11
‘The English are for the most part little edified with the person or with the conduct of the king and declare openly enough that they were deceived in the opinion they were led to entertain of him.’
Christophe de Harlay, Comte de Beaumont, French ambassador to England from April
1603 to November 1605
Though James knew little of England’s laws and parliament, he was well equipped to grasp the elements of the struggle for power at Whitehall and the subtleties by which his predecessor had managed to maintain a fragile balance of forces around her council table. The enmity between Cecil and Raleigh, for example, was in any case certainly less noisy than the kind of knuckleduster fuming he had been forced to contend with in Scotland, and he had been kept closely informed of events by the letters of both Cecil and Henry Howard. Moreover, his opening moves on the broader front were wisely non-committal. On the one hand, he at once provisionally confirmed the existing council in office, while choosing to release Lord Southampton and Sir Henry Neville from the Tower, where they had been languishing in the aftermath of the Essex rebellion. As a further gesture towards healing old wounds and offering new beginnings, he also announced his intention of bringing up Essex’s heir in his own household – restored in blood and title, and reared in the companionship of Prince Henry. And those who had in any way supported his mother’s cause were to be brought back to favour and thus bound to the new dynasty alongside their former enemies.
In the meantime, the immediate shape of the new king’s government had been decided on 3 May at Theobalds when he stopped at the home of Sir Robert Cecil on the final leg of his journey from Edinburgh to London. It was there that he had withdrawn with Cecil to a ‘labyrinth-like garden, compact of bays, rosemary and the like’ for an hour’s intimate conversation to confirm the latter’s primacy and seal, in the process, the rather more disconcerting triumph of Henry Howard – soon to become Earl of Northampton – and his sailor nephew, Thomas, who was swiftly promoted to the earldom of Suffolk. Charles Howard, too, who had commanded the English fleet against the Spanish Armada as Lord Howard of Effingham, duly retained the office of Lord Steward of the Household under his new title of Earl of Nottingham. In James’s view, it would have been the ultimate folly to discard those very men who had so strikingly demonstrated their level-headed competence in securing his succession, and who appeared to embody so strikingly all that typified Elizabethan wisdom and prestige. It was only natural, too, that five of his loyal Scottish lieutenants – Lennox, Mar, Home, Elphinstone and Edward Bruce, Lord Kinloss – should join the reconstituted council, since the court at Edinburgh had effectively ceased to exist, though for Sir Walter Raleigh and his allies, against whom Cecil and Howard had been so successfully poisoning the king’s mind, there was to be no crumb of comfort. Indeed, on 15 April James dismissed Raleigh as captain of his Guard, without financial compensation, and ordered him to leave Durham House in the Strand, which had been provided by the former queen for his private use over twenty years.
Dark, saturnine and colossally proud, the 50-year-old Raleigh possessed a swagger that, in spite of his undoubted brilliance, could never endear him to one such as James, who regarded him purely as a reckless old pirate, opposed at any price to peace with Spain. To others he was a ‘Macchiavellian’ and an ‘atheist’, but if such terms bore no relation to his actual views, he was certainly no judge of character – and nowhere more so than in the case of the new king. To present James so early on with A Discourse Touching a War with Spain and of the Protecting of the Netherlands merely confirmed Elizabeth I’s conviction that her favourite was no statesman, and the king lost little time in attempting to put the upstart in his place. When Raleigh presented himself before James at Burghley House, for example, he was merely treated to the kind of clumsy putdown that was the king’s stock in trade. ‘Rawly, Rawly,’ James declared upon their meeting, ‘and rawly ha’e heard of thee, mon’. Before long, moreover, the former royal favourite had lost not only the captaincy of the royal guard but the governorship of Jersey, the lord wardenship of the Stanaries and his monopoly on the sale of sweet wines. All in all, it may well have been no more than Raleigh’s presumption merited, but it was far more than one such as he could be expected to settle for passively. And, surely enough, this particularly glittering star of a bygone Elizabethan age would neither forgive nor forget.
Yet the flipside of Raleigh’s eclipse was the triumph of an altogether more accomplished politician. ‘The evidence of a king,’ James himself observed, ‘is chiefly seen in the election of his officers’, and in Sir Robert Cecil, at least, he had acquitted himself most favourably, notwithstanding the fact that the two men had precious little in common. Wholly unlike his new master, the principal Secretary of State stood, in fact, for calculated dignity and restrained decorum. And though he would be able occasionally to share a recondite joke with the king, the rest of their relationship would be largely artificial as his grave and careful judgement was brought to bear upon even the lightest or most minute details. If James wished to tease him clumsily on his puny figure and address him as his ‘little beagle’, this was a small price to pay for maintaining the reality of power in his own hands, and he was usually more than capable of enduring the king’s badinage under an umbrella of urbanity and stoical self-assurance. For there was a gravity and air of civilisation about Cecil that placed even a long-serving king in awe of him – especially a King of Scotland whose provinciality was inclined to surface so frequently. Perhaps, indeed, the very banter that James directed Cecil’s way was itself a product of his own innate unease in the minister’s presence. Over time, however, the king’s awe and sense of debt would turn to frustration against the man who strove so doggedly to curb his impulsiveness and extravagance. Certainly, Cecil’s death in 1612 would be a source of considerable relief and emancipation for James – though for the time being that prospect seemed as distant as the notion that the king could somehow cope without him.
As Principal Secretary, Master of the Wards and later Lord Treasurer, the diminutive minister remained until his death the pivot around which the entire machinery of government revolved, controlling all foreign affairs, directing Parliament, and managing every aspect of finance. Within weeks of James’s accession, moreover, he had been created Lord Cecil of Essendon before becoming Viscount Cranborne in 1604 and Earl of Salisbury a year later. No living king, James openly acknowledged, ‘shall more confidently and constantly rely upon the advice of a councillor and trusty servant than I shall ever do upon yours’. ‘Before God,’ the king declared, ‘I count you the best servant that ever I had – albeit you be but a little beagle.’ Such high praise could not, it seems, be delivered by James without a final tweak at Cecil’s dignity. But the other key members of the council, which included the courtier earls of Shrewsbury and Worcester, the buccaneer-courtier Cumberland, Mountjoy, who returned from Ireland to become Earl of Devonshire, and the Earl of Northumberland, to whom the king gave credit for the good behaviour of the English Catholics, all accepted Cecil’s primacy without question. The same was true for the new Scottish additions and, more importantly still, the ubiquitous Howards, Henry and Thomas, who, along with Worcester, a devout but utterly loyal Catholic, soon formed an inner circle of four on the council with Cecil himself.
But in dominating all areas of government and attempting to bridle the king’s impulsiveness as best he could, the secretary would also stretch his physical resources to the limit by almost ceaseless work. As month after month of confusion and uncertainty followed the change in dynasty, Cecil would bemoan to his friend, Sir John Harington, the passing of the former queen. ‘I wish I waited now in her Presence Chamber,’ he wrote, ‘with ease at my food and rest in my bed. I am pushed from the shore of my comfort and know not where the winds of the court will bear me.’ ‘I know it bringeth little comfort on earth …’ he added, before appending his signature ‘in trouble, hurrying, feigning, suing and such-like matters’. It was small wonder, then, that Shrewsbury was soon warning Cecil that he would ‘blear out his eyes’ and ‘quite overthrow’ his body without some form of respite. For although the king’s letters to his principal secretary demonstrate his shrewdness and ability, as well as his capacity to grasp a situation readily and reach a swift decision, he was also disinclined to master details and prone to lapses of concentration – especially when his devotion to hunting and recreation took priority over all else. ‘He seems to have forgotten that he is a king,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador, ‘except in his kingly pursuit of stags, to which he is quite foolishly devoted.’
Certainly, James’s dislike of London, ‘that filthy town’, and Whitehall made it easy enough to abandon the seat of government at every opportunity – convenient or otherwise. Indeed, he would spend only about a third of the year in London, with predictable consequences. ‘This is the cause of indescribable ill-humour among the king’s subjects,’ wrote the Venetian Molin, ‘who in their needs and troubles find themselves cut off from their natural sovereign and forced to go before the council, which is full of rivalry and discord and frequently is guided more by personal interests than by justice and duty.’ By 1 December 1604, indeed, Molin was reporting that posters had been fixed up in various locations around the capital, complaining that the king attended to nothing but his pleasures and left all to his ministers. Nor were such accusations by any means entirely groundless. Within two months of his accession James had issued a proclamation against illegal hunting in the royal forests and, with not a little sophistry, was soon attempting to justify his frequent absences. ‘The king […] finds such felicity in that hunting life,’ wrote Chamberlain in January 1605, ‘that he hath written to the council that it is the only means to maintain his health (which being the health and welfare of us all) he desires them to undertake the charge and burden of affairs.’ In accordance with the king’s wishes, the Privy Council issued orders prohibiting anyone other than members of the royal family from hunting with hounds within four miles of London, and ambassadors were rarely received at Royston in the way they had formerly been at Falkland during Elizabeth’s time, since her successor did not like to be distracted while taking his leisure. ‘He hath erected a new office and made Sir Richard Wigmore marshall of the field, who is to take order that he be not attended by any but his own followers, nor interrupted and hindered in his sports, by strangers and idle lookers on,’ Chamberlain would report in 1609. And James’s neglect of government was not the only cause for concern, since Lord Treasurer Buckhurst was soon uneasy, predictably, about excessive allowances for the royal buckhounds.
There was, moreover, much about James’s actual hunting practice that made even contemporaries uneasy – his vindictive fury in pursuing and slaughtering the game, his dabbling in the dead animals’ blood once the kill had been made, his rage when the quarry escaped, his low company and bad manners at the chase. ‘Running hounds’, as the king called them, would bring down and kill the stag, after which the king would dismount, cut the stag’s throat and open its belly, thrusting his hands (and sometimes his feet) into the stag’s entrails and daubing the faces of his courtiers. This, however, was the least offensive aspect of James’s behaviour to local farmers and villagers who found themselves tormented by the indiscriminate rampaging of the king and his courtiers. ‘As one that honoureth and loveth his most excellent Majesty with all my heart,’ wrote the Archbishop of York to Cecil during December 1604, ‘I wish less wastening of the treasure of this realm, and more moderation in the lawful exercise of hunting, both that poor men’s corn be less spoiled, and other his Majesty’s subjects be more spared.’
But James’s delight in the ‘sporting’ destruction of animals was not an obsession he was willing to limit. Hawking, cockfighting, bull- and bear-baiting were all passions, and the bear-garden at Southwark, known as Paris Garden, which also housed lynxes and tigers, was owned by him personally. The Earl of Dorset, in fact, was ‘brought into great grace and favour with the king’, because of his love of cock-fighting. In addition, James kept cormorants to dive for fish and by 1605 had developed, according to Chamberlain, ‘a great humour of catching larks’. A lion-baiting pit was also constructed at the Tower, and on one occasion, accompanied by young Prince Henry and several lords, he ‘caused the lustiest lion to be separated from his mate, and put into the lion’s den, one dog alone, who presently flew to the face of the lion, but the lion suddenly shook him off and grasped fast by the neck, drawing the dog upstairs and downstairs’. This, however, was not the end of proceedings, since the king ‘now perceiving the lion greatly to exceed the dog in strength, but nothing in noble heart and courage, caused another dog to be put into the den, who proved as hot and lusty as his fellow and took the lion by his face’. And though this dog died, too, another one later recovered from its wounds, encouraging Prince Henry to order his servant Alleyne to look after the beast well, saying that since he had ‘fought with the king of beasts’, he ‘should never after fight with any inferior animal’.
Not all such staged encounters were so predictable, however, since lions, it emerged, were generally unwilling to fight for entertainment purposes. Indeed, after a bear had killed a child and James arranged for the offending creature to be baited by a lion, the result was an embarrassing anti-climax in which the king of beasts chose to withdraw from the encounter without so much as a bared tooth or exposed claw. Nor, for that matter, were all the king’s involvements with animals so violent. He was a keen patron of horse-racing, for instance, making it a royal sport after swift-footed Spanish horses had been thrown ashore on the coasts of Galloway at the time of the wreck of the Armada, and establishing several race tracks, the most important of which was located at Newmarket. He also appears to have indulged a particular fascination for more exotic creatures, including Indian antelope and a flying squirrel from Virginia, as well as two young crocodiles, which were presented to him by Captain Christopher Newport after his journey to Hispaniola. The Prince of Orange sent him a tiger, while the Duke of Savoy presented him with another, as well as a lioness and a lynx – all of which died in transit. In 1623, meanwhile, King Philip of Spain would give James five camels and an elephant. At first, the camels were left to graze in St James’s Park until stables were constructed for them at Theobalds, and though the elephant was for some reason kept from public view, its captivity was enlivened by a gallon of wine daily from September to April – a period during which its keepers considered it unable to drink water.
The chase, his ‘sport’, his curious pets, his love of country life were all, plainly, welcome distractions from the more tedious routines of everyday government. But even if the king’s frequent excursions really were good for his health and thus the health of his kingdom too, the burden imposed on others – and not only Cecil – was now considerable. ‘This tumultuary and uncertain attendance upon the king’s sports affords me little time to write,’ confided one official, while George Home, Earl of Dunbar, bemoaned the fact that he and his colleagues ‘are all become wild men wandering in a forest from the morning till the evening’. But it was the Earl of Worcester, perhaps, who best encapsulated the problem. ‘Since my departure from London,’ he noted, ‘I think I have not had two hours of twenty-four of rest but Sundays, for in the morning we are on horseback by eight and so continue in full career from the death of one hare to another until four at night; then for the most part we are five miles from home. By that time I find at my lodging sometimes one, most commonly two packets of letters, all of which must be answered before I sleep, for here is none of the council but myself, no, not a clerk of the council nor Privy Signet.’
Such packets of letters came down from the councillors in London daily and Salisbury sometimes sent messengers to talk with the king and report his wishes. But the dispatches from the capital might well be answered by any ranking official at hand, and it frequently fell to Sir Thomas Lake, who was in constant attendance upon James, to set down his master’s thoughts and instructions after snatched consultations in the limited time available. Most often the king could be found at one of three houses - Royston, which he bought in 1604, Theobalds, which he acquired from Cecil in 1604 in exchange for Hatfield, and Newmarket – all of which were linked to London by private roads that he maintained for the purpose. But the council’s business would often have to make its way to Thetford, Hinchingbrooke, Ware and Woking, too, rather than Windsor and Hampton Court, the two principal country palaces at the time of James’s accession. And the expense as well as the inconvenience mounted further through the duplication of stables, deer parks, offices and living quarters, as even local farmers began to complain increasingly about the excessive burden imposed by the king’s purveyors. When Jowler, one of James’s favourite hounds, was lost near Royston in 1604, it was returned next day with a letter round its neck. ‘Good Mr Jowler,’ it read, ‘we pray you speak to the king (for he hears you every day, and so doth he not us) that it will please his Majesty to go back to London, for else the country will be undone; all our provision is spent already and we are not able to entertain him longer.’
Meanwhile, the broader disruption caused by James’s inattention to state affairs during the short periods he spent at Whitehall may well be imagined. Still inclined to rush in the way that George Buchanan had noticed so many years earlier, he could often exasperate those who had his best interests at heart. In 1603, for instance, Wilbraham noted that when Cecil presented James with patents for eight barons and two earls, ‘the king signed them all at one time confusedly, not respecting who should have antiquity’. There were times, too, when haste could turn to outright flippancy – especially, it seems, when it came to the practice of dubbing knights, which, in his case, became such a common chore. On one occasion, Wilbraham tells us, he did not catch the long Celtic name of a Scot who was kneeling before him to receive his honour. ‘Prithee,’ James is said to have declared, ‘rise up and call thyself Sir What Thou Wilt.’
Predictably, too, there was great irregularity in James’s availability for more general business, with the result that suitors ‘swarmed about his Majesty at every back gate and privy door, to his great offence’. Indeed, it was precisely because of the first Stuart’s constant irritation at his loss of privacy, that Charles I soon decreed after his accession that suitors ‘must never approach him by indirect means, by back stairs or private doors leading to his apartments, nor by means of retainers or grooms of the chambers, as was done in the lifetime of his father’. Rather than taking steps to deal with the problem himself, however, James had merely railed against his predicament, so that by the end of the reign he was still bedevilled by the same problem that his own informality had done so much to spawn. ‘The king is not as her Majesty is,’ Thomas Fowler had written upon a visit to James while Queen Elizabeth was still alive, ‘any of his subjects being gentle or noble may speak his mind frankly to him’. And his inability to project a truly kingly aura now left all and sundry to pester him as they pleased. ‘The king is much disgusted with it,’ wrote a courtier in 1623, ‘but knows not how to help it.’ While he protested in private, moreover, he continued to think that no man was sincerely bound to him unless by a gift, which merely served to swell the throng – even confiding to Cecil on one occasion that he had been so prodigal in rewarding persons who had no claim upon him that he could not justly deny those who had.
And when Robert Cecil was not bailing his master out, he would continue to find himself bearing the tiresome burden of his master’s deprecating familiarity for his trouble. In the king’s own words, the tireless earl remained the little ‘beagle’ that ‘lies at home by the fire when all the good hounds are daily running on the fields’. On another occasion, James wished that ‘my little beagle had been stolen here in the likeness of a mouse, as he is not much bigger, to have been partaker of the sport which I had this day at hawking’. Even when weightier matters were involved, the tireless theme was maintained. In planning an embassy to France, for example, the king could not forego the opportunity to tell Cecil of his intention to dispatch a kennel of little beagles across the Channel and to ask him ‘if ye mind to be of that number’. Rarely did the secretary bridle at either his workload or his nickname, though he certainly regretted the latter in particular. ‘I see nothing that I can do,’ he complained to Sir Thomas Lake, ‘can procure me so much favour as to be sure one whole day what title I shall have. For from Essendon to Cranborne, from Salisbury to Beagle, from Beagle to Thom Derry, from Thom Derry to Parrot, which I hate most, I have been walked as I think by that I come to Theobalds I shall be called Tare or Sophie.’
Certainly, it is hard to escape the conclusion that there was a distinct element of unseemliness, if not outright spite, at the heart of much of James’s playfulness, which extended to other confidants as well as Cecil. In 1605, on the eve of a visit to Greenwich, the king issued an apparently friendly warning to his most trusted councillors. ‘If I find not at my coming to Greenwich,’ he declared, ‘that the big Chamberlain [Thomas Howard] have ordered well all my lodging, that the little saucy Constable [Cecil] have made the house sweet and built a cockpit, and that the fast-walking keeper of the park [Henry Howard] have the park in good order and the does all with fawn, although he has never been a good breeder himself, then I shall make the fat Chamberlain to puff, the little cankered beagle to whine, and the tall black and cat-faced keeper to glower.’ Elsewhere, James pretended to be suspicious of their relations with his wife. ‘I know Suffolk is married,’ he writes, ‘but for your part, master 10 [Cecil], who is wanton and wifeless, I cannot but be jealous of your greatness with my wife.’ As for Northampton, meanwhile, ‘who is so lately fallen into acquaintance with my wife … his part is foul in this, that never having taken a wife to himself in his youth, he cannot now be content with his grey hairs to forebear another man’s wife’.
There were times, of course, when James acknowledged his servants’ efforts. ‘My little beagle,’ he wrote on one occasion, ‘although I be now in my paradise of pleasure, yet will I not be forgetful of you and your fellows that are frying in the pains of purgatory in my service.’ ‘Your zeal and diligence are so great,’ he observed, ‘as I will cheer myself in your faithfulness and assure myself that God hath ordained to make me happy in sending me so good servants, and the beagle in special.’ But he was also quick to point out to the Archbishop of York that the absences so necessary for the maintenance of his health took up no more time than other kings spent upon feasting and visiting their whores. Besides which, such fair-weather praise as James sometimes deigned to offer his servants carried little substance when mixed with sneers and tantrums. ‘Ye sit at your ease and direct all,’ he would tell his ministers, while ‘the king’s own resolutions depend upon your posting dispatches, and when ye list, ye can (sitting on your bedsides) with one call or whistling in your fist make him to post night and day till he comes to your presence’. To such unthinking outbursts, the only sensible response was perhaps Cecil’s, who indulged his master by flattery, begging James to send him copies of his writings or telling him how a kind word from the royal pen had cured a recent illness.
The court, meanwhile, was soon increasing in lavishness and cost while degenerating rapidly in orderliness and tone. According to the Venetian ambassador, it was soon fashionable for even the lesser nobles and councillors to appear in public with forty or fifty horsemen and sometimes with 200 to 300, so that ‘the drain on private purses is enormous’. Vulgar ostentation became the order of the day, in fact, as great ladies sported ever more costly jewels at state functions and even the wives of ambitious civil servants would think it worthwhile to spend £50 a yard on the trimming of a dress. The value of presents became a subject for calculation and haggling too, it seems, for when de Beamont, the French ambassador, was recalled to his homeland in 1605, he complained bitterly that his parting present of plate weighed only 2,000 ounces. Quoting precedents and whingeing continually, he eventually received 500 ounces more. And when perquisites and commissions of this kind were the norm and even minor offices were for sale, the opportunities for corruption became legion – so much so that open peculation ran throughout the king’s own household and, much worse still, every department of state.
The newly prevailing atmosphere of expenditure for expenditure’s sake would, however, be epitomised most strikingly by the excesses of Sir James Hay who had arrived from Scotland with James at the time of the succession to be rapidly installed as a ‘prime favourite’ and gentleman of the bedchamber. A man of accommodating temper and good sense in most things, Hay was not without some diplomatic ability. But his extravagance and lavish expenditure, his costly entertainments and so-called ‘ante-suppers’ – at which banqueting tables were laden with splendid food that was then discarded without being consumed before the main, even more dazzling, dishes were brought in - became the theme of satirists and wonder of society, as his debts spiralled to more than £80,000. He left behind him, said the Earl of Clarendon, ‘the reputation of a very fine gentleman and a most accomplished courtier, and after having spent, in a very jovial life, above £400,000, which upon a strict computation he received from the Crown, he left not a house or acre of land to be remembered by’. He had, wrote Clarendon, ‘no bowels in the point of running in debt, or borrowing all he could’ and ‘was surely a man of the greatest expense in his person of any in the age he lived’.
Nevertheless, it was the personal extravagance of the king that fed as well as reflected this culture of brash display and conspicuous consumption. The number of gentlemen of the bedchamber, of gentlemen, ushers and grooms of the privy chamber and of the presence chamber, of carvers, cupbearers and sewers, of clerks of the closet and esquires of the body, of harbingers, yeomen, pages and messengers increased in line with the king’s desire to advertise his exalted status. The gentlemen of the privy chamber, for instance, rose in number from eighteen to forty-eight, each with a fee of £50 a year, and before long there were 200 gentlemen extraordinary. Wardrobe costs, on the other hand, which averaged approximately £9,500 per annum in the last four years of Elizabeth’s reign leapt to over £36,000 per annum in the first five years of James’s. According to the records of the treasurer of the chamber, meanwhile, the cost of court ceremonial rose from £14,000 under Elizabeth to £20,000 under her successor. No man, it was soon being said, ate at court without costing the king £60 a year, while even the charge for one of the seamstresses or laundresses that teemed around the court was estimated at £86. And both the king and his queen spent extraordinary sums on jewels: James expending some £92,000 in the first four years of his reign alone, while Anne would run up a bill of £40,000 over ten years with the jeweller George Heriot. Only one year into the new reign, therefore, a royal commission had been appointed in the vain hope of curtailing household expenses.
In particular, the king’s generosity to his favourites became a matter of widespread concern. ‘I hear,’ Chamberlain would write to Carleton in February 1607, at a time when all the City knew that money was low in the Exchequer, ‘the king hath undertaken the debts of the Lord Hay, the Viscount Haddington and the Earl of Montgomery to the value of four and forty thousand pounds, saying that he will this once set them free, and then let them shift for themselves. In the meantime his own debts are stalled to be paid the one half in May come two years, the residue in May following.’ Haddington was the same John Ramsay to whom James believed he owed his life on the day of Gowrie’s conspiracy and therefore, arguably, had a special claim upon the king’s generosity. But even in his case, let alone Hay’s and Montgomery’s, the merchants and tradesmen who had been left to wait over two years for money already long owing could well feel aggrieved – especially when James would go on, within twelve months, to mark Haddington’s marriage with even more largesse. For along with the gold cup in which the king had drunk her health, the bride was also given not only ‘a basin and ewer, two livery pots and three standing cups all very fair and massy, of silver and gilt’ but a joint annuity of £600 out of the Exchequer to enjoy with her husband. Five years later, in the midst of an even worse financial crisis, James would give the Countess of Somerset £10,000 worth of jewels as a wedding present. And by 1610, a little over £220,000 had been given away in hard cash, with pensions granted by the king amounting to a further £30,000 a year. In other words, presents accounted for more than a quarter of James’s total indebtedness, while annuities swallowed around 6 per cent of his yearly expenditure. The fact, moreover, that so many of his gifts had been lavished upon Scotsmen when the Scottish court itself had boasted only a ‘small, unkingly household’ merely added fuel to the fire.
For Englishmen, indeed, the transformation of the court into a hybrid entity, heavily and undesirably infested with barbaric foreigners, had become a cause of rancour and suspicion from the very moment of James’s succession. The king, of course, had appointed his countrymen to bedchamber posts, paid their debts and proceeded to surround himself with them, and though he did so for good reason from some perspectives, there was little appreciation in the kingdom at large of either his motives or his predicament. It was only natural, of course, that he should want his friends around him, in court and elsewhere, and his friends in the first instance were inevitably Scots. Much more importantly still, however, there was now only one royal court, where before there had been two. In such circumstances, a hybrid court, accommodating both Scots and English was inescapable. But the former were swiftly branded greedy and uncivilised thugs, and the king would not help the situation by declaring to his first Westminster Parliament that Scotland, unlike England, had never been conquered by any outsider.
A key issue, predictably, was access to the king which appeared initially to be dominated by the newcomers. ‘No Englishman, be his rank what it may, can enter the Presence Chamber without being summoned,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador in May 1603, ‘whereas the Scottish Lords have free entrée of the privy chamber.’ But the greatest resentment continued to spring from the general perception that the Scots had a virtual monopoly on the royal bounty. In the parliamentary debate on purveyance in 1606, one speaker would describe the treasury as ‘a royal cistern, wherein his Majesty’s largesse to the Scots caused a continual and remediless leak’. And such hostility was ongoing. ‘The Earl of Dunbar,’ wrote Sir Dudley Carleton in 1608, ‘is returned out of Scotland with a new legion of Scots worse than the former,’ while in 1610 their influence upon James was once again being blamed for the kingdom’s financial problems – this time in Parliament. ‘The court is the cause of all,’ declared Sir John Holles, ‘for by the reception of the other nation that head is too heavy for this small body of England … The Scottish monopolise his princely person, standing like mountains betwixt the beams of his grace and us.’
Even Cecil, for that matter, now found his operations complicated by the king’s involvement with his countrymen. ‘It fareth not with me now as it did in the queen’s time,’ he confided to Sir Henry Yelverton who had been forced to seek help from the Earl of Dunfermline and Dunbar after offending James, ‘… for then I could have done as great a matter as this without other help than myself; she heard but few, and of them I may say myself the chief; the king heareth many, yea, of all kinds.’ Nor would James’s attempts to amalgamate the Scottish and English upper classes by marriage always prove successful. When Sir John Kennedy did not get along with his wife, a daughter of Lord Chandos, she took up with Sir William Paddy, the king’s physician, and triggered an explosive response. ‘You have heard, I am sure,’ wrote Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain in 1609, ‘of a great danger Sir William Paddy lately escaped at Barn Elms, where the house was assaulted by Sir John Kennedy by night with a band of furious Scots, who besides their warlike weapons came furnished … with certain snippers and searing irons, purposing to have used him worse than a Jew, with much more ceremony than circumcision.’
As early as February 1604, James had made a desultory attempt to bar Scottish officials and noblemen from venturing south, on the grounds that the administration of Scotland would suffer by their flocking to London. In 1607, moreover, he went on to make an outright apology to Parliament for his excessive largesse to his countrymen. ‘My first three years were to me as a Christmas. I could not then be miserable,’ he pleaded. ‘Should I have been over-sparing to them, they might have thought that Joseph had forgotten his brethren.’ More significantly still, however, the hanging of Lord Sanquhar for the murder of an English fencing-master who had accidentally put out his eye finally convinced many that James was determined to be even-handed. And though hatred of the Scots did not diminish in the country as a whole, at court at least there was a gradual acceptance that, while Scots were a permanent fixture in office around the king, there was no unwritten Scottish monopoly as such. However obnoxious to English courtiers, the Scottish link had not, therefore, reached truly critical dimensions, and the arrival of the new king had at least brought one enticing consolation for any red-blooded man of his court: the emergence of a new gaiety and hedonism.
Now, indeed, that the restraining hands of Andrew Melville and his ilk had been removed, James could spread his wings in other ways, too, for whatever Whitgift, Bancroft and other leading members of the English episcopacy might think in private about their master’s lifestyle, they would never take to the pulpit to compare him with Jeroboam. Court festivities therefore became not only more numerous and extravagant but sometimes more disorderly as well. Of the more innocuous entertainments on offer, however, James particularly enjoyed the spectacle of the elaborate masques, which, with their hugely ornate floats, costumes and scenery, so delighted his wife. In the process, no expense was spared on these elaborate entertainments, which came to occupy a place of special symbolic significance at the Jacobean court. The Masque of Blackness, which Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones staged for the queen in January 1605 to celebrate the creation of Prince Charles as Duke of York cost more than £3,000, for example, and typified the new atmosphere. The court, wrote Arthur Wilson, whose history of James’s life and reign was published in 1653, became nothing less than ‘a continued masquerade, where the queen and her ladies, like so many sea-nymphs or Nereids, appeared often in various dresses to the ravishment of the beholders, the king himself being not a little delighted with such fluent elegancies as made the night more glorious than the day’. At times, it is true, he appeared mildly distracted and uninterested in proceedings, but, on the whole, wherever there was revelry, especially the kind which involved any hint of immodesty in females – in whom he remained more interested than is often suggested – James could be guaranteed to respond with elevated spirits.
The king’s attitude to women had never, in fact, been chivalrous or gentlemanly, and though the Scottish court had been an informal, masculine place where little attention was paid to etiquette in any case, there is much about his outlook that remains regrettable. Certainly, if his A Satire against Woemen is taken at face value, there seems little doubt that he regarded them as inherently flawed. ‘Dames of worthie fame,’ he believed, ‘are to be congratulated for triumphing over their evil natures, since women of all kinds were inherently vain, ambitious, greedy, and untruthful.’ And if his attitude did not actually worsen in England, it nevertheless seems to have provoked more of a reaction. ‘He piques himself,’ observed the French ambassador, de Beaumont, ‘on great contempt for women. They are obliged to kneel before him when they are presented, he exhorts them openly to virtue and scoffs with great levity at men who pay them honour. You may easily conceive that the English ladies do not spare him but hold him in abhorrence and tear him to pieces with their tongues, each according to her humour.’
Yet for all his faults, it was at feasts and banquets that James nevertheless came into his own, rarely missing the opportunity to address the revellers, embrace the gentlemen, kiss the ladies and raise his glass in numerous toasts. In Scotland, the Venetian ambassador observed, the king had ‘lived hardly like a private gentleman, let alone a sovereign, making many people sit down with him at table, waited on by rough servants who did not even remove their hats’. Now, however, he dined ‘in great pomp’ and entertained his guests with ‘extraordinary bravery’. His first Christmas in England, for example, was celebrated at Hampton Court where there were feasts in honour of the ambassadors from France, Spain and Poland, involving many plays and ‘dances with swords’ and a number of masques, in one of which the queen and eleven of her ladies appeared as goddesses bringing gifts to the king. The costumes in each masque, thought Roger Wilbraham, must have cost from £2–3,000, and the jewels £20,000, while those worn by the queen he judged to be worth £100,000. A year later, Sir Dudley Carleton, the courtier and future diplomat described the celebrations at Whitehall when the king’s favourite, the Earl of Montgomery, married Lady Susan Vere. ‘There was no small loss that night of chains and jewels and many great ladies were made shorter by the skirts,’ wrote Carleton. ‘There was gaming for high stakes, too, and another grand masque for which the queen and three other ladies were seated in a shell upon a great float carrying figures of sea-horses and other large fish ridden by Moors.’ The ‘night’s work’ was then concluded, we hear, with a banquet in the great chamber ‘which was so furiously assaulted that down went table and trusses before one bit was touched’.
But by far the most notorious example of overindulgence and debauchery came in the summer of 1606 with the visit of Christian IV of Denmark whose concept of happiness, like that of all his countrymen, began and ended, it seems, with the contents of a bottle. According to Sir John Harington, who provided a vivid description of what transpired for William Barlow, Dean of Chester, ‘the sports began each day in such manner as persuaded me of Mahomet’s paradise’. ‘We had women and indeed wine too of such plenty,’ he declared, ‘as would have established each sober beholder,’ adding that ‘the ladies abandon their sobriety and roll about in intoxication’. It was at the performance of the Masque of Solomon and Sheba, however, that the boundaries were well and truly crossed. Following a magnificent banquet at which both James and Christian and all their retinues had far too much to drink, things rapidly spiralled out of control. For the Queen of Sheba fell over the steps as she sought to offer the Danish king a present and deluged him in wine, cream jelly, cakes and spices. And when Christian, having been roughly cleaned up ‘with cloths and napkins’, then tried to dance with her, both fell down and had to be carried out and put to bed.
James, meanwhile, chose to sit through the rest of the spectacle as things went from bad to worse. Most of the other performers, Harington tells us, ‘went backward or fell down, wine did so occupy their upper chambers’, while those representing Hope and Faith fared worse still. Hope, it seems, ‘did essay to speak, but wine rendered her endeavours so feeble that she withdrew’, whereupon Faith, having been abandoned by her partner, ‘left the court in a staggering condition’. Nor, it seems, did the more sober efforts of Charity entirely rescue matters, for she returned to the two other virtues, only to find them ‘sick and spewing in the lower hall’. ‘After much lamentable utterance’, the young lady playing Victory was also ‘led away like a silly captive and laid to sleep in the outer steps of the ante-chamber’, while Peace, ‘much contrary to her semblance’, appears to have ‘rudely made war’ against those of her attendants who had attempted to prevent her getting ‘foremost to the king’. Using her olive branch, it seems, she ‘laid on the pates of those who did oppose her coming’.
Even allowing for Harington’s flare for a witty tale and recognising the fact that he owed James a grudge for patronising him insufferably, this was hardly the sort of evening to cause anything but scandal among sober City merchants and taxpayers and in such remote manor houses – of which there was no small number – who might boast a London correspondent to keep them in touch with the gossip of St Paul’s. The House of Commons, moreover, had only just voted the king the tidy sum of £400,000 and Harington is unlikely to have been the only man to point the obvious moral that Parliament ‘in good soothe’, had not stinted in providing the king ‘so seasonably with money’. Not only would such stories undermine Robert Cecil’s subsequent negotiations with MPs to rescue the king’s finances, they would also have a more pernicious broader and longer-term affect. For they marked the beginning of the rift between the Jacobean court and the country at large, which was to be James’s worst legacy to his descendants – a legacy which would arguably influence the entire character of politics throughout the century ahead.
And though the excesses witnessed in 1606 may not be considered typical, the junketing continued throughout the reign – with no expense spared. On 8 January 1608, for instance, John Chamberlain, described the kind of gambling session that became a commonplace of court life. ‘On Twelfth eve there was great golden play at court, no gamester admitted that brought not £300 at least,’ he wrote. ‘Montgomerie played the king’s money and won him £750, which he had for his labour.’ Five years later, the marriage of James’s daughter, Elizabeth, to Frederick V Count Palatine of the Rhine was a wonder of ceremonial magnificence even for that exceptionally extravagant age, costing £50,000 and almost bankrupting the Crown in the process. ‘This extreme cost and riches,’ remarked Chamberlain after describing what the princess wore at her wedding, ‘makes us all poor’. And the cost to the government was mirrored in the expenditure of those around the court as clothes became richer – and more revealing – and gentlemen competed in vain against Sir James Hay’s unimpeachable reputation as the great spender of his age. On Twelfth Night 1621, according to Chamberlain, the carefree Scotsman organised a feast for the entire court that employed 100 cooks over eight days in the creation of 1,600 dishes, costing over £3,300. It seemed likely, thought Chamberlain, that ‘this excessive spoil will make a dearth of the choicest dainties, when this one supper consumed twelve score pheasants, baked, boiled and roasted’. Nor should it be forgotten, of course, that Hay’s considerable fortune had come in the first place from the royal bounty – a fact, which made the largesse of a once-beggarly Scot all the more galling in some quarters.
This is not to say, of course, that the king’s own ‘generosity’ was without a wider political purpose. Cecil himself would observe in Parliament in 1610 that ‘for a king not to be bountiful were a fault’, and such generosity not only tied important men to his cause but coincided with and confirmed notions of the godlike nature of the king. Nor did the Jacobean court lack an altogether more refined aspect, just as one might expect with such a learned occupant of the throne. It was, for instance, a place at which literary activity in particular was heartily encouraged. The king ‘doth wondrously covet learned discourse’, wrote Thomas Howard to Harington, and while Jacobean censorship may well have been tighter than that of Elizabeth – as Ben Jonson discovered when he found himself in hot water for mocking Scotsmen in Eastward Ho! – it was hardly oppressive. Lancelot Andrewes, bishop and scholar, became a particular celebrity at James’s court, while Inigo Jones received rich patronage and John Donne was virtually coerced into the clerical career that eventually afforded him such distinction.
And though the king’s interest in serious drama was so limited that even the genius of Shakespeare appears to have largely bypassed him; he was nevertheless prepared to provide official encouragement when able. As early as 19 May 1603, for instance, letters patent were issued altering the name of ‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’ – the theatre troupe of William Shakespeare and Richard Burbage – to the ‘King’s Men’, and allowing them to perform ‘as well for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think it good to see them … within their now usual house called The Globe, as well as all other boroughs and towns within the kingdom’. In the case of music, moreover, James was prepared not only to offer encouragement but to foot the bill. In 1596 the musicians of the chapel royal had petitioned the old queen for an increase in their stipend and were rebuffed. But what they lacked under Elizabeth, they gained under James and duly received an increase in their annual income from £30 to £40. Ultimately, the number of musicians on the payroll would more than double under James, as did the cost of the musical establishment in general, from £3,000 to £7,000 per annum.
Yet if the arts would flourish in James’s time, the king’s role was always primarily confined to largely passive recognition of established facts. And while James might easily have made his court so much more of an asset to his rule in England, it is no mere coincidence, perhaps, that the traditional picture of the Jacobean court took root so tenaciously: an endless stream of expenditure on a limitless parade of worthless people; a kaleidoscope of drunken maids of honour and effeminate young men produced by a complacent absentee king relentlessly pursuing deer. Greed, conspicuous consumption and sexual misbehaviour were all familiar features of the Whitehall scene before 1603, of course, and it was not for nothing that moral decay became a prominent theme of Elizabethan as well as Jacobean verse. However, the public face that Henry VIII and Elizabeth succeeded in projecting concealed a great deal of the baser behaviour which permeated their world, in much the same way that their personal gravitas would compensate for their own broader deficiencies. And while they, through careful stage-management and personal charisma, came to represent an ideal, James, for his part, remained an uncomfortable travesty of those very qualities he sought so desperately to embody. He had, of course, been brought up a king of Scots and ultimately his character and qualities had played out well enough upon the Scottish stage. But more than a border divided Scotland from England as James would soon discover. Curiously, therefore, his greatest fault as ruler of England would lie not in his laziness, his prodigality, his political theories or his unworthy favourites, but in something altogether more intangible and all the more irremediable: his plain, straightforward and frequently glaring lack of majesty.