit royal sovereignty. A message came to the Commons that the king had taken note that ‘this House pressed not upon the abuses of power but upon power itself’. ‘Power’ was a grand word, but what was its meaning? The debate continued, with the king suggesting that all would be well if only the monetary supply was granted. It was a question of relying upon ‘his royal word and promise’. On 5 May a parliamentary remonstrance was presented to him on the matters under dispute. The king, in reply, was willing to pledge that he would not act in the manner he had done in the past; but he refused to allow that any of his future actions could be determined by parliament. The uses of ‘power’ could be curtailed, in other words, but ‘power’ itself remained his to wield as he saw fit.

This was not a satisfactory conclusion. The royal promises were too vague. No fundamental principles had been agreed. It was still not clear whether the king was above the law or the law above the king. A committee was drawn up to prepare a ‘petition of right’ which itself became an important statement of constitutional principle; the notable historian, Thomas Babington Macaulay described it as ‘the second great charter of the liberties of England’. It cited the statutes passed in the reigns of Edward I and Edward III; it deplored the fact that ‘your people have been in diverse places assembled and required to lend certain sums of money unto your majesty’, and demanded that ‘no freeman be taken or imprisoned’ without due process of law. It also complained that ‘great companies of soldiers and mariners have been dispersed into diverse counties of the realm’. The petition really contained nothing novel or radical, despite the king’s autocratic sensitivities, and can most profitably be interpreted as a conservative document essentially restating what many considered to be the ancient constitution of the country. It can be concluded, however, that the king was not trusted in the same way as some of his predecessors.

By the end of May, after much debate, the petition had been adopted by both the Commons and the Lords; to sweeten what might be for Charles a bitter pill it was also agreed to offer the king five subsidies. In other circumstances he would no doubt have rejected the petition as a sheer abrogation of his rights and duties, but his foreign policy was in disarray. La Rochelle had still received no aid from England, despite the promises the king had made, and the fall of key German towns to the imperialist forces meant that English intervention in northwestern Europe had for all practical purposes come to an inglorious end.

So the king was in urgent need of the money from parliament if he was to retain any shred of honour in foreign policy. Yet he prevaricated. He asked the judges certain leading questions concerning the petition, to which they gave cautious replies. ‘Gentlemen,’ he told the assembled parliamentarians before granting them his answer, ‘I am come here to perform my duty. I think no man can think it long, since I have not taken so many days in answering the petition as you spent weeks in framing it…’ His impatience was clear. With his finances in parlous state, and his foreign devices wrecked, all these men could do was debate and debate about the ‘rights’ of the people. The king then announced his reply to the petition. He declared merely that ‘right should be done according to the laws and customs of the realm’. His words gave no comfort at all, since it was still the privilege of the king to judge what those ‘laws’ and ‘customs’ actually were.

The men of parliament were neither impressed nor reassured. When they met to consider their answer they remained seated for a while in a profound and melancholy silence; when certain members did eventually rise to their feet, their speeches were often interrupted by their tears. Sir John Eliot summoned up their spirits with the stern declaration that at home and abroad all was confused and uncertain. Our friends overseas had been defeated, and our enemies had prospered. The cause of Protestantism in Germany, and the recapture of the Palatinate, had been sacrificed as a result of the king’s obsessions with a war against the French king. One member, Humphrey May, was about to interrupt him; but the rest of the house called out to Eliot, ‘Go on! Go on!’

‘If he goes on,’ May said, ‘I hope that I may myself go out.’

‘Begone! Begone!’

But May stayed to listen to Eliot’s oratory. ‘Witness [the journey] to Cadiz! Witness the next! Witness that to Rhé! Witness the last! And I pray to God we shall never have more such witnesses!… Witness all! What losses we have sustained! How we are impaired in munition, in ships, in men!’ At the close of his impassioned peroration he demanded a statement of grievances, or ‘remonstrance’, to be addressed to the king.

It seems that he was about to name Buckingham as the source of all regal problems, but he was stopped from doing so by the Speaker. The king then sent a message, absolutely forbidding the members further to discuss matters of state on pain of instant dismissal. In the face of this command, touching the liberties of parliament, one member after another rose to speak; others sat on the benches and wept. Joseph Mead, the contemporary writer of newsletters, reported that ‘there appeared such a spectacle of passions as the like had seldom been seen in such an assembly, some weeping, some expostulating, some prophesying of the fatal ruin of our kingdom … I have been told by a Parliament man that there were above an hundred weeping eyes; many who offered to speak being interrupted and silenced by their own passions.’ It was a sensitive and tearful age, in which political and religious controversy were not to be distinguished from personal passion. Eventually Sir Edward Coke rose to ask, ‘Why may we not name those that are the cause of all our evils? The duke of Buckingham – that man is the grievance of grievances.’ At that remark the Commons erupted in acclamations. It was said that, when one good hound recovers the scent, the rest come in with a full cry.

On 7 June Charles, now aware of the danger to his favourite and acutely conscious that his financial needs must be satisfied, took his seat upon the throne in the Lords. In front of the peers, and the members of the Commons who crowded to the bar, he ordered that his previous inconclusive answer to the ‘petition of right’ should be removed and that new words take its place. ‘Soit droit fait comme il est désiré.’ This was the usual formula of assent that conferred legality on parliamentary measures: ‘Let right be done as is desired.’ He then added that ‘now I have performed my part. If this parliament have not a happy conclusion, the sin is yours. I am free from it.’ The result was delight in parliament itself, and celebration in the streets beyond; the bells were rung and the bonfires were kindled.

Yet the general satisfaction did not prevent parliament from pressing still further against the king. The remonstrance against Buckingham was presented to Charles on 17 June, to which he responded with a few words. He would consider their grievances ‘as they should deserve’. Buckingham himself was not disturbed by the charges against him and is reported to have said that ‘it makes no matter what the Commons or parliament do, for without my leave and authority they shall not be able to touch the hair of a dog’.

The Commons, not happy with the royal reception of their remonstrance, then went into committee on the question of the king’s finances. The king ordained that the parliament should end in the next week. Whereupon a second remonstrance was prepared declaring that the king’s collection of customs duties and other taxes without parliamentary assent was ‘a breach of the fundamental liberties of this kingdom’. Before the debate could commence the king prorogued the assembly.

So ended the parliamentary session. It has sometimes been seen as one of the most significant in the history of that institution. The members had reminded the king that he was not permitted to violate the liberties of his subjects, and they had obtained from him the recognition of those rights they believed to be most important. Yet the celebrations on the street were perhaps premature. Three days after the conclusion of the proceedings, the king ordered a recall of the second answer he had given ‘to be made waste paper’. He also ordered the reprinting of his first unsatisfactory answer, together with a series of qualifications to his second answer. In his closing speech to parliament, he had said that ‘my meaning … was not to grant any new privileges but to re-edify your old’, which could mean anything or nothing.

He prevaricated in his usual fashion, therefore, and as a result diminished the respect in which he was held. It was difficult to believe now in his good faith. One contemporary diarist, John Rous, noted that ‘our king’s proceedings have caused men’s minds to be incensed, to rave and project [scheme]’. It could of course be claimed, on his behalf, that he was merely protecting the power and authority of the sovereign. It is worth noting that the young Oliver Cromwell, member for the town of Huntingdon, was also part of this parliament.

On the evening of 13 June, thirteen days before the prorogation, Buckingham’s physician and astrologer was noticed leaving the Fortune Theatre in the northern suburbs of the city; his name was Doctor Lambe. A crowd of apprentices recognized him and began to cry out, ‘The duke’s devil! The duke’s devil!’; they pursued him towards a cookhouse in Moorgate Street where he paid a group of sailors to guard him. By the time he left the cookhouse the mob had grown in size; he told them that he ‘would make them dance naked’, no doubt at the end of a rope. Still the people followed him, but at Old Jewry his guard beat them off. The crowd was now intent upon violence and, forcing him towards the Windmill Tavern in Lothbury, they beat him senseless with sticks and stones. One of his eyes was kicked out as he lay upon the cobbles. He was taken to a compter or small prison in Poultry where he died on the following morning.

A couplet was soon being repeated everywhere:

Let Charles and George [Buckingham] do what they can

Yet George shall die like Dr Lambe.

When the rhyme was discovered among a scrivener’s papers he confessed that he had heard it from one Daniel Watkins, who had in turn heard it recited by an illiterate baker’s boy. A Suffolk cleric recalled that ‘about September 3 I had related to me this foolish and dangerous rhyme, fruit of an after-wit’. So poems and ballads, commonly known as ‘libels’, circulated throughout the kingdom; they were often left on stairs or nailed to doors or pinned to gates. Some were even put in the open hands of conveniently placed statues. When the attorney general prosecuted a group of minstrels for singing scurrilous ballads about Buckingham, he referred to these ‘libels’ as ‘the epidemical disease of these days’. They are evidence of the political consciousness of the nation and of the ‘lower sort’, otherwise largely unheard. Even the baker’s boy had opinions about the king and ‘George’.

The temperature of the nation was also being raised by the publication of printed ‘courants’ or ‘corantos’ in ever-increasing quantity; these were regular newsletters or news pamphlets that were circulated in taverns and in marketplaces together with the ‘libels’ that accompanied any great movement in the affairs of state. While many were printed, others were written by hand. The written varieties were considered more reliable, perhaps because they seemed to be more immediate or perhaps because of the authority of the correspondent. One of the writers of these papers called himself ‘your faithful Novellante’ or newsmonger; this is of course the derivation of the ‘novel’.

In a similar movement of information any great stir in the county towns also reached the capital. The newsletters often deliberately helped to provoke controversy or division, so that, for example, the growing polarization between ‘court’ and ‘country’ – between ‘courtiers’ and ‘patriots’ – can only have been assisted by their partisan accounts. Ben Jonson’s masque, News from the New World, portrayed a writer of newsletters declaring that ‘I have friends of all ranks and of all religions, for which I keep an answering catalogue of dispatch wherein I have my Puritan news, my Protestant news and my Pontifical news’.

Manuscript copies of the proceedings and debates of parliament of 1628, known as ‘separates’, were also issued at this time in perhaps the first example of parliamentary reporting. The great speeches of Sir John Eliot and others were thus available to the public, reinforcing the conclusion that parliament had indeed come to represent the will and voice of the people. It is perhaps significant that these papers were often to be found in the libraries of the gentry.

After parliament had been prorogued, the king gave orders that all the gunpowder in London should be taken under royal control. The impression of overweening authority, close to arbitrariness, was further strengthened by the investiture of William Laud as the bishop of London in the following month. His exaltation of the king’s authority, and his demand for exact conformity, did not endear him to the ‘patriots’ of the kingdom who were eager to curb the royal prerogative.

The king also elevated Sir Thomas Wentworth to the peerage. Wentworth had previously taken the part of parliament but, after the publication of the ‘petition of right’, he came to accept the king’s position on matters of sovereign control; he had arrived at the conclusion that the Commons were not fit to manage the affairs of the nation. He was condemned for abandoning his principles but he believed that parliament, not he himself, had changed. He was soon to say in a speech that ‘the authority of a king is the keystone which closes up the arch of order and government’. With men such as Laud and Wentworth around him, what might the sovereign not dare to undertake? The atmosphere of the city was uneasy. It was reported that the citizens were filled with alarm, and were taking up arms for their own defence. It was rumoured that the duke and the king were ready to confront their enemies. No one knew what might happen next.

14

I am the man

The plight of La Rochelle, still besieged by the forces of Louis XIII after the forced withdrawal of the English army, was extreme. Its inhabitants were reduced to eating grass and boiled cow-hides. It was reported that they cut off the buttocks of the dead, lying in the churchyard, for sustenance. The honour of the king, and of Buckingham, determined that they must once more come to the aid of the city. So in the spring and summer of 1628 a fleet was fitted out at Plymouth. The normal delays ensued. ‘I find nothing’, Buckingham wrote, ‘of more difficulty and uncertainty than the preparations here for this service of Rochelle.’ He was so despised at home that he had been asked to wear protection in order to ward off any attempt at assassination. He replied that ‘a shirt of mail would be but a silly defence against any popular fury. As for a single man’s assault, I take myself to be in no danger. There are no Roman spirits left.’

On the morning of 23 August, the duke was staying at the house of Captain Mason on Portsmouth High Street; Mason was a naval administrator as well as an officer. Buckingham was at breakfast with his colleagues and some representatives from La Rochelle; after the meal was over, he came down into the hall of the house. He stopped to converse with one of his officers when a man, who had been standing in the passage, stepped forward and plunged a knife into his chest with the words ‘God have mercy upon thy soul!’ Buckingham staggered back but, crying out ‘Villain!’ managed to draw the knife from the wound. He tried to pursue his assailant but fell against a table before dropping to the floor.

A great outcry went up among those assembled. The foreigners were suspected, and men cried out, ‘A Frenchman! A Frenchman!’ Others shouted, ‘Where is the villain? Where is the butcher?’

‘I am the man. Here I am.’ John Felton, with his sword in his hand, came forward. He might have been killed where he stood, but some of Buckingham’s officers surrounded him. The wife and sister-in-law of the dead man rushed to the corpse. ‘Ah, poor ladies,’ Dudley Carleton informed the queen, ‘such was their screechings, tears and distractions that I never in my life heard the like before, and hope never to hear the like again.’

The news reached the king while he was at prayer in the royal chapel. When it was whispered in his ear his face betrayed little emotion and he stayed in his place until the service was over. Then he hurried to his private apartments, closed the doors and wept. It was reported that the king used to refer to him as ‘my martyr’. Charles believed, in other words, that his favourite had been murdered for carrying out his orders.

Under examination it was revealed that John Felton had served in the disastrous expedition to Rhé, and that Buckingham had denied him promotion. The insult was compounded by the fact that Felton’s wages had not arrived. When he asked the duke how he was supposed to live, Buckingham is supposed to have replied that he could hang himself if he had not the means to survive. Felton returned to London, where he brooded on his misfortunes; he read the latest pamphlets, which accused Buckingham of poisoning the former king and of being the source of all the grievances of the realm. Four days before the assassination he purchased a tenpenny knife at a cutler’s shop on Tower Hill; he then visited a church in Fleet Street and asked the cleric for prayers as ‘a man much discontented in mind’. He made his way to Portsmouth, largely on foot, where he performed the deed. He had sewn certain messages in the crown of his hat, among them one in which he announced himself to be an executioner rather than an assassin: ‘He is unworthy of the name of a gentleman or a soldier, in my opinion, that is afraid to sacrifice his life for the honour of God, his king, and country.’ He had been the righteous killer of a reprobate who had brought Charles and England into jeopardy.

In that opinion, he was almost universally sustained by the response of the people. The joy at Buckingham’s death was widespread and prolonged. Celebratory healths to Felton were drunk in the taverns of London, and congratulatory verses passed from hand to hand. When he was taken through Kingston on his way to the Tower, an old woman cried out, ‘God bless thee, little David.’ When he arrived at the Tower itself, a large crowd had gathered to greet him, calling, ‘The Lord comfort thee! The Lord be merciful to thee!’ Charles was much offended by these manifestations of popular sentiment, and he wrapped himself more deeply in the mantle of cold authority.

The day before Felton’s arrival at the Tower, Buckingham’s funeral had taken place at Westminster Abbey in a hurried and apparently graceless manner with approximately one hundred mourners. But even this ceremony was mere theatre. The body had been privately interred the night before, to avoid any demonstrations against it by the London crowds. The poet and dramatist James Shirley wrote an appropriate epitaph:

Here lies the best and worst of fate,

Two kings’ delight, the people’s hate.

Felton himself, after due trial, was executed at Tyburn; his body was then displayed in chains at Portsmouth dressed in the same clothes he wore when he killed the duke.

The king now took sole charge of the administration. It was reported by his secretaries that he dispatched more business in two weeks than Buckingham had managed in three months. He told his privy council that he would postpone the opening of parliament until the following year. He retained the same ministers as before, but of course he did not trust them as much as he had trusted the duke. There would be no more royal favourites except, perhaps, for Henrietta Maria, who, after the death of Buckingham entered a much more intimate relationship with her husband; it soon became apparent that, after the initial discord, the royal family was at last a happy one. The poet and courtier Thomas Carew claimed that Charles had ‘so wholly made over all his affections to his wife that he dare say that they are out of danger of any other favourite’. Carew’s friend, William Davenant, composed some dialogue at the time for a play entitled The Tragedy of Albovine, King of Lombardy:

‘The king is now in love.’

‘With whom?’

‘With the queen.’

‘In love with his own wife! That’s held incest in court.’

Six children followed this reconciliation.

Buckingham had not sailed for La Rochelle, after all. Yet in the early autumn of the year a third expedition was sent to the besieged town; it was no more successful than its predecessors. The fleet dared not take the initiative, and its fire-ships were sunk by French ordnance. When the English did eventually land, they were repelled with firmness by the French besiegers. The king’s promises of assistance had come to nothing. So in October 1628, the authorities of the town signed a treaty of surrender to the French king; their great walls were demolished. Whereupon Louis XIII announced a policy of toleration to his Protestant subjects, who were to enjoy freedom of worship throughout his kingdom. The fears of the Protestants had been based upon the mistaken belief that their religion was in danger of being extirpated, and it could be said that the foreign policy of Charles I represented a thorough misunderstanding of the policy of Louis XIII.

In the absence of Buckingham the king was more uncertain and irresolute than ever. Should he make a treaty with France against Spain, or a treaty with Spain against France? There was no question of waging outright war against either nation. The king did not have the resources to do so, or any realistic prospect of raising money by other means. In any case the zeal for war was rapidly ebbing in the country. There might be some delay in signing the relevant treaties, but a period of peace had become inevitable.

A day after the assassination of Buckingham a prominent courtier, Sir Francis Nethersole, remarked that ‘the stone of offence being removed by the hand of God, it is to be hoped that the king and people will now come to a perfect unity’. Yet the opening of the parliament in January 1629 did not bode well for national harmony. The abiding issue was still that of religion. A royal declaration had been issued in the parliamentary recess that ‘the Church has the right to decree ceremonies, and authority to decide controversies of religion’. But what Church? William Laud, now bishop of London, had helped to draw up the proclamation and in the same period a number of his supporters had been promoted to vacant sees. These were the Arminians or ‘high churchmen’ who rejected the precepts and practices of Calvinism.

For parliament this was a direct challenge to the old and familiar creed of the Church. Sir John Eliot told his parliamentary colleagues that the prelates, with the king’s authority, might ‘order it which way they please and so, for aught I know, to bring in Popery and Arminianism, to which we are told we must submit’. Another member, Christopher Sherland, said of the Arminians that ‘they creep into the ears of his Majesty, and suggest, that those that oppose them, do oppose his Majesty…’

It had become a confrontation, therefore, between the Calvinists of the old Church and the Arminian bishops of the new. The recently appointed prelates declared that theirs was the true creed of the Church of England and condemned their opponents as puritan, synonymous with zealotry and nonconformity. It was claimed, for example, that the Calvinists were ready to take up the cause of individual conscience against the precepts of the established faith and the prerogative of the sovereign. The Arminian bishops were in turn accused by their opponents of preaching passive obedience and the divine right of kings. The Calvinists believed in predestination, grace and the gospel; the Arminians put their faith in free will, the sacraments and deference to ceremonial order. It was not conceived by any contemporary that these were controversies that could stir a civil war, but this was the moment when members of parliament and members of the court party began to take sides.

The Commons, animated by the speeches of Eliot and others, affirmed that they alone had the right to determine the religion of the country. John Pym, who had already earned the king’s wrath, stated that ‘it belongs to the duty of parliament to establish true religion and to punish false’. The members resolved that the faith they espoused was that agreed in the reign of Elizabeth ‘and we do reject the sense of the Jesuits and Arminians’. The king, perhaps justifiably, considered this to be a breach of his prerogative in spiritual matters; he was, after all, ‘supreme governor’ of the Church of England. The Commons had also laid aside matters of ‘tonnage and poundage’, the customs duties destined for the king’s purse, thus depriving him of his traditional revenue. Charles adjourned parliament on 25 February for a week. Both sides were in fact vying for mastery.

This was the point when Eliot decided to appeal to the country in the face of an obvious threat. If the king took the further step of dissolving parliament, its future would be uncertain. If he could obtain his revenues elsewhere, there was no reason at all why he should ever summon it again. He had had, in any case, enough of parliament; he called it ‘that noise’. The Arminians were eager to avoid parliaments, also, for the simple reason that they believed they would be persecuted by them; they were of course wholly justified in their suspicion. Eliot had already said of them that ‘they go about to break parliaments, lest parliaments should break them’.

So all things were leading to a final quarrel. On 2 March the Speaker, Sir John Finch, announced to the Commons that it was the king’s wish that they should adjourn for a further eight days. Such a request had in the past always been accepted. Now the members stood up shouting, ‘No! No!’ Finch moved to rise from his chair, thus abruptly ending the session, but some of the members barred his way and thrust him back to his seat. ‘God’s wounds,’ Denzil Holles told him, ‘you shall sit till we please to rise.’ Eliot then announced that the members would have the privilege of adjourning themselves after he had read out a declaration of their intentions.

‘What would any of you do,’ Finch asked, ‘if you were in my place? Let not my desire to serve you faithfully lead to my ruin.’ He was in an impossible situation, with incompatible loyalties to parliament and to the king. Some members, realizing the gravity of the approaching confrontation, rose to leave. But the serjeant-at-arms was ordered to close the doors; when he hesitated, another member locked the doors and put away the key.

Eliot once more demanded that the declaration he had prepared should be read. ‘I am not less the king’s servant for being yours,’ the Speaker replied. ‘I will not say that I will not put the reading of the paper to the question, but I must say, I dare not.’ Eliot then spoke out in a ferocious attack upon the evil councillors that surrounded the king; he also assaulted Arminianism as an open door to popery.

Knocks were heard on the outer door. The king had ordered the serjeant-at-arms to bring away the mace, thus depriving the proceedings of any authority. Sir Peter Heyman then turned upon the Speaker. ‘I am sorry’, he told him, ‘that you must be made an instrument to cut up the liberties of the subject by the roots … The Speaker of the House of Commons is our mouth, and if our mouth will be sullen and will not speak when we have it, it should be bitten by the teeth and ought to be made an example; and for my part I think it not fit you should escape without some mark of punishment to be set upon you by the House.’ This was one of the first indications of the arbitrary and authoritarian impulses of some parliamentarians.

Talk of punishment was vain, however. It was whispered that the king had sent a guard to force its way into the chamber and end the proceedings. So Denzil Holles swiftly proposed three resolutions. Anyone who tried to introduce popery or Arminianism into the kingdom would be considered a capital enemy. Anyone who should advise the levying of customs duties, without the authority of parliament, would similarly be considered as an enemy. If any merchant should voluntarily agree to pay the duties of ‘tonnage and poundage’, he would be ‘reputed a betrayer of the liberty of England and an enemy to the same’. The resolutions were thereupon adopted. Having delivered his message to the nation, Holles asked that the house now adjourn itself, to which there were immediate calls of ‘Ay! Ay!’ The doors were thrown open and the triumphant parliamentarians streamed out to announce the news. They would not meet again for another eleven years.

Two days later the king announced the dissolution of parliament, and at the same time nine of its members were arrested. Sir John Eliot was the particular object of the king’s wrath; Charles blamed his angry tirades against Buckingham for the favourite’s death. In his speech to the Lords Charles did not censure the majority of the Commons, but reserved his anger for ‘some few vipers amongst them that did cast this mist of undutifulness over most of their eyes’. It was reported that he was afterwards in very good spirits.

A few days later was published His majesties declaration of the causes which moved him to dissolve the last parliament, in which he declared that the men whom he imprisoned had ‘more secret designs which were only to cast our affairs into a desperate condition, to abate the powers of our crown and to bring our government into obloquy that in the end all things may be overwhelmed with anarchy and confusion’. He was not alone in this belief. Many considered that the members had gone too far in their opposition to the king. Even a fervently Protestant MP, Simonds D’Ewes, considered that the events of 2 March represented ‘the most gloomy, sad and most dismal day for England that happened in five hundred years last past’; he also blamed the turmoil on ‘diverse fiery spirits in the House of Commons’.

The immediate aftermath of the dissolution was one of dismay and bewilderment. The majority of the merchants refused to pay the customs duties demanded of them, on the grounds that a future parliament would condemn them as betrayers of the kingdom; so they simply declined to trade. Their recalcitrance lasted for two months until the prospect of financial ruin weakened their resolution.

The nine members of parliament arrested after the scenes in the chamber remained in prison. They could no longer appeal to the Lords or the Commons but they could take their case to the courts; they could appeal to the rule of law in a fundamental attempt to question the powers of the king. They claimed parliamentary privilege, and in particular ‘freedom of speech in debate’ that had been asserted by the Speaker since the late sixteenth century; four of them, including Eliot, refused to answer questions on anything pertaining to parliamentary business. The king wished them to be tried for conspiracy and treason, but the judges were reluctant to do so. The question of privilege was vexatious, and Charles eventually asked them to cease speaking in riddles.

At the beginning of May the imprisoned men sought to obtain their release on the grounds of habeas corpus, according to the precepts of the ‘petition of right’. After much argument and debate the judges decided that the prisoners had indeed the right to bail; the king then demanded that they reach no verdict until they had consulted their colleagues on the judiciary. This was essentially an appeal for delay, so that the long legal vacation could intervene; the men would therefore languish in gaol for the duration of the summer. At the beginning of October the prisoners were taken from the Tower to Serjeants’ Inn, where they were promised their release as long as they signed a bond of good behaviour; most of them refused to do so, on the grounds that this would implicitly justify their arbitrary imprisonment for the last eight months. They were intent upon inflicting the maximum embarrassment on the king and his officers.

The Venetian ambassador wrote that ‘affairs grow more bitter every day, and by these disputes the king has made his people see that he can do much more than they may have imagined’. The imprisoned members were testing, piece by piece, the lengths to which Charles would go. When the chief judge of the exchequer made it clear that he was inclined to support parliamentary privilege, the king suspended him from office. It was clear that the guilt of the prisoners was simply to be assumed. The king’s action seems to have clarified the opinion of the remaining judges, who declared that the defendants were indeed punishable by law.

The members of parliament had reached the end of the legal process. Three of them, including Eliot, were once more imprisoned at the king’s pleasure; the others were detained for shorter periods before being released. It had been a victory for the king, in theory, but it had gravely impaired his authority and reputation. He had revealed himself to be inclined to arbitrary and perhaps illegal measures in order to sustain his sovereignty; he saw treachery and conspiracy in what others considered to be justifiable dissent; he was wilful, and even implacable. Yet those who supported him put a different interpretation upon his actions. Charles had conducted himself in the manner of a true sovereign; he was determined to rule the country without the intervention of enemies or malcontents. He was guided by God. This may be considered to be the tone or principle of the next period of his reign.

15

The crack of doom

After the dissolution of parliament in March 1629, the king entered upon a period of personal government that lasted for eleven years. To all intents and purposes he had begun an experiment in absolute monarchy, with the prospect of an acquiescent nation obeying his commands. He was not ill-equipped for that role. One prominent lawyer, Sir Robert Holborne, observed that ‘the king could drive a matter into a head with more sharpness than any of his privy council’. Yet in practice he delegated much of his work to various officials, preferring the pleasures of the hunt to the world of practical affairs.

It was in certain respects a time of silence. There were no debates in parliament, and no elaborate declarations or proclamations from the throne. As in a masque, the king had no need to speak; his presence itself ensured majesty and harmony. As in a masque, also, he could command the workings of the great stage of the world. Charles had a high enough opinion of his supreme office, not unmixed with moral self-righteousness, to believe this.

In the absence of parliament, and with a relatively tame judiciary, the freedoms of the subject were to a certain extent reliant upon the judgement and goodwill of the sovereign. The people of England were simply asked to trust his benevolent intentions. It is true that in many respects he was a gentle monarch, in the course of whose reign no political executions took place. Yet some still considered him to be a tyrant riding over the liberties of the nation and parliament. The continued detention of Sir John Eliot and two colleagues was cited as an example.

Unparliamentary government was not in itself fruitless. It was a time of improvements in transport, with roads repaired and new canals dug; the national postal service was improved, with a regular post on the principal roads taking the place of an irregular system of carriers; in the absence of any national emergency, the administration of local government was strengthened and extended. That domestic peace, however, depended upon external tranquillity. The king could not afford war. And, as long as he could raise sufficient money for his own government by fines and taxation, there was no need to call parliament.

The foreign policy of the nation therefore, in a sense, made itself. Peace was concluded with France in the spring of 1629 and, nineteen months later, a truce was arranged with Spain. By the treaty with France Charles was obliged to abandon the cause of the Protestant Huguenots on the understanding that the principles of his marriage treaty with Louis XIII need not be strictly applied; he need not, for example, grant freedom of worship to Roman Catholics.

The peace with Spain made no mention of the restoration of the Palatinate to Charles’s sister and brother-in-law; the fate of the region was now the subject of promises and expressions of goodwill. In another clause of the treaty it was agreed that Spanish silver could be minted in England before being shipped to Antwerp, where the Spanish were engaged in fighting the Protestant Dutch. It was an open question whether these alliances with the Catholic powers would become a cause of dissent in England. Some believed the people to be cheerful and acquiescent; others suggested that the anger or antagonism against the king had simply been driven below the surface.

The public reaction to both pacts, however, was subdued. Little interest was taken in the matter. Charles had no European policy as such, except for the wish that his sister might be returned to the Palatinate with her husband; but with no army or money to enforce his desires he was reduced to inaction. Money was the key. It was said that Henrietta Maria herself had been obliged to close the shutters of her private apartments in case visitors saw the ragged coverlets of her bed. There were times when, roused by Protestant appeals in Europe for assistance, the king asked his council what he might do. He was told that a new parliament would need to be called to raise the money. This was unthinkable. So nothing was done. The French ambassador remarked that lack of revenue made the English government one ‘from which its friends can hope for no assistance, and its enemies need fear no harm’.

The king’s discomfort was compounded when a new Protestant champion arose in Europe to counter the imperialist triumphs in Poland and Bohemia, Austria and Bavaria, Flanders and the Rhineland. In 1629 the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, marched into Germany and embarked upon a military conquest as unexpected as it was unprecedented. His chancellor wrote that ‘all the harbours of the Baltic, from Kalmar to Danzig, throughout Livonia and Prussia, are in his majesty’s hands’. Gustavus Adolphus had created a new Swedish empire and thereby took on the mantle of a Protestant Messiah, the Lion of the North.

How was the English king to treat with such a man? Gustavus Adolphus demanded men and materials from a fellow Protestant king. But if Charles entered into an alliance with the Swedish king, his important friendship with Spain would come to an end; and the trade with Spain was very important. If he refused an alliance with Gustavus Adolphus, he would lose honour and influence if the Swede was eventually victorious.

So Charles prevaricated and tried half-measures to maintain his credit on both sides. He agreed that a private force of 6,000 Scottish soldiers, under the command of the marquis of Hamilton, could join the Swedish army; but the expedition was a disaster, made worse by epidemic disease and insubordination. The king then sent a delegation to the Swedish king ‘to enter into a league … upon emergent occasions’. This could mean anything or nothing. In practice it meant nothing. At one point Charles banned the news gazettes from reporting on the Swedish victories because they cast such an unhappy light on his own ineffectiveness.

The fortunes of the Swedish king came to an end in a battle outside Leipzig, where his body was found among a heap of naked corpses. The king of England had done nothing to counsel or to assist him. English inaction, or inertia, had created what one anonymous pamphleteer, in ‘The Practice of Princes’, described as ‘a Hispanolized, Frenchified, Romanized or Neutralized’ policy. Yet there may have been virtue in that. One week of war can undo a decade of peace. England escaped the devastation that was inflicted upon central Europe.

Funds still had to be raised by one means or another. The fines against the illegal enclosure of common land were more strenuously exacted. The king also raised much money from a great scheme to drain the fens of eastern England. Many articles of ordinary consumption were granted for a fee to monopolists, who could then set their own prices; the articles included iron and salt, pens and playing cards, starch and tobacco, seaweed and spectacles, combs and gunpowder, hats and hops. Patents could also be purchased for such projects as the manufacture of turf or the weighing of hay and straw, for ‘the gauging of red herring’ and the gathering of rags. In a contemporary anti-masque an actor came on stage with a bunch of carrots on his head, representing a ‘projector’ or speculator ‘who begged a patent of monopoly as the first inventor of the art to feed capons fat with carrots’. The king demanded from the Vintners’ Company a payment of £4 on every tun of wine; when they refused to pay the new tax, the Star Chamber forbade them to cook and serve meat for their customers. The loss of trade meant that they came to an ‘understanding’ with the court, amounting to £30,000 a year.

There was also the curious case of soap. The Company of Soapmakers was in 1631 granted a monopoly to manufacture soap made out of domestic ingredients, such as vegetable oil, rather than out of imported whale oil or fish oil. The company agreed in turn to pay the king an annual tax of £20,000.

The previous soap manufacturers were prosecuted in the Star Chamber for selling the old product; many of them were fined and some of them were imprisoned, while their pans and vats were destroyed. They were of course incensed at their loss of livelihood, but many housewives also complained that the new soap did not wash as well as the old. In seventeenth-century England even the most domestic disputes had a religious dimension. It was believed that the Company of Soapmakers was in fact controlled by the Catholic friends of Henrietta Maria; some of the new monopolists were rumoured to be financed by the Jesuits. Many Protestant households, therefore, objected to the new soap on theological grounds. It became known as the Popish Soap.

So the authorities put on a public demonstration of the efficacy of the new soap. In the Guildhall, under the gaze of the lord mayor, the aldermen and the lieutenant of the Tower, two washerwomen used the rival products in tubs placed beside each other. It was meant to prove that the new soap cleaned and lathered better, but the demonstration does not seem to have persuaded the London public. Eighty great ladies signed a testimonial to the effect that their maids preferred the new soap. This also had no noticeable effect. The old soap was still being sold under the counter. Another demonstration by washerwomen in Bristol was meant to prove that the new product washed ‘as white … and as sweet, or rather sweeter’ than the old. This may be considered a harbinger of modern advertising campaigns. It also made little impression. The old soap was still being manufactured and, as a result of its scarcity, sold at a much higher price.

More personal exactions were made by the king. Individuals were summoned for taxes they had not thought to pay. In 1630, for example, a royal commission was set up to fine those gentlemen who had not taken up knighthoods at the time of the king’s coronation. It was a legal requirement that had faded out of memory through disuse. Those who were summoned were aggrieved at this unexpected imposition, and most tried to excuse themselves. Yet they were not successful. By these means the king raised the money he wished for, but at the expense of the affection and loyalty of some of his subjects.

Other expedients were also practised. Royal rights over forest lands were resurrected; those who had encroached upon forest boundaries were charged large sums. Those who had built houses in London ‘upon new foundations’ were also fined. Mr Moor had erected forty-two new houses in the neighbourhood of St Martin-in-the-Fields, for example, and was fined £1,000 and ordered to demolish the houses; when he refused, the sheriffs took them down and sold the materials to pay the fine.

What, then, was the king’s general attitude to the property of his subjects? Could he take it away at will? If he could impose new taxes on his people without recourse to the courts or to parliament, might he not be able to emancipate the Crown from its traditional obligations? Many suggested that the king could indeed tax without consent, and that public good took precedence over private right. Others in turn argued that the Englishman’s right to the property of his goods and estates was absolute, and could not be removed from him by any court or sovereign. Domestic peace was also unsettled by the disastrous harvest of 1630, which pushed up the price of grain from 4 shillings to 14 shillings a bushel; the prospect of starvation alarmed many communities, and food riots occurred in Kent, Hampshire and elsewhere.

The fractious atmosphere of the time was also evident in the court’s actions against the notable antiquary Robert Cotton. His library had been sealed up, in the belief that it contained ancient tracts and pamphlets that took the side of parliament against the king. History had to be cleansed. One tract was found, according to the archbishop of York, ‘containing a project how a prince may make himself an absolute tyrant’. Cotton was taken into custody, and interrogated by the Star Chamber before being released. Yet his life of study was effectively over. He was no longer allowed to enter his library and learned men were advised to cease their visits to him. He told one friend that ‘my heart is broken’. He was so worn by anguish and grief that, according to Simonds D’Ewes, ‘his face, which had been formerly ruddy and well-coloured, such as the picture I have of him shows, was wholly changed into a grim, blackish paleness near to the resemblance and hue of a dead visage’. He expired soon after, the victim of a nervous and turbulent time.

At the end of 1629 William Laud had, with the assent of the king, composed a ‘Declaration on the Articles of Religion’. It was designed to impose order and uniformity upon the English Church by prescribing the forms of worship, the words of the prayers and even the gestures of the clergy. It was ordained that all clerics must accept to the letter the Thirty-Nine Articles, a demand which would in effect prohibit any discussion by Calvinists on such matters as predestination; these were condemned by the bishop of Chichester as ‘deep and dark points which of late have so distracted and engarboyled the world’. The declaration was conceived thoroughly in the spirit of the monarch, who believed in order above all things. Certain observers thereby concluded that Church and nation were to be reduced to uniformity.

Laud was, in the capital, considered to be little more than a papist in love with ritual and with ceremony. A paper was scattered about the streets of London declaring ‘Laud, look to thyself, be assured thy life is sought. As thou art the fountain of all wickedness, repent thee of thy monstrous sins, before thou be taken out of the earth.’ Laud was not discomfited. ‘Lord,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘I am a grievous sinner; but I beseech thee, deliver my soul from them that hate me without cause.’ An opponent of Laud by the name of Alexander Leighton, having written an appeal to parliament entitled ‘Sion’s Plea against the Prelacy’, was condemned to the Fleet Prison for life; he was also to be taken to the pillory at Westminster and whipped before one of his ears was cut off, one side of his nose slit, and his face branded with the mark of ‘S.S.’ for ‘Sower of Sedition’. He was then to be returned to prison for a period of recuperation before being whipped again and his other ear removed. He was afterwards ‘to be shut up in close prison, for the remainder of his life’. Part of this sentence was remitted, for the sake of decency, but he was not released from prison until 1641 by which time he could not see, hear, or walk.

His wife was also briefly committed ‘for her disordered tongue’, according to a news-writer of March 1630, ‘and a button maker for putting his mouth to the keyhole of the prison door where he lay, and crying aloud “Stand to it, doctor, and shrink not” and such like words’. In the following month an oatmeal-maker was brought before a religious commission for his unorthodox opinions. He was condemned by the bishop of Winchester, another ally of Laud, as a ‘frantic, foolish fellow’. The maker of oatmeal replied, ‘Hold thy peace, thou tail of the beast that sittest at the lower end of the table.’

The king expressed his appreciation of Laud’s work, however, by appointing him as chancellor of Oxford University in the spring of 1630. Laud worked at once to re-establish order and decorum in the ancient university. The students had previously venerated Bacchus and Venus who were, as Laud wrote, ‘the cause of all our ills in church and state’. Discipline was to be restored, thus promoting order and harmony; extravagant dress and long hair were not to be permitted, and alehouses were to be regulated. In the course of Laud’s chancellorship, new buildings were erected and new studies were placed upon the curriculum with learned clerics to expound them. The city was refurbished, as it were, in glowing vestments.

The glory of Charles I was also celebrated. In 1630 the lord treasurer, Richard Weston, commissioned a statue of the king on horseback; it was a noble decoration for the garden of his country house in Roehampton. It soon became the abiding image of Charles’s rule. In 1633 Van Dyck portrayed the king riding through a triumphal arch in the classical style; the king becomes a Roman conqueror. Two years later the same artist composed Charles I on Horseback, in which the king calmly and effortlessly directs the steed on which he rides. Images of chivalry, and of the Christian knight, are conflated with the representation of order.

It is also an image of the sovereign controlling animal nature, bringing the strength and energy of the horse into harness with his own will and desire. The Spanish ambassador, in the same spirit, had once flattered Charles by noting that the horses upon which he was mounted ‘laid down all their natural and brutish fierceness in his presence’. The equestrian portraits are thereby a depiction of the manner in which reason must be able to control passion. This is of a piece with Charles’s own conception of his rule and of his evident belief that he must control his own nature, by restraint and formality, before he could properly govern the entire kingdom. Art was for the king one of the great emblems of power. Yet it was more than that.

Lucy Hutchinson observed that ‘men of learning and ingenuity in all the arts were in esteem and received encouragement from the king, who was a most excellent judge and great lover of paintings, carvings, gravings and many other ingenuities…’ Charles had seen the artistic wealth of the royal court in Madrid and wished to cultivate a similar state of magnificence. He was in addition an adept and instinctive judge of painting and sculpture; if he had not been a king, he would have been a connoisseur. He was able to recognize the identity of an artist at first glance; this was known as a ‘knowledge of hands’. He knew where ‘gusto’, passion or taste, was to be found. He commissioned Rubens, Mytens, Inigo Jones and Van Dyck; by the end of his reign he had collected some 500 paintings and tapestries, among them nine Correggios, thirteen Raphaels and forty-five Titians. The Dutch once sent him five paintings to persuade him to resolve a dispute about herring fisheries; the city of Nuremberg gave him two Dürers. He also collected coins and medals; he enjoyed composing music. His love of order was everywhere apparent. When a collection of the busts of senators and emperors of ancient Rome reached Whitehall, he himself took pains to arrange them in chronological order.

A papal emissary to England recalled the occasion when the king, in the company of Inigo Jones, was informed that a consignment of paintings had arrived from the Vatican; he ‘rushed to see them, calling to him Jones … the very moment Jones saw the pictures he greatly approved of them, and in order to study them better threw off his coat, put on his eyeglasses, took a candle, and together with the king, began to examine them very closely, admiring them very much…’ The gift included works by Leonardo and Andrea del Sarto. This excitement reveals a sovereign very different from the conventional image of his coldness and reserve. Rubens was to say of Charles’s court that it was remarkable ‘not only for the splendour of the outward culture’ but for ‘the incredible quality of excellent pictures, statues and ancient inscriptions which are to be found in this court … I confess I have never seen anything in the world more rare.’

The authority of the king’s image was amplified by the evidence of his fertility. In the spring of 1630 Henrietta Maria presented him with a son and heir, also to be named Charles. She wrote to a friend in France that her child was ‘so serious in all that he does that I cannot help deeming him far wiser than myself’. The baby never clenched his fists, and so it was predicted that he would be a king of great liberality. He was also healthy and strong, looking at four months as if he were already a year old. So the birth augured well. The infant Charles was also the first in English history to be born as heir to the three kingdoms.

Thomas Carew, gentleman of the bedchamber, told the earl of Carlisle that the king and queen were ‘at such a degree of kindness as he would imagine him a wooer again and her gladder to receive his caresses than he to make them’. Charles wrote to his mother-in-law, Marie de’ Medici, that ‘the only dispute that now exists between us is that of conquering each other by affection’. More importantly, perhaps, the birth of a son seemed to indicate that the Stuart dynasty might continue until the crack of doom.

16

The shrimp

All seemed quiet. The appearance of calm may have been deceptive, but it was peaceful enough in comparison with the violent years yet to come. Edward Hyde, 1st earl of Clarendon, claimed in his History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England that during the personal rule of Charles ‘the like peace and plenty and universal tranquillity for ten years was never enjoyed by any nation’. Another historian, Sir Philip Warwick, in his Memoirs of the Reign of Charles I, wrote that ‘from the year 1628 unto the year 1638, I believe England was never master of a profounder peace, nor enjoyed more wealth, or had the power and form of godliness more visible in it’.

On 9 January 1631, Love’s Triumph, a masque devised by Inigo Jones and Ben Jonson, introduced Henrietta Maria as the Queen of Love in Callipolis or ‘the city of beauty and goodness’. When the scene dissolved the ‘prospect of the sea’ appeared, into which setting the king himself walked in the guise of Neptune with a train of sea-gods and Cupids. He was then apostrophized as ‘the centre of proportion, sweetness, grace!’ At the end of the performance ‘the throne disappears, in place of which there shooteth up a palm tree with an imperial crown on the top’.

In that same month, by royal command, a ‘book of orders’ was published. It decreed that two justices of the peace should meet each month in petty sessions to maintain the operations of local government. The overseers of the poor were to ensure that poor children were placed in apprenticeships; the constables and churchwardens of the parish were ordered to discipline offenders and to chase away vagrants. It was also the responsibility of the two justices to make certain that the roads were in a good state of repair and that, in general, law and order were imposed. They were also obliged to submit reports to London concerning ‘how they found the counties governed’.

Although the king himself may not have drawn up these provisions, they bear all the marks of his paternal authority and of his predilection for good order. Charles was also determined that the local gentry and nobility should play an active part in the government of their neighbourhoods; a proclamation was issued ordering any of them still dwelling in London to return to the countryside where they belonged. At a later date another royal declaration ordered that urban vintners should stop selling tobacco and that innkeepers should not dress or serve game birds; this was believed to be a device to make the city less attractive to the country gentry.

The servants of the Crown were going about their duties. At the beginning of March William Laud preached at Paul’s Cross in celebration of the sixth anniversary of the king’s accession. He remarked that ‘some are so waspishly set to sting that nothing can please their ears unless it sharpen their edge against authority’; he added, in sententious fashion, that ‘I hope I shall offend none by praying for the king’.

The king’s other great councillor, Sir Thomas Wentworth, had been dispatched to York as lord president of the north in order to curb disorder. At the beginning of 1632 he was further promoted to become lord deputy of Ireland, where his cause of promoting ‘good and quiet government’ could be tested. He was a man of strong will and of commanding temper. He believed implicitly in royal authority and in public duty. He told one of his relatives that ‘a life of toil and labour’ was his effective destiny. The portraits of him by Van Dyck show him to be profoundly animated by zeal or, perhaps, by vision.

Laud and Wentworth shared similar precepts and preoccupations that were embraced by them under the name of ‘Thorough’, by which they meant a disciplined and energetic response to the problems of the realm. They would not be diverted from their self-imposed task, and held nothing but contempt for those ministers of the state whom they regarded as lax, cowardly, or concerned only with enrichment. The administration of the king and his councillors – parliament was put to one side – should be enabled to push through those policies that were in the public interest. The vital alliance was that between Church and Crown in the cleansing of the kingdom.

The lord treasurer, the earl of Portland, was described by them as ‘Lady Mora’ or ‘Lady Delay’; Laud also described the chancellor of the exchequer, Lord Cottington, as ‘Lady Mora’s waiting maid’ who ‘would pace a little faster than her mistress did, but the steps would be as foul’. This represented the difference between complaisant councillors and committed reformers.

Wentworth, like Laud, believed that only royal sovereignty could bring order out of disorder and discipline out of anarchy. As lord deputy of Ireland, therefore, he was inclined to drive himself over any opposition, to consolidate the authority of the king, to lead the people – and in particular the recent English settlers – into the pastures of obedience and docility. He was intent upon recovering the powers of the king, as he said, by ‘a little violence and extraordinary means’. By his own light he succeeded, but only at the cost of arousing hostility and even hatred. He brought to his task a less than attractive combination of austerity and obstinacy. It was said, in A Collection of Anecdotes and Remarkable Characters, that ‘his sour and haughty temper’ meant that he expected ‘to have more observance paid to him than he was willing to pay to others’.

Laud was more practical than the inspired Wentworth. The bishop wrote to the lord deputy that ‘for the State, indeed my Lord, I am for thorough … and it is impossible for me to go thorough alone’. ‘Thorough’ and ‘through’, spelt in an identical way in the seventeenth century, were for all intents and purposes the same word. Laud added that ‘besides, private ends are such blocks in the public way, and lie so thick, that you may promise what you will, and I must perform what I can and no more’. Nevertheless Wentworth was relentless, describing himself at his subsequent trial as ‘ever desiring the best things, and never satisfied I had done enough, but did always desire to do better’.

In this period, too, the proclamations of the privy council were given legislative authority; the privy councillors could make laws on those matters which the actual courts of law neglected or avoided. The other governors of the realm maintained the emphasis upon law and order. It was reported in London by a news-writer, John Pory, that ‘on Sunday, in the afternoon and after supper, till midnight, my lord mayor visited as many taverns as he could, and gave warning to the vintners not to suffer any drinking in their houses, either that day or night; and the same afternoon also he passed Moorfields and put down the wrestling of the western with the northern men, which was there usual on that afternoon’. The Star Chamber also enjoyed new authority with its enforcement of the proclamations from the council and its pursuit of transgressors.

One of the most prominent of these public offenders, William Prynne, had already aroused controversy with his strongly puritan opinions. He wrote tracts and pamphlets endlessly, his servant bringing him a bread roll and pot of ale every three hours; he was known as a ‘paper-worm’. John Aubrey wrote that he ‘was of a strange saturnine complexion’, and Christopher Wren said that he had the countenance of a witch.

In the late autumn of 1632 Prynne’s Histriomastix: A Scourge of Stage Players launched a general assault upon the plays and players of London, with a particular attack upon the practice of boys playing female roles and of women themselves appearing on the stage. He wrote that the actresses were ‘notorious whores’ and asked if ‘any Christian woman be so more than whorishly impudent as to act, to speak publicly on a stage (perchance in man’s apparel and cut hair), in the presence of sundry men and women’.

Unfortunately for Prynne the queen, Henrietta Maria, took part in a theatrical pastoral entitled The Shepherds’ Paradise just a few weeks after the publication of his tract. The play itself was in the best possible taste. It was recorded of its audience that ‘my lord chamberlain saith that no chambermaid shall enter, unless she will sit cross-legged on the top of a bulk’. It was a serious affair, and was of such complexity that the production lasted for seven or eight hours.

Nevertheless Prynne’s attack upon female players was interpreted as an attack upon the queen herself; he had also denounced public dancing as a cause of shame and wickedness, and it was well known that the queen was fond of dancing. Prynne was sent to the Tower, where he faced prosecution by the Star Chamber and by the high commission on religious affairs. He was sentenced to imprisonment for life, fined £5,000 and expelled from Lincoln’s Inn where he had practised law. The severity of the judgment was enhanced by the brutal order that both of his ears should be cut off as he stood in a public pillory. The sentence was duly carried out. One of his ears was cut away at Westminster, and the other in Cheapside.

Another opponent of the court, Sir John Eliot, died in confinement at the end of 1632. The king’s enmity against him was such that, despite pleas for his health, he had never been allowed to leave the Tower in the course of his imprisonment. He had sent a petition to the king in which he declared that ‘by reason of the quality of the air I am fallen into a dangerous disease’; he also stated that ‘I am heartily sorry I have displeased your majesty’. The king replied that the petition was not humble enough. Eliot’s humiliation was continued after his death. His son petitioned the king to allow his father’s body to be carried into Cornwall for burial. Charles scrawled at the bottom of the petition, ‘Let Sir John Eliot’s body be buried in the church of that parish where he died.’ He was in other words to be interred in the Tower.

A sequence of letters between the members of the Barrington family, in the early months of 1632, gives the flavour of the time. Thomas Barrington, writing from Holborn, informs his mother that ‘women are cruel this year, Saturn reigns with strong influence: another wife has given her husband a potion of melted lead, but it was because he came home drunk’. His wife, Judith Barrington, wrote to her mother-in-law that ‘I find all my friends sick or dying, the air is so bad … Here is little news stirring, much expected at the latter end of this week … This day was the poor woman burned in Smithfield that poisoned her husband, which is wondered at the cruelty, since there was so much cause of mercy to her.’ A week or so later she reported that ‘the smallpox is so much here that we wish ourselves with you’. In May Thomas Barrington wrote that ‘the current of London runs so contrary and diverse courses as that we know not which way to fasten on certain truths’. London was the city of disease, of cruelty and of false reports.

In the spring of 1633 the king returned to his homeland. He made a leisurely journey northwards, and reached Edinburgh by the middle of June. His relations with Scotland in the past had not been entirely happy; at the beginning of his reign he had asked for the restitution of Church lands in Scotland to the Crown. The measure was not in the end advanced, but it stirred bad blood. When some Scottish lords came to defend the existing landowners, the king made a characteristic remark. ‘My lord,’ he said to the leader of the deputation, ‘it is better the subject suffer a little than all lie out of order.’ Charles himself did not seem especially to like the Scots and, in particular, the Highlanders, whom he described as ‘that race of people which in former times hath bred so many troubles’. Yet his principal feeling was one of indifference rather than hostility.

He was crowned as king of Scotland in Holyrood Abbey on 18 June, and it was remarked that he had been happy to wait eight years for the privilege. The delay showed no overriding desire to endear himself to his people. The coronation itself was marked of course by ritual and formal ceremony that did not impress the natives; for most Scots, brought up in the Presbyterian faith, it smacked of prelacy and popery.

One of the complaints advanced by the Scots concerned the introduction of English ritual into the service. Yet the chief proponent of that ritual was about to be raised to the highest see. When Bishop Laud came into the king’s presence for the first time after the journey to Scotland he was greeted with unfamiliar words. ‘My Lord’s Grace of Canterbury, you are very welcome.’ Charles had just heard of the death of George Abbot, the previous archbishop.

As bishop of London Laud had been the king’s principal religious adviser, but his authority had been ill-defined. Now as archbishop he became the source and spring of English religion, with an energy and purpose that the king himself lacked. Yet, at the beginning of his ministry, he was beset by anxiety. He wrote to Thomas Wentworth that ‘there is more expected from me than the craziness [infirmity] of these times will give me leave to do’. Nevertheless like Sisyphus he was ready to put his shoulder to the stone.

He was a man of quick temper, small in stature, inclined to irritability and impatient of contradiction. His harshness and rigour quickly made him enemies, particularly among the puritans whom he excoriated. He was known as ‘the shrimp’, ‘the little urchin’ and ‘the little meddling hocus-pocus’. The king’s fool, Archie, made a pun before a royal dinner. ‘Give great praise to God, and little laud to the Devil.’ Yet no one could question the new archbishop’s sincerity or personal honesty. One English diplomat, Sir Thomas Roe, told the queen of Bohemia that Laud was ‘very just, incorrupt … a rare counsellor for integrity’.

Thomas Carlyle described him as ‘a vehement, shrill voiced character confident in its own rectitude, as the narrowest character may the soonest be. A man not without affections, though bred as a college monk, with little room to develop them: of shrill, tremulous, partly feminine nature, capable of spasms, of most hysterical obstinacy, as female natures are.’ He was something between an Oxford don and a bureaucrat. A portrait of him by Van Dyck represents him as austere and quizzical. Not that he would have put much faith in the artist. He described his paintings as ‘vanity shadows’.

He was highly superstitious and kept a record of his uneasy dreams. He dreamed that he gave the king a drink in a silver cup; but Charles refused it, and called for a glass. He dreamed that the bishop of Lincoln jumped on a horse and rode away. On one night ‘I dreamed that I had the scurvy; and that forthwith all my teeth became loose. There was one in especial in my lower jaw, which I could scarcely keep in with my finger till I had called for help.’

Soon enough his influence was being felt. In October 1633 he and the king caused to be republished King James’s Declaration of Sports, which had granted a degree of entertainment and recreation on the Sabbath. The king’s ‘good people’ were not to be discouraged from dancing or archery, while the sports of leaping and vaulting were also permitted; ‘may-games, whit ale and morris dances, and the setting up of maypoles’ were perfectly acceptable to the authorities. It was almost like a return to the more picturesque religion of earlier centuries. For the Calvinists and the stricter sorts of Protestant, the Declaration of Sports was a poisoned document set to destroy true religion. Certainly it had unforeseen consequences. A seventeenth-century historian, Thomas Fuller, wrote that many of his contemporaries were ‘of opinion that this abuse of the Lord’s Day was a principal procurer of God’s anger, since poured out on this land, in a long and bloody civil war’. The vicar of Enmore in Somerset declared from the pulpit that ‘whatsoever the king is pleased to have done, the king of heaven commands us to keep the Sabbath’.

In the same period it was determined that the plain communion table should be moved from the middle of the church to the eastern end where it was to be railed off; it then more closely resembled the altars of the old faith. The priests now bowed towards it, and some of them employed the sign of the cross to bless it. William Prynne had already satirized the Eucharistic rite when the celebrant …