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‘I could wish from my heart that it would please God to make me one of the members of such a general Christian union in religion, as laying wilfulness aside on both hands, we might meet in the middest, which is the centre and perfection of all things.’
From James I’s address to his first English Parliament,
19 March 1604
By the time that James I entered London for the first time on 7 May 1603, amid teeming crowds and lofty expectations, there were already two actively disappointed groups in the country: the long-suffering Catholic community and the motley crew of ambitious men on the fringe of official life who found themselves excluded from office by the triumph of the Cecil–Howard administration in which the king had placed his faith. For the former, in particular, James had seemed to offer fresh hope. Pursuing his dream of healing Europe’s religious feuds, the new king had already resumed diplomatic relations with the papacy and drawn a careful distinction between those Catholics who accepted their duty of allegiance to the Crown and those that did not. To the loyal, at least, he was prepared to allow the free exercise of their religion in private, so long as they made no effort to increase their numbers. But even so eminently enlightened an approach to such an intractable problem was already inadequate, since in seeking Catholic support for his succession, James had encouraged still higher hopes that could now be neither satisfied nor extinguished. In 1599, the Scottish Jesuit, Robert Tempest, had boasted how he could produce evidence ‘in the king’s own hand’ that he was a Catholic, and the pope’s last informal communication to James before he left Scotland had been an inquiry whether Prince Henry might not be brought up in the faith of Rome. Penal laws and recusancy fines, or so it was widely believed, would soon be a thing of the past, while in Ireland, in particular, the old religion was making a new and strident show of confidence. ‘Jesuits, seminaries and friars now come abroad in open show,’ wrote one contemporary chronicler, ‘bringing forth old rotten stocks and stones of images.’
It was hardly surprising, therefore, that frustrated Catholics would soon be indulging the penchant for conspiracy and intrigue that had already led to a number of spectacular incidents during the reign of Elizabeth – though the first attempt at subversion during James’s rule would prove more farcical than threatening. Indeed, the so-called ‘Bye Plot’ revealed more about divisions within the Catholic priesthood between Jesuits on the one hand and ‘secular’ priests, who wished to remain loyal to the Crown, than about any mortal threat to the king. In fact, the plotters, led by the secular priest William Watson wished only for recusancy fines to be lifted and for Catholics to be accorded some posts in government – objectives which fell far short of the wishes of the leading English Jesuits, George Blackwell, John Gerard and Henry Garnet, who desired the complete restoration of the old religion and had only acquiesced in James’s succession in the first place, since the King of Spain was not at that moment prepared to support opposition with armed force. When Watson laid plans for a Scottish-style kidnapping, therefore, the Jesuit leadership readily betrayed the plot to the authorities, with the intention of striking a telling blow against those ‘loyal’ Catholics who might interfere with their own more radical intentions. The result was a would-be attempt to ‘take away the king and all his cubs’ on St John’s Day (24 June) 1603, which never materialised, and the subsequent execution of Watson and some of his confederates.
In the course of extinguishing this altogether pallid escapade, however, the government also exposed another, marginally more sinister conspiracy known as the Main Plot, which had apparently overlapped with Watson’s intended venture at various points. The motives in this case, insofar as they can be gauged at all, were predominantly political, as men who found themselves frustrated by the continuance in office of Cecil and his friends decided to act. Lord Cobham, Warden of the Cinque Ports, had already attempted to intercept James on his journey south in a vain attempt to forestall the triumph of the Cecil–Howard grouping, and now – with the aid of a number of disaffected individuals including Sir Griffin Markham, a Catholic who already had links with the Bye Plot, and Lord Grey of Wilton, a leading Puritan – he attempted to persuade Count d’Aremberg, the ambassador of the Spanish Netherlands, to finance the landing of a Spanish force in Britain. The intention was to murder the king and his advisers, and to place Lady Arbella Stuart on the throne, after which she would be married in accordance with the wishes of the Catholic rulers of Spain and Austria.
The daughter of James’s uncle, Lord Charles Stuart, Arbella had been left parentless early in life and was raised by her grandmother in the grandeur and seclusion of Hardwick Hall. She was a classical scholar whose learning was reputed to extend even to acquaintance with Hebrew and stood in high favour with the king. ‘Nature enforces me,’ James had written, ‘to love her as the creature living nearest kin to me, next to my own children.’ But, as a potential replacement for the king, she remained a painfully poor choice of candidate, for not only was she fundamentally loyal to his cause, she was also a Protestant. Under such circumstances, the Main Plot had no effect whatsoever other than to saddle its adherents with a clear-cut charge of treason. Almost incredibly, moreover, one of those implicated in this pro-Spanish daydream was none other than Sir Walter Raleigh whose career had been heroically anti-Spanish throughout the previous reign. Though despised by Cobham, who was the brother of Cecil’s long-dead wife, Raleigh was nevertheless Cobham’s cousin – and now would pay a heavy price for that connection.
Hitherto, only the personal favour of the former queen had kept Raleigh in office in the teeth of the enmity of the Cecils, both father and son. But the new king was known to favour peace with Spain, and two years earlier, Robert Cecil had informed James that Cobham, who was his own father-in-law, and Raleigh, ‘in their prodigal dissensions would not stick to confess daily how contrary it is to their nature to resolve to be under your sovereignty’. Deprived of the captaincy of the royal guard and excluded from court, Raleigh is quite likely, moreover, to have played into his enemies’ hands by bemoaning his mistreatment to Cobham, though the latter’s evidence against him was later retracted and only delivered in any case at a moment when he had completely broken down. At the same time, Raleigh’s passionate denials at his trial in the court room of Wolvesey Castle at Winchester in November 1603 continue to have a decided ring of truth about them.
The main charges were that he had conspired with Cobham ‘to deprive the king of his government and advance the Lady Arbella Stuart to the throne’, and set out to ‘bring in the Roman superstition, and to procure foreign enemies to invade the kingdom’ – all of which Raleigh vehemently and convincingly denied. But his protests were vain and his trial a carefully orchestrated sham, which proceeded with all the venom and virulence of a latter-day show trial. Prosecuted remorselessly by Sir Edward Coke, the great champion and exponent of the English Common Law, and denounced as ‘a monster’ and ‘the greatest Lucifer that ever lived’, Raleigh remained unwavering. ‘Oh barbarous! …’ he declared, ‘I was never any plotter with them against my country, I was never false to the Crown of England.’ But when he denounced his accusers as ‘hellish spiders’, Coke’s response encapsulated the obvious injustice of the proceedings. ‘Thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart,’ he retorted, ‘and thyself art a spider of hell. For thou confesses the king to be a most sweet and gracious prince, and yet thou hast conspired against him.’
The guilty verdict delivered by Lord Chief Justice Popham that inevitably followed convinced nobody and guaranteed, ironically, a wave of sympathy for Raleigh that would hardly have been forthcoming otherwise. Indeed, it remains questionable whether most of the others implicated in the Main Plot, including Cobham and Grey, also needed to have been treated in quite the way that they were. Characteristically, James dissected the moral niceties involved with an intensity that ultimately cut common sense – and common decency – to pieces. It was to Englishmen one of the most surprising things about their new ruler that, in his overwhelming urge to demonstrate both his intellect and zeal for justice, he would go to such tangled lengths to unravel the truth – and think out loud in doing so. In this case, predictably, he was torn between his duty to make an example of traitors and his urge to be merciful. ‘To execute Grey, who was a noble young spirited fellow,’ he reasoned, ‘and save Cobham, who was base and unworthy, were a matter of injustice.’ However, ‘to save Grey, who was of a proud insolent nature, and execute Cobham, who had showed great tokens of humility and repentance were as great a solecism.’ Crucially, however, even when James eventually opted for clemency, he did so in a manner that not only robbed the act of much of its virtue but demonstrated a degree of spite that sat ill with the principles of justice he claimed to personify. For Grey and Cobham, along with Sir Griffin Markham were each brought to the scaffold twice before their reprieve was finally read to them – a decision, in Cecil’s words, to which James had ‘made no soul living privy, the messenger excepted’.
In Raleigh’s case, meanwhile, the king’s callousness was altogether more pronounced. Raleigh remained, of course, an intolerably proud, quick-tempered and violent man of action whom his Elizabethan colleagues had found no more tolerable than James now did, and the policies of war and piracy he stood for were in any case precisely those that the king had made it his mission in life to reverse. But to commute his execution, which had been fixed for 13 December only to consign him subsequently to the Tower and leave him there for thirteen years with a suspended death sentence hanging over him was to show a meanness of spirit which even James’s own son found himself unable to condone. None but his father, Prince Henry was to say, would have found a cage for such a bird. And when peace with Spain quickly followed in August 1604, it fell as a further hammer blow to the prisoner who could now look forward, in his own words, only to the ‘bribeless judgement hall’ of Heaven, where Christ alone would be ‘the king’s attorney’.
If, however, the conclusion of hostilities with Spain represented the cruellest of cuts for Sir Walter Raleigh, it marked for James merely the first step in realising his most cherished vision of himself as a wise and benevolent mediator-king who, after uniting Scotland and England, would then bring peace to the warring nations of Europe and thereafter seal his illustrious place in history by reconciling that continent’s conflicting faiths. Now, after all, he was ruler of Europe’s most powerful Protestant state, strengthened by union with Scotland, and he enjoyed a number of advantages derived from his experience to date. His prestige was high, for instance, in Scandinavia and northern Germany, and he was also on good terms with the Catholic states opposed to Spain. To English friendship with France he could add the old tradition of Franco-Scottish alliance, and he had also cultivated Tuscany and Venice. But if he had maintained peace with foreign countries as ruler of Scotland, it was due in no small measure to the remoteness and insignificance of his kingdom. And if he had hitherto dabbled promiscuously across the religious divide with both Catholic and Protestant powers, he would not be able to do so with such impunity in England. Indeed, James’s hope from this point onwards that he could be both a champion of Protestantism and friend of Spain would prove not only a cardinal error but a classic demonstration of his belief that he could square circles by force of intellect and goodwill alone.
As early as 1590, in fact, James had sent ambassadors to the German princes to organise a joint threat of economic boycott to force Spain to come to terms. But until the Spanish had finally lost hope of conquering Ireland, and their rebellious Dutch provinces were capable of resistance without foreign aid, all hope of an end to fighting was vain. And these conditions were only to be fulfilled at the very end of Elizabeth’s life, leaving her successor, by sheer good luck, the chance to wield the olive branch successfully. One of James’s first actions as King of England, therefore, was to recall the letters of marque that had enabled English privateers to prey so greedily upon Spanish commerce under his predecessor, and to order the cessation of all hostilities with Spain on the grounds that since he, personally, had never been at war with that country, he could not become so by inheriting the English Crown. It was specious reasoning of precisely the kind that James specialised in when determined to achieve his own ends. But the Spaniards, too, were ready for peace, and by the end of September a Spanish ambassador, Don Juan de Tassis, was presenting his credentials at Winchester with a view to opening preliminary negotiations.
Since the war had reached a state of utter deadlock, the best that either side could now hope for was merely a cessation of hostilities, and there was little need for prolonged negotiation. Yet there were endless delays, largely on account of what Sir Henry Wotton called ‘Spanish gravity sake’ and it was not until August 1604 that the Constable of Castile finally crossed the Channel with full powers to sign what would become known as the Treaty of London. In the meantime, however, James’s previously friendly attitude to the Dutch now became lofty and condescending. Holding the so-called ‘Cautionary Towns’ of Flushing, Brille and Rammekens as security for the large sums of money advanced by Elizabeth, the king’s unfamiliar status as creditor seems to have gone to his head. He believed, said the Venetian ambassador, ‘that at a single nod of his the Dutch would yield him all the dominion that they had gained’, and he also talked foolishly of their revolt from Spain as though it were a crime. When told that Ostend might fall if English aid were withheld, his answer was characteristically insensitive. ‘What of it?’ he declared, ‘Was not Ostend originally the King of Spain’s and therefore now the Archduke’s?’ And when Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Land’s Advocate of Holland, was dispatched to plead the Dutch cause, he was unable to obtain audience with James until smuggled into a gallery where the king was about to walk.
James, it is true, stood his ground against the Spanish stalwartly, correctly judging that they were in greater need of peace than his own kingdom. But what is often construed as the one great triumph of James’s statesmanship was not a definitive solution to the long-standing tension between the two countries. Above all, Spain remained at war with the Dutch, and while Spain, unlike her rebellious enemy, was denied facilities to raise money and volunteers in England, suspicion and mistrust was bound to remain. Nor was the Treaty of London, signed at Somerset House, a source of unalloyed relief for Englishmen as a whole. For while the king resolutely refused to denounce the Dutch rebels outright, maintaining that while they and the Spanish continued to fight he ‘was resolved always to carry an even hand betwixt them both’, and Cecil successfully defended English trading rights with both sides, there remained a bitter taste for many who felt the treaty a betrayal not only of their valiant co-religionists but of their own great past. Indeed, fanned by invective from Puritan pulpits and darkening storm clouds in Germany where the Counter-Reformation was already stoking the fires of what would become the Thirty Years’ War, anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic feeling would continue, in spite of James’s usual good intentions, to remain a prominent feature of his English kingdom for the next twenty years.
Yet the king would not lightly forsake the selfsame good intentions in religion either, which now became the next arena for his mediating efforts. To the end of his life, in fact, James could never rid himself of the illusion that it was possible to ‘win all men’s hearts’ by reason, logic and purely intellectual persuasion. But when the truth was at issue he could only construe it as his to determine, and when resistance persisted, he could only perceive it as wilfulness. ‘It should become you,’ he would write to Archbishop Abbot some years later, when they had differed over a point of theology, ‘to have a kind of faith implicit in my judgement, as well in respect of some skill I have in divinity, as also that I hope no honest man doubts of the uprightness of my conscience; and the best thankfulness that you, that are so far my creature, can use towards me, is to reverence and follow my judgement, except where you may demonstrate unto me that I am mistaken or wrong-informed.’ Even archbishops, then, might expect to defer to the king in matters of religion and the same was true for Catholics, Calvinists and anyone else who found themselves at odds with his views. For it was one of many curious ironies that a ruler who saw himself as a mediator in all things was so rarely prepared to compromise on his own ideas.
Without doubt, the Church of England that greeted James upon his arrival in 1603 was an institution much to his taste. Moderate, placid, hierarchical and deferential, administered by upper clergy who, though sometimes worldly and arrogant, were learned scholars and able administrators, it was a far cry from the more notorious elements of the Kirk he had left behind in Scotland. Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury at the time of Elizabeth’s death, and Bancroft, the Bishop of London who replaced him in 1604, could not have contrasted more starkly with the likes of Andrew Melville and John Durie who had plagued him previously. And there were others, too, just as willing, it seemed, to underpin their ‘Anglicanism’ with ‘High Church’ principles and the so-called ‘Erastian’ conviction that the state should enjoy unqualified primacy in all ecclesiastical affairs. William Barlow, Dean of Chester, Thomas Bilson, the learned Bishop of Winchester, and John King, Bishop of London (whom James dubbed the king of preachers) were only some of the divines who now, often literally, surrounded the throne. In due course, too, he would find in George Abbot, the Master of University College, a man whose zest for the Early Fathers and mild Calvinism, tempered by careful study of St Augustine, exactly matched his own. But it was in the presence of Lancelot Andrewes especially that James’s raucous mirth was most respectfully suppressed. Dean of Westmister at the opening of the reign before being elevated successively to the bishoprics of Chester, Ely and Winchester, Andrewes possessed all the qualities guaranteed to endear him to the king, combining learning with wit, piety with adroitness, and austerity with the ready tongue of the courtier. And, as always, when James was won over he was won over unreservedly, speaking of Andrewes’ sermons as a voice from heaven and asking the bishop on one occasion whether his sermon notes might be laid at night beneath the royal pillow.
Yet if James revered his Anglican divines as men and scholars, it was the Church they represented that he valued above all. Episcopal in structure and Calvinist in doctrine, the Church of England represented, indeed, an ideal model from the king’s perspective, and in Richard Hooker, whose Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie was published in 1593, it had found, it seems, its ultimate apologist. For Hooker’s book treated the Church of Rome as merely one part of the visible Church – like those of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandra – and skilfully contended that the unreformed Church had fallen into error, becoming unsound in doctrine and corrupt in its behaviour. By contrast, Hooker argued, the Church of England had returned to original truths and godly practices, while retaining its apostolic links by virtue of its emergence from its Roman predecessor. Most important of all, however, Hooker was convinced like his king that state and society were so intimately and integrally connected that there could be no question of ecclesiastical independence from secular authority. So it was hardly surprising, perhaps, that according to Hooker’s biographer, Isaak Walton, James considered the Lawes such ‘a grave, comprehensive, clear manifestation of reason, and that backed with the authority of the Scriptures, the fathers and schoolmen, and with all law both sacred and civil’.
If James loved the Church of England quite literally as his own, however, it is altogether more doubtful whether he ever fully understood it. Addressing his first parliament in 1604, he distinguished three religious elements within his new kingdom. On the one hand, there was the religion ‘publicly allowed and by the law maintained’, as opposed to what were ‘falsely called Catholics, but truly papists’, whom in spite of the Bye and Main Plots, he still proposed to conciliate by toleration. The third group ‘lurking within the bowels of this nation’ was, he maintained, ‘a private sect’, consisting of ‘Puritans and Novelists, who do not so far differ from us in points of religion as in their confused form of polity and parity, being ever discontented with the present government and impatient to suffer any superiority, which maketh their sect unable to be suffered in any well governed commonwealth’. For James, these Puritans were a distinct and largely monolithic body, mirroring their radical counterparts north of the Border – men espousing a democratic theory of ecclesiastical government, and intent like their Scottish counterparts upon relegating him to the status of ‘God’s sillie vassal’.
But such a neat categorisation of what the king termed ‘Purinisme’ involved a considerable and costly oversimplification, which dogged his efforts to understand the religious status quo in England and swiftly dashed his attempts to foster unity. For in reality the very word ‘Puritan’ had gained currency as a catch-all term of derision, which obscured more than it enlightened and encompassed a wide spectrum of opinion ranging from those wishing to bring about minor modifications to the Church’s everyday practice to those outright ‘separatists’ who sought the complete ‘independency’ of each congregation from the stranglehold of state authority. Those who broadly accepted the Church of England, as constituted by Elizabeth I’s religious settlement, also varied considerably in matters of detail. Some desired a compromise with Presbyterianism which would combine a Council of Elders with the bishop in the administration of diocesan discipline. Others wanted the use of ceremonial and vestments to be left to the discretion of the incumbent in each parish, and there was debate, too, over the positioning of the altar. Some decried ‘Romish’ practices, such as bowing at the name of Jesus and there were objections in some cases to the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, to the ring in marriage, and the rite of confirmation.
For James, who found himself well satisfied with the Church of England’s existing rituals and practices, such matters were of little significance in their own right. Writing, for instance, upon the subject of clerical dress, he made it clear that division over such an issue merely ‘gives advantage and entry to the papists’. ‘No,’ he declared, ‘I am so far from being contentious in these things (which for my own part I ever esteemed as indifferent), as I do equally love and honour the learned and graved men of either of these opinions.’ But in downplaying the need for dispute, James was also determined to stress the need for obedience on the grounds that ‘in things indifferent, they are seditious which obey not the magistrate’. ‘There is no man half so dangerous,’ he contended, ‘as he that repugns against order.’ In emphasising the necessity of obedience over non-essentials, moreover, he also sowed further confusion in more significant areas by straddling conflicting positions, particularly over matters of doctrine, and balancing contending groups against each other. Above all, while Queen Elizabeth had sensibly discouraged religious debate, James not only leapt in head first, but consciously chose the deep end for doing so. This, after all, was a king who was never happier than when exchanging essays with Lancelot Andrewes or Hugo Grotius over the issue of final damnation, notwithstanding his condemnation of ‘vain, proud Puritans’, who believed that they ruled the Deity ‘upon their fingers’. And this, too, was a ruler who believed himself capable of determining at a stroke the precise worth of those ceremonies and rituals unsupported by Scriptural injunction – the key bone of contention between ‘Puritans’ and his own episcopacy.
By 1603, ironically, the clamour for a drastic revision of the Prayer Book and for the abolition of bishops in favour of some more democratic model of ecclesiastical government had largely died down. Furthermore, an overwhelming majority of Englishmen still acknowledged the mystical authority of the monarchy and accepted the inseparability of Church and State. All agreed that pluralism should be abolished and that a ‘preaching, Godly ministry’ must somehow be established. All agreed, too, that stipends must be increased. In 1585, Archbishop Whitgift had estimated that more than half the beneficed clergy of England had meagre incomes between £8 and £10 a year, while less than half could be licensed to preach for lack of university degrees. But by the end of Elizabeth’s reign little had changed, and it was no special surprise that when two of his ex-pupils went to see him at Drayton Beauchamp, even Lancelot Andrewes was found ‘tending his small allotment of sheep in a common field’ while reading the Odes of Horace. Had James confined his activities to remedying such ills, he might well have made genuine progress. Had he avoided the summits of theological debate and the pitfalls of dabbling so wilfully in ceremonial niceties, he might also have saved both himself and his kingdom a good deal of acrimony and frustration.
Yet keen intellect and high principles did not, in James’s case, always sit well with common sense and sound man management. Even as he was travelling down from Scotland for the first time, a selection of prominent Puritan clergy had respectfully presented him with the famous Millenary Petition – a skilfully drafted and studiously moderate document, wholly acceptable in terms of content to the majority of English bishops. The petitioners were not, they emphasised, factious men like the Presbyterians, nor schismatics like the so-called ‘Brownists’, but loyal subjects of the king, whose Christian judgement they now sought. They desired the discontinuance of the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, of the ring in marriage, and of the terms ‘priest’ and ‘absolution’. They requested, too, that the rite of confirmation be abolished, the wearing of the surplice made optional, and the employment of music in church moderated. The ministry, on the other hand, was to be recruited from more able and learned men, while non-residence and pluralism were to be ended, the ecclesiastical courts reformed, and the Sabbath more strictly observed. All in all, there was little, ostensibly, to offend or threaten, and the graciousness of James’s initial response was enough to warm Puritan hearts. The petition’s suggestion of a conference between Puritans and Anglicans accorded closely, moreover, with the king’s much-advertised love of intellectual inquiry and rational discourse.
What the king did not grasp, however, was that such a conference, whatever its outcome, would give Puritans a recognition they had never been granted by his predecessor and raise hopes that he could never realistically fulfil – hopes that were soon leading to disturbances of the peace in Suffolk. Equally importantly, the proposed conference represented a direct challenge to the Anglican bishops in whom James placed so much faith and who were soon launching a counter-offensive which would mould his conceptions of Puritanism for the rest of his reign. Oxford had answered the Millenary Petition by branding its authors seditious and identifying them with the Presbyterian ministers of Scotland that the king so loathed – men whose aim, it was said, was ‘the utter overthrow of the present church government and instead thereof the setting up of a presbytery in every parish’. In July, moreover, James held long and earnest conference with Bishop Bancroft, the self-avowed arch-enemy of Puritan innovation, at his palace in Fulham, with the result that by October a proclamation had been issued, prohibiting petitions concerning religion and asserting that the existing constitution and doctrine of the Church of England were agreeable to God’s Word and in conformity with the condition of primitive Christianity. All men, he told Whitgift subsequently, must ‘conform to that which we have by open declaration published’, while any clergyman employing unauthorised forms of service was to be punished severely.
Yet when Bishop Bilson urged James to abandon plans for the conference, the response was predictable. ‘Content yourself, my lord,’ the king informed him, ‘we know better than you what belongeth to these matters.’ And so it was that, as soon as the festivities of James’s first Christmas in England were over – while peace negotiations with Spain were still dragging on, and before he had even met his first parliament – a representative Puritan delegation from Oxford and Cambridge was commanded to meet a selection of bishops and clergy under his chairmanship at Hampton Court on 14 January 1604. Although now wrongly convinced of the nature of the Puritan ‘threat’, he remained equally convinced nevertheless that it could be banished once and for all by the cleansing effect of his superior intellect and solemn judgement. For it was clear to him, at least, that Puritan leaders like Dr John Rainolds, the President of Corpus Christi, Oxford, or John Knewstubs of St John’s College, Cambridge, would never be able to demonstrate that he was ‘mistaken or wrong informed’. ‘I did ever hold persecution as one of the infallible notes of a false Church,’ James had once told Cecil, adding that he would ‘never agree that any should die for error in faith’. And now he would have the chance to exercise his healing influence as what he himself described as a ‘good physician’ on a suitably imposing stage.
With a more accommodating and less outspoken approach on the king’s part the Hampton Court Conference might well have achieved much. Puritan demands were, after all, more moderate than they had been for the past twenty years and, most significantly of all, far more moderate than they would ever be again. Most of those protesting at this time were, it should be remembered, demonstrably the best educated, most zealous and conscientious of the parish clergy, the majority of whom had hitherto loyally accepted regulations of which they disapproved in the interests of Church unity as a whole. To have conciliated them, therefore, before they became irreparably embittered with the episcopacy was not only the obvious priority but a distinct possibility at this critical juncture. ‘Religion is the soul of a kingdom,’ James would assure his audience at the very outset of proceedings, ‘and unity, the life of religion.’ Yet it was no coincidence that the Puritan representatives were quite conspicuously excluded on the first day while the king addressed his bishops. And although his preliminary speech, which lasted some five hours, committed him to ‘examine and try’ complaints about the Church ‘and fully to remove the occasions thereof, if scandalous’, it also made clear that, unlike his predecessors, who ‘were fain to alter all things they found established’, he saw no reason ‘so much to alter and change anything as to confirm what he found well settled already’. The religious status quo was therefore to remain intact in all fundamentals, while the conference was to serve, it seems, as a show case for the king’s skill in divinity before a suitably submissive and amenable gathering of awestruck admirers who, when apprised of their errors, ‘must yield to him’.
With these priorities fixed in advance, it was clear, of course, that the four Puritan leaders, led by Dr Rainolds, who faced the nine Anglican divines, eight deans of the Church and lords of the Privy Council ranged against them were unlikely to enjoy a truly impartial hearing when admitted to the conference on the second day. And if eye-witness William Barlow’s account of proceedings, The Summe and Substance of the Conference, may well have exaggerated the abrasiveness of James’s attitude towards the Puritans, it remains hard nevertheless to deny that the king was inclined to lapse on occasion into the kind of sharp-tongued pedantry and dismissiveness that has so often been associated with him. The four Puritan leaders had been hand-picked, in fact, by the Privy Council and were far from being the ‘brainsick and heady preachers’ that the king both feared and despised. In addition, to Rainolds and Knewstubs, there was Laurence Chaderton, whom even Bancroft considered a good friend, and Thomas Spark, a comparatively innocuous lecturer in divinity at Oxford. Yet when all four entered the king’s presence on the second day, looking as if they wore ‘cloaks and nightcaps’, they would be facing an uphill struggle.
It was not without some justification, indeed, that Barlow referred to them as ‘plaintiffs’, and while Spark said little, Chaderton was ‘mute as any fish’. Knewstubs, it is true, condemned the use of the cross in worship, only to be roundly quashed by Lancelot Andrewes, and Rainolds, too, was given short shrift over infant baptism, the use of the ring in marriage rites and, above all, the use of the phrase ‘with my body I thee worship’ in the Anglican wedding ceremony. Nor could the king, knowing full well that Rainolds was a confirmed bachelor, resist a jarringly patronising jibe in response to his pronouncements on the union of men and women. ‘Many a man,’ said James, smiling at his hapless target, ‘speaks of Robin Hood who never shot his bow.’ ‘If you had a good wife yourself,’ he continued, ‘you would think all the honour and worship you could do for her well bestowed.’ And if the famous aphorism of ‘No bishop, no king’, with which James concluded the later discussion on the ordination of bishops, was from his point of view little more than an emphatic statement of undeniable fact, it remained nonetheless another case of the type of cudgel phraseology, which ill accorded with what was supposedly the avowed intention of the whole conference. Where James did offer genial agreement, moreover – on the need for producing a revised catechism, raising stipends, recovering lost Church revenues, providing a better ‘teaching ministry’, discouraging pluralism and enforcing proper observance of the Sabbath – he repeatedly undermined any resulting goodwill by spasmodic outbursts of needless condescension. ‘And surely,’ he declared at one point, ‘if these be the greatest matters you be grieved with, I need not have been troubled with such importunities and complaints as have been made unto me; some other more private course might have been taken for your satisfaction.’ Whereupon, we are told, ‘looking upon the lords, he shook his head smiling’.
It was not, however, until the subject of ecclesiastical discipline was raised that James’s swagger and volubility turned to outright anger and provocation. Until this point, at least, the king had made some effort to leaven his jibes with attempts to play the honest broker. When, for instance, Bishop Bancroft interrupted Rainolds on the grounds that ‘schismatics are not to be listened to against bishops’, he had been put firmly in his place on the grounds that there could be no ‘effectual issue of disputation, if each party be not suffered, without chopping, to speak at large’. Likewise, when Bancroft objected to the Puritan proposal for a new translation of the Bible, James appeared equally fair-minded. ‘If every man’s humour might be followed,’ the bishop had protested, ‘there would be no end of translating.’ To which the king replied that he had ‘never yet’ seen a Bible ‘well translated in English’, before urging the creation of what would become the ‘Authorised’ or ‘King James’ version, which has been justly characterised as the great glory of his reign. Yet the harmony of these exchanges was undermined all at once when Rainolds suggested to his cost that episcopal synods, ‘where the bishop with his presbytery should determine all such points as before could not be decided’, would be less obnoxious than the existing system of archdeacons’ courts.
The connotations of the very word ‘presbytery’, linked as it was so inextricably with the ecclesiastical polity of the Presbyterian Kirk of Scotland, made it intolerably offensive to James, and the use of it was, to say the least, ill-advised. But the innocence of Rainolds’ intention could not have been clearer from the broader content of his proposal, and what followed demonstrated all too aptly how the king was unable to bridle his emotions when delicate negotiation was involved. No less importantly, it proved conclusively that a hectoring tone, particularly when resulting from an apparently inexplicable misapprehension, was unlikely to win converts even to the most valid cause. At this point, according to Barlow at least, ‘his Majesty was somewhat stirred, yet, which is admirable in him, without passion or show thereof’. But Barlow had his eye on promotion and was shortly to be rewarded with the bishopric of Lincoln for his sympathetic account of the entire conference. The reality, therefore – as recorded in all the variously reported versions of James’s words – could not have been more starkly different.
Plainly mistaking Rainolds’ meaning, the king proceeded to tell him, in fact, how a ‘Scottish’ presbytery ‘as well agreeth with a monarchy as God and the Devil’. ‘Should such a body ever be permitted within the Church of England’, he continued, ‘then Jack and Tom and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council and all our proceedings … When I mean to live under a presbytery I will go into Scotland again, but while I am in England I will have bishops to govern the Church’. And then, it seems, as a final flourish he turned to his Puritan audience and declared stridently that ‘if this is all they have to say, I will make them conform themselves or I will harry them out of this land or else do worse’. So with all the insensitivity of a man utterly convinced of the transparency of his good intentions and correctness – as well as the unalloyed love of his subjects, which, he believed, entitled him to impunity even when making the most provocative statements – James demonstrated his failure to appreciate the fundamental principle that had underpinned his predecessor’s whole system of government in Church and State. This principle rested on a series of delicate balances which could work in practice only so long as they were never subjected to any harsh dialectic and definition – or undermined by injudicious and needless threats. On this occasion as on others, James would eventually moderate his position and behave in practice altogether more pragmatically when his irrational blaze of anger had burnt itself out. But such unedifying outbursts were inevitably costly, not only because of the anger they provoked in turn, but far more importantly because of their impact upon the credibility of James’s leadership and authority.
In this case, at least, the more damaging effects of the king’s indiscretion were by no means immediately apparent. Indeed, the conference closed on the following day in an atmosphere of outward goodwill, with the Anglican divines heaping praise upon James, in spite of their misgivings that any concessions had been granted at all, and the king himself convinced that, since ‘obedience and humility were the marks of honest and good men’, the Puritans would thereafter toe the line. Archbishop Whitgift, it seems, was convinced that ‘his Majesty spake by the special assistance of God’s spirit’, while Bancroft acknowledged ‘unto Almighty God the singular mercy we have received at His hands in giving us such a king as since Christ his time the like he thought had not been’. In the meantime, Rainolds and his counterparts concealed their undoubted frustration with a humble plea that their brethren ‘who were grave men and obedient unto the laws’ might simply be given some time to determine whether they would conform to the new and more rigid enforcement of the Prayer Book ceremonies and the Thirty-Nine Articles.
But the fact remained that the underlying tone of Elizabethan government, however authoritarian in practice, had been altogether less abrasive. Lord Burghley, for instance, had considered it his duty to lessen the impact of Whitgift’s ecclesiastical courts upon ‘poor ministers’ whom, he believed, were being made ‘subject to condemnation before they be taught their error’. James, however, was the controversialist, thirsting for wordy and sardonic victory. ‘The king,’ wrote Sir John Harington, ‘talked much Latin and disputed with Dr Rainolds at Hampton, but he rather used upbraidings than arguments’, adding that if, as his bishops claimed, he had spoken ‘by the power of inspiration’, then ‘I wist not what they meant, but the spirit was rather foul-mouthed’. And if Harington’s or any other account should be doubted, there remain of course James’s own comments to consider. ‘We have kept such a revel with the Puritans here these two days as we never heard the like,’ he informed the Earl of Northampton the day after the Hampton Court Conference closed. ‘They fled me so from argument to argument without ever answering me directly, ut est eorum mos, as I was forced at last to say unto them that if any of them had been in a college disputing with their scholars, if any of their disciples had answered them in that sort, they would have fetched him up in place of a reply, and so should the rod have plied upon the poor boy’s buttocks’. Thus, in the happy belief that he had ‘peppered them soundly’, James brought to an end the first part of his attempt to achieve a ‘general Christian union in religion’.
James’s indiscretions were capable, in fact, of wounding even his own avowed allies. The bishops, for instance, were less likely to have been assured of the divinity of the king’s words when, not long after the Hampton Court Conference, he told Parliament that the Devil, sparing neither labour nor pains, was a busy bishop. But his sympathies remained unwavering. Only one month after the conference, moreover, Whitgift died and Bancroft was duly installed as Archbishop of Canterbury. And though the new archbishop’s anti-Puritan sympathies have sometimes been exaggerated, he would nevertheless quietly choose to forget most of James’s agreed concessions, as would the vast majority of his episcopal colleagues. Nor was the king’s subsequent attention to his intended reforms ever sufficient to persuade Bancroft to do otherwise. Even if it was true, therefore, that only ninety of the Church of England’s 9,000 incumbents eventually resigned in response to the Canons of 1604, this was mainly due to the fact that, in spite of their underlying hostility to reform, many bishops nevertheless proved reluctant to force so many of their best clergy into taking the ultimate step of defiance. ‘The bishops themselves,’ wrote Chamberlain, ‘are loath to proceed too rigorously in casting out and depriving so many well reputed of for life and learning.’ ‘Only the king,’ he added significantly, ‘is constant to have all come to conformity,’ while even an outspoken high churchman like James Montagu, Bishop of Bath and Wells and later Winchester, urged that recalcitrant ministers should be called to account gradually ‘rather than all without difference be cut down at once’ on the grounds that those who lost their places would gain more from pity than they would from their piety.
Yet, in spite of his detestation of Puritanism, James’s good intentions for the Church as a whole were often evident. ‘I have daily more and more cause to hate and abhor all that sect, enemies to all kings,’ he informed Cecil in November after he had been presented with a Puritan petition while hunting near Royston. On the broader front, however he resented criticism of the Church in whatever form it came, supporting the ecclesiastical courts in their struggle with the courts of common law and defending his bishops when they came under fire from Parliament. Nor was he prepared to deepen ecclesiastical poverty by cynical alienations of property, and though simony was rife at court, he resisted it in clerical appointments. Indeed, he rejected with scorn a cynical scheme to reassess the evaluation of benefices in order to obtain large sums in first fruits, and on the other hand supported church leaders in their highly unpopular efforts to obtain enhanced revenues from tithes. In 1608, moreover, he was struck by the disgraceful condition of St Paul’s Cathedral, and though he offered no money himself, nevertheless encouraged the Bishop of London to finance repairs.
James’s appointments to the episcopacy were not, it is true, always judicious. Certainly, large numbers of royal chaplains who, like Robert Abbot, had won the king’s favour for no especially compelling reason found themselves promoted. ‘Abbot,’ James informed this particular beneficiary of royal goodwill, ‘I have had much to do to make thee a bishop; but I know no reason for it, unless it were because thou hast written a book against a popish prelate.’ When, moreover, Lancelot Andrewes was passed over as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1611, amid general astonishment, the king explained his decision in terms that can only be described as eccentric. The successful candidate, George Abbot, a university man who had little experience of ecclesiastical administration, was told by the king that his appointment did not spring from his learning, wisdom or sincerity (though the king did not doubt that he possessed these qualities) but out of respect for the recently deceased Earl of Dunbar, who had recommended him. Yet, in other respects, James’s ecclesiastical record was not without its merits. In this particular case, for instance, Abbot’s appointment was undoubtedly less provocative to Puritan opinion than the elevation of Andrewes might have been and appears to have represented an incipient willingness on James’s part to send signals of compromise. Much more important by far, however, was the ringing success of the publication of the ‘Authorised Version’ of the Bible, for which the king must be accorded all due praise.
If, as James himself acknowledged, the Hampton Court Conference had been intended ‘to cast a sop into Cerberus’s mouth that he bark no more’, the upshot had clearly been less than wholly satisfactory. In 1610, indeed, the Commons’ Petition on Religion, presented by the Puritan gentry in Parliament, plainly demonstrated the discontent of significant sections of the laity, and grumbling would only begin to abate at last with Bancroft’s replacement in 1611. But John Rainold’s proposal for a new English Bible on the conference’s second day, which appeared at the time as an almost casual interjection, not only captured the king’s imagination but brought out the best in him and, in doing so, prompted what was arguably one of his most significant achievements. Together with Bancroft and Cecil, he would engage the finest of Greek and Hebrew scholars to produce ‘one uniform translation … ratified by royal authority’, which, if successful, was to represent both the lynchpin and crowning glory of James’s quest for religious unity. Equally importantly, it would affirm in the process his own exalted conception of kingship, since the Geneva Bible, which was the version used by the majority of his common subjects, contained anti-monarchical margin notes which were, in his view, ‘very partial, untrue, seditious and savouring too much of dangerous conceits’. If it could be superseded, along with the existing official Bible of the Church of England, the so-called ‘Bishops’ Bible’, the slate could at last be wiped clean of contention and misapprehension. ‘You will scarcely conceive how earnest his Majesty is to have this work begun,’ Bancroft informed a colleague in June 1604 – and, as events would demonstrate, he did not exaggerate.
Bancroft himself had, of course, objected vehemently when a new translation was first mooted, only to change his tune completely upon realising the extent of the king’s commitment. At Hampton Court, moreover, James’s passion for sketching programmes and drafting directives had borne immediate fruit. The translation, he decided, should be made by the most learned linguists at Oxford and Cambridge, and thereafter reviewed by the bishops and other learned churchmen before being presented to the Privy Council and then ‘authorised’ ultimately by royal consent. Such, meanwhile, was Bancroft’s sudden enthusiasm for the project that he was appointed general co-ordinator of the process of translation and by March, on the king’s initiative, had asked Lancelot Andrewes to be one of the regional supervisors for three translation teams – the two others being Edward Lively and John Harding, both professors of Hebrew at the two universities. Fifty-four translators in all, each working separately within six groups would eventually confer with their group members before submitting their final translation to the scrutiny of the other groups. Ultimately, six men, two selected from each group, would review the work as a whole in London, after which Bishop Bilson and Miles Smith would give a last revision to the completed text.
Significantly, the translators were selected primarily for their linguistic expertise rather than their religious views, and while one Puritan, Hugh Broughton, was excluded for his radical opinions, Dr John Rainolds, who had been buffeted by the king at Hampton Court Conference, was nevertheless invited to contribute. James too, it seems, contributed directly by undertaking the translation of the Psalms in conjunction with Sir William Alexander, his friend and literary crony, who would nevertheless complain of the difficulty of working with the king, since ‘he prefers his own to all else’. By the time of his death James had completed about thirty; at which point, as Bishop Williams remarked, he was called to sing psalms with the angels. Similarly, while James commanded that the Bishops’ Bible be followed as far as possible, with words like ‘church’ retained in preference to ‘congregation’, he was responsible for making sure that the new version should be readily comprehensible even to the most humble of his subjects. The language of the Bishops’ Bible had, after all, been not only inaccurate at times, but overly literal and in consequence lumpy, dense and difficult to navigate. Ecclesiastes 1:11, which was eventually rendered ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters’ in the King James Bible had, for instance, been presented in the earlier version as ‘Lay thy bread upon wet faces’. Ultimately, indeed, although the Bishops’ Bible was to be treated at the outset as what might be termed the ‘default’ version and left untouched if adequate, it would comprise only 8 per cent of the final Authorised Version.
To James’s considerable credit, then, the bible which eventually saw the light of day in 1611 was, without any real question, the most significant and successful that had been produced to date. And though it was essentially a patchwork quilt, incorporating the finest elements of former translations, it would stand the test of time for good reason, since, as James seems to have appreciated, Jacobean culture was a culture of the word, and above all a listening culture, which gave the book both its clarity and poetic force. The bible was intended, after all, to be ‘read in churches’, and it was no coincidence therefore that the king had demanded that the words be ‘set forth gorgeously’. Nor was it any coincidence that one of the last steps of the translation process was a ‘hearing’. The result was a grand harmony, stateliness and splendour that in spite of its nature as a committee product and notwithstanding its high Anglican tone, largely superseded factional or sectarian divides. As such, the King James Bible was in many respects the embodiment of the highest and noblest of all his religious aims: the reconciliation of contending parties under the benevolent guidance of a wise, all-knowing and all-governing king.
It was not without some irony, therefore, that James remained in many respects more tolerant of English Roman Catholics than their Puritan counterparts. He harboured, it is true, a deep suspicion of Catholic priests and an outright abhorrence and terror of Jesuits, but he distinguished sharply between them and the Catholic laity. Indeed, before he left Scotland he had told Salisbury that he intended to seek a golden mean in dealing with English Catholics, on the one hand preventing them from rebellion and increasing their numbers until they were ‘able to practise their old principles upon us’, but asking at the same time for no more than outward conformity to the law by attendance at Church of England services. Even after the Main and Bye Plots, therefore, the Catholics were relieved of recusancy fines, though these had been collected in May 1603, primarily because the king was already stretched for money. The ideal of Christian unity was still, after all, far from dead at this time, and if Pope Clement VIII might somehow be persuaded to summon an ecumenical council of the kind that was still considered possible in some quarters, there remained hope that a middle ground could be established, so long as the Holy Father renounced temporal sovereignty and the political subversion of the Jesuits.
Certainly, James’s own words speak eloquently enough of his intentions. ‘We have always wished,’ he wrote, ‘that some good course might be taken by a general council, lawfully called, whereby it might once for all be made manifest which is the doctrine of antiquity nearest succeeding to the primitive Church.’ He was, moreover, a declared ‘Catholic’ Christian, a member of the Ancient, Catholic and Apostolic Church, as constituted in the first five centuries of its existence. If, therefore, the papacy could be persuaded to purge itself of the unbiblical accretions that had emerged since that time, James was willing to accord Rome a high place in any newly united Church that might then arise. ‘I would with all my heart,’ he declared, ‘give my consent that the Bishop of Rome should have the first seat. And for his temporal principality over the seignory of Rome, I do not quarrel it either. Let him in God’s name be Primus Episcopus inter omnes Episcopos, and Princeps Episcoporum, so it be no otherwise but as Peter was Princeps Apostolarum.’ James’s only other requirement was that the pope should ‘quit his godhead and usurping over kings’. ‘I acknowledge,’ he added for good measure, ‘the Roman Church to be our mother church.’
It was typically dizzy oratory, fuelled in part by the kind of undiscriminating adulation which James was always unable to resist. ‘We have a Constantine among us,’ trilled George Marcelline, ‘capable to preside as the other did in the Nicene assemblies, the presence of whom is able to dispose of differences, to soften the sharpest, to restore and place peace and concord among all good fathers, and to make them happily to finish such a design.’ But Pope Clement was thinking along entirely different lines and by 1605 his hopes of James’s conversion had reached their short-lived peak. Though he wished English Catholics to remain quiescent, he took few practical steps to lessen the threat from plots, and the queen’s decision to urge a Catholic marriage for Prince Henry, coupled to her efforts to obtain office for her co-religionists, only served to undermine James’s efforts further. Employing Sir Anthony Standen, the English ambassador in Italy, as her private agent in Rome, the queen also wrote to the Spanish infanta, imploring her to send two friars to Jerusalem to pray for herself and her husband. And by the time that James began to claw back the situation, the inevitable Protestant reaction had already outstripped him. Imprisoning Standen when he brought back sacred objects from the pope and commanding Anne’s chamberlain, Lord Sidney, to exercise great care in the selection of her household would do little to quell the indignation of even moderate Anglicans that he himself had provoked by his attempts at reconciliation.
‘It is hardly credible in what jollity they now live,’ wrote one contemporary English Protestant of his Catholic counterparts. ‘They make no question to obtain at least a toleration if not an alteration of religion, in hope whereof many who before did dutifully frequent the Church are of late become recusants.’ Cecil, too, expressed concerns about the king’s excessive clemency, which alienated the Anglican clergy and resulted in Catholic priests openly plying their trade in the country at large. And predictably there were the obvious comparisons drawn between the leniency extended to papists and the harsh treatment of Puritans. Indeed, even the Archbishop of York, Matthew Hutton, made this very point, while adding how Catholics ‘have grown mightily in number, favour and influence’. Plainly, then, the king’s irenic impulses found little sympathy with his councillors and bishops when it came to the Church of Rome. Nor did they impress his judges who continued to enforce the anti-Catholic laws wherever they could, for England as a whole, with its long tradition of hostility to the pope, was not ready for the toleration he proposed. On the contrary, the immediate results proved that the deep anti-Catholic prejudices of Englishmen, however irrational from some perspectives, were a sounder basis for policy than the theoretically high-minded sentiments of the king.
The revelation of the real numbers of Catholics in the country when they were allowed to disappear without penalty from the back benches of their Anglican parish churches, and the large numbers now attending Mass, startled even James. Previously, the returns which had been collected from every diocese of those who officially stayed away from church had led the government to estimate the total number of Catholics at about 8,500. When toleration allowed them into the open, however, it seemed that the papal claim to more than 100,000 was nearer to the mark – something which James believed, quite wrongly, could only be explained by widespread, rapid conversion resulting from his own policy of toleration. And it was increasingly clear, too, that while the majority of English Catholics were both loyal and peaceable, their leaders were inclined to think otherwise. The Jesuit Robert Persons, whom Sir Henry Wotton characterised with good reason as ‘malicious and virulent’, retained a place at the heart of papal policy in England and remained committed to the forcible restoration of Catholicism, even, if the need arose, at the price of assassinating a heretic ruler. Indeed, plans were already in hand for the imposition of censorship and the installation of an English Inquisition, which made nonsense of James’s hopes that wounds could be healed and deals done.
Ironically, then, the admirable intentions of the ‘British Solomon’ were soon being replaced by growing irritation and impatience with those whom he sought to assist but could not help as a result of their own ignorance and fractiousness. Upon ascending the throne, he had suspended recusancy fines, allowed Catholics to worship in private as they pleased and turned a blind eye to the influx of Catholic priests. Now, however, only nine months after this first reversal of policy, a second was to occur. And at a meeting of the council in February 1605, he found himself venting his spleen against both Puritans and Catholics. As to the latter, he declared, he was so far from favouring their superstitious religion that if he thought his son would tolerate them after his death, he would wish him buried before his eyes. The only answer now, it seemed, was a restoration of the old Elizabethan measures and a rigorous execution of the laws against ‘both the said extremes’. A proclamation duly ordered all Jesuits and priests to quit the country, and several were hanged in February, albeit without direct instructions from the government. Indeed, when the king learned of the hangings in Devon, he explicitly ordered that no executions should be carried out merely on grounds of religion.
From James’s perspective, however, his first moves in favour of toleration had been foiled both wilfully and ungratefully by those who lacked his wisdom and vision, and the saboteurs would now have to reap the consequences. The fact that he had played with fire and, in doing so, exacerbated an already delicate situation seems to have escaped him – though, having excited Catholic expectations, the king too would now have a price to pay. For if Puritans wrote petitions when frustrated, there were those among the Catholic community who would express their discontent altogether more forcefully when no longer fed a diet of fair promises.