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‘We came out of Scotland with an unsullied reputation and without any grudge in the people’s hearts but for want of us. Wherein we have misbehaved ourself here we know not, nor we can never yet learn … To be short, this Lower House by their behaviour have periled and annoyed our health, wounded our reputation, emboldened all ill-natured people, encroached upon many of our privileges and plagued our purse with their delays.’
James I’s complaint to his Privy Council,
7 December 1610
‘Their Parliaments hold but three days, their statutes are but three lines.’ So wrote Sir Anthony Weldon, that most caustic critic of the Scots, who on this occasion as on others both simplified and distorted broader realities north of the Border. The irony, however, was that Weldon’s dismissive perception of the Scottish Parliament or ‘Estates’ as a submissive and ineffectual institution was propagated most effectively of all by the very King of Scotland who had now come to occupy the English throne. Some while before he headed for London, indeed, James VI, as he then was, had portrayed the Scottish Estates as little more than the chief court of the king and his vassals, and it was this institution - displaying, he suggested, no rash desires for liberty or innovation – that James I subsequently presented to his English subjects as the ideal parliamentary model. By 1603 his terminology had changed slightly, for he was now calling Parliament ‘nothing else but the king’s great council’. Yet his thinking was very largely unaltered. Parliament was assembled, or so he suggested, for the exclusive purpose of ratifying laws and punishing notorious offenders. And in holding up the Scottish Estates as an example to Westminster, he consciously chose to expound its operation in a way that suggested total subservience to the whim of the monarch. No member of that body, James told English MPs when the first parliament of the new reign assembled in March 1604, was allowed to speak without his chancellor’s explicit permission, and any proposed new laws were automatically submitted to the monarch’s scrutiny some twenty days beforehand, whereupon ‘if there be anything that I dislike, they raise it out before’.
Yet the Scottish Estates had a long and often proud record of independent activity, which plainly contradicted the more obvious caricatures and suggested an altogether more subtle relationship with the monarchy than James saw fit to depict. Its origins dated back, in fact, to at least 1286 with the first use of the term ‘the community of the realm’, although William the Lion was recorded as having held a full parliament over a century earlier. Moreover, the notion that Scottish history was subsequently marred by a malign combination of supine parliaments, arbitrary rule and self-interested and remote noblemen is a simplification and misrepresentation firmly founded in Enlightenment historiography. By the early fourteenth century, the attendance of knights and freeholders had already become important, and from 1326 burgh commissioners also attended. Consisting of the three ‘estates’ of clerics, lay tenants-in-chief and burgh commissioners sitting in a single chamber, the Scottish Parliament thereafter acquired significant powers over particular issues. Most obviously it was needed to sanction taxation, and although taxes were raised only irregularly in Scotland during the medieval period, it also had a strong influence over justice, foreign policy and the conduct of war, as well as enacting a wide range of legislation on political, ecclesiastical, social and economic matters.
In reality, then, the underlying rationale of Scottish government had always been collaborative and inclusive, with the king-in-parliament at its apex, held in place by subtle checks and balances in a manner that seemed rare within a contemporary European context. Furthermore, this whole system actually reached its apogee in the 1590s under none other than James VI himself, which, in light of his modernising aspirations in other areas, was not as surprising as hindsight might appear to suggest. It was he, after all, who had encouraged the mapping of his country, the revamping of its weights and measures and the listing of its landowners and their estates by the Privy Council. And it was he, ironically, who appeared for so much of his reign to accept the theory and practice of the ‘community of the realm’ so readily. Indeed, whenever James convened the Estates, its physical layout could not have represented more tangibly the whole nature of the Scottish polity, with the king enthroned at the centre, the lesser barons and lairds in front of him, the nobility, barons and their guests, all appropriately ranked on his left, and, to his right, the burgh and shire commissioners, alongside the clergy.
Ultimately, moreover, the king could avoid calling Scotland’s Parliament only if he had no need of money, was making no constitutional or religious changes, had no treaties to approve, no embassies to send or receive, no marriage to negotiate, no high-ranking miscreant to punish, and no need to finance or plan military expeditions. And though in the latter years of James IV, for instance, Parliament met rarely after the king had the comfort of a Tudor dowry, most monarchs in this relatively unwealthy country usually required both money and the parliaments to provide it. The Estates existed, in fact, precisely because Scottish monarchs were not absolute, and the very term ‘community of the realm’ implied not only that the realm was distinct from the ruler, but that Parliament was the guardian of the status of the kingdom and its people. By the end of the fifteenth century, it was accepted, indeed, that Parliament could directly restrain tyrannical monarchs, and by the time John Mair wrote his Historia Majoris Britanniae in 1521, he was able to assert that it could even frame laws of its own that were binding upon the monarch.
The question arises, therefore, just how far James’s increasingly authoritarian views in the years directly before 1603 were actually encouraged by his impending succession to the English throne. Ironically, during the last decade or so before he became King of England, the Scottish Estates had enjoyed possibly its most effective period, undertaking in the 1590s its busiest and most wide-ranging legislative programme. Indeed, petitions to it had become so numerous that a vetting committee was proposed in 1594, though this did not prevent the overall explosion of law-making during the same period, as legislation poured forth on a broad spectrum of topics from consanguinity and divorce, through to property protection, legal guardianship, and the education of nobles abroad. Yet by 1600, James had nevertheless published The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron in which he clearly appeared to be advocating a move towards what can only be construed as some form of absolute monarchy.
There was no denying, of course, that the parliaments of the 1590s had been fractious, or that the king’s imprisonment by a religious mob during a meeting of the Privy Council in Edinburgh’s Tolbooth in 1596 prompted a desire on his part to redefine the theoretical authority of the monarch, as evidenced by his literary output thereafter. But it is equally likely that his transfer to London further stimulated his budding absolutism, for there was no developed notion of the monarch as primus inter pares south of the Border, where the nobles in particular were effectively on their knees before their ruler. More importantly still, there appeared no shortage of cash when compared to Scotland, permitting the king to indulge his absolutist fantasies in a way that could never have been possible otherwise. And when full account is taken of the recalcitrance of many MPs at Westminster under his predecessor, it becomes clearer than ever, perhaps, why James unwisely decided to assume the constitutional offensive in his new realm.
To all outward appearances, of course, England’s Parliament had been growing steadily in status throughout the sixteenth century, and the reign of Elizabeth, above all, had certainly witnessed a number of spectacular incidents in which Crown and Parliament clashed over a variety of issues including free speech, her marriage, the succession and, of course, James’s own mother, Mary Queen of Scots. In 1597, indeed, Elizabeth had been forced to accept that although she had formerly been ‘exceeding unwilling and opposite’ to all manner of innovations in ecclesiastical matters, there was now no choice but to give ‘leave and liberty to the House of Commons to treat thereof’. More strikingly still, in 1601 there had been a vigorous and successful attack on her grants of trading monopolies, in the course of which one MP had dared to raise the whole issue of the balance between the authority of Parliament and the royal prerogative itself. ‘To what purpose is it to do anything by Act of Parliament,’ declared Francis Moore, ‘when the queen will undo the same by her prerogative.’ And by the time of the opening of her last Parliament, it was even being noticed that fewer voices than ever were being raised in the customary cry of ‘God save your Majesty’ as she passed among members.
James’s task in managing his new English Parliament was therefore sure to be a delicate one. But in overestimating the scale of potential opposition and opting to assert his authority more vocally than his predecessor, he would actually instigate the kind of response that he had feared in the first place. In reality, the free speech debates of 1566, 1576 and 1571, the rancour over the queen’s marriage and the succession, as well as the struggle over Mary Queen of Scots were actually far from typical, and insofar as real Crown–Parliament conflict occurred at all, it happened only once – over monopolies. On those occasions, moreover, when sections of the House of Commons had pressed a case against Elizabeth, the Crown was almost invariably victorious. In spite of religious controversy and attempts to establish a full-blown Presbyterian system in 1587, for example, the Elizabethan religious settlement stood fully intact in 1603, while the earlier free speech debates achieved nothing. Overall, indeed, harmony and co-operation had been the predominant feature of Parliament’s relationship with Elizabeth, as no less than twelve out of a total of thirteen parliamentary sessions readily granted supply to the queen. Even more importantly, there had been little intrinsic interest in the general nature of the constitutional balance between monarch and subject until James himself raised it in arguably the most provocative manner possible. For although James’s practice would frequently prove rather more subtle and accommodating than his rhetoric, his outspokenness on the question of his prerogative was almost invariably as jarring as it was unnecessary.
The catalogue of the king’s indiscretions is, in fact, almost limitless. ‘Hold no Parliament’, he had informed his son in Basilikon Doron, ‘but for necessity of new laws, which would be but seldom’, and to force home the point he added later that any man desiring a new law should come to Parliament with a halter round his neck, so that if the law proved unacceptable he could be hanged forthwith. Fortified by Bancroft’s flatteries in the wake of the Hampton Court Conference and secure in the knowledge of his own success in Scotland, he would also blandly inform his first Westminster Parliament of ‘the blessings which God hath in my person bestowed upon you all’, while in exalting his own status, he necessarily appeared to minimise Parliament’s own. ‘The state of monarchy,’ James would tell the House of Commons, ‘is the supremest thing upon earth. For kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God Himself they are called gods.’ Like God ‘they make and unmake their subjects’, he continued, having the power ‘to exalt low things and abase high things and make of their subjects like men at chess, a pawn to take a bishop or a knight, for to emperors or kings their subjects’ bodies and goods are due for their defence or maintenance’.
In truth, of course, such sentiments were neither new nor inherently offensive in their own right, and there is little doubt that many of James’s more provocative utterances were delivered with all sincerity at times when he genuinely considered the royal prerogative to be under unjust threat from innovating MPs. But in spite of good intentions and a genuine wish to act in his subjects’ best interests as a benevolent and paternal ruler, there remains little doubt that James’s policy of employing attack as the best form of defence was often counter-productive. Above all, he simply talked too much. His predecessor’s appearances in Parliament had, by contrast, been rare, judiciously timed and invariably regal in tone and execution. Confining herself to brief statements of policy at the start of a session, and the occasional rebuke or engaging appeal, which were all part of her armoury of ‘love-tricks’, Elizabeth I was able to obtain most of what she wanted without sacrificing those essential principles on which she knew she must stand firm. But she very rarely delivered substantial orations, such as that of 1601 in which she brilliantly covered her retreat over the issue of monopolies, while James, by contrast, was temperamentally unable, it seems, to curb his desire for publicity: to declaim at great length and in minute detail not only upon immediate policy but upon far-reaching philosophical issues encompassing Church and State. The result, in the opinion of one MP, was ‘long oration that did inherit but wind’. Much more damagingly still, however, was discussion of matters best left alone and an extremity of expression in the heat of debate that led MPs, in turn, to deliver increasingly strident affirmations of their own rights and grievances.
Any successor to Elizabeth faced, then, an especially testing time, precisely because she had circumvented so much by saying so little. But if James inherited a challenging hand, there remains little doubt that he might have played it more skilfully at times, particularly with regard to matters of everyday procedure. During the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, it was Robert Cecil who had managed the government’s business in Parliament and he would continue to do so in the new reign, notwithstanding his promotion to the peerage. Yet the minister found himself increasingly frustrated not only by the king’s meddling but by his tantrums, complaints and frequently misguided instructions. Royal messages, interruptions to debates and attempts by the monarch to dictate their course, which had been infrequent and weighty occurrences in the previous reign, now, in fact, became routine and an increasing disruption to royal business. Later, indeed, there would be outright complaints concerning the ‘many intervenient messages’ issuing from the throne that culminated in 1621 with a formal attempt to ‘move the king that there be not so many interpositions’.
Likewise, James’s passion for definitions often provoked dangerous counter-definitions from MPs, while his inability to resist poring over abstract technicalities at every opportunity could have only one outcome in an institution packed with common lawyers. And though these same lawyers continued almost without exception to reverence the lolling, ungainly figure in front of them, with his heavily padded clothes and thick Scottish accent, his general lack of majesty and charisma did nothing to enhance his cause or make his pedantry any more tolerable. Nor, for that matter, did his favouritism, his extravagance and his apparent inconsistency when it came to hard work. For any ruler so inclined to assert his own God-given authority as the Lord’s Anointed could only hope for a truly amenable audience, if he seemed more obviously to personify it in his everyday habits and demeanour.
All in all, then, it was only inevitable, perhaps, that James found himself opposed in Parliament. Much more surprising, however, and much less forgivable was his bewilderment at this and his subsequent exasperation, which frequently manifested itself in either self-pity or pique. In 1604 he assured the Commons of his belief that their intentions were not seditious, before informing them nevertheless that they were rash, over-inquisitive and apparently distrustful. ‘In my government bypast in Scotland, where I ruled among men not of the best temper,’ he declared, ‘I was heard not only as a king but, suppose I say it, as a counsellor.’ Here, however, there was ‘nothing but curiosity from morning to evening to find fault with my propositions’. All things, James concluded, were now ‘suspected’, and his bitterness and sense of hurt were even more intense six years later when he once again professed himself ‘sorry of our ill fortune in this country’, where his ‘fame and actions’ had been ‘tossed like tennis balls’ and ‘all that spite and malice might do to disgrace and infame us hath been used’. Since he was a pious king, the father of his people and so manifestly willing to take such pains in redressing wrongs, the implication was clear. Only ill-intentioned men, bent upon perilous innovation could air ‘grievances’ against his government, established institutions such as the Court of High Commission, and above all the royal prerogative. And in taking such a firm stand against change of any kind, all appeals for alteration of existing practice became subsumed in James’s mind under the same pernicious heading. ‘All novelties are dangerous,’ he asserted in 1610, ‘and therefore I would be loath to be quarrelled in my ancient rights and possessions, for that were to judge me unworthy of that which my predecessors left me.’ The fact that the Commons would ask for the same things over and over only convinced James further of their ill will.
But it was the new king’s careless intervention in a matter he did not fully understand that prompted the first serious squabble in the reign, and one that would set the tone for a good deal of what was to follow. In a not altogether unprecedented attempt to influence the course of the forthcoming elections for the Parliament of March 1604, a proclamation had been issued to encourage sheriffs and electors ‘to avoid the choice of any persons either noted for their superstitious blindness or for their turbulent humours other ways’. This attempt to categorise Catholics and Puritans as ‘disorderly and unquiet spirits’ and exclude them from election was not, however, the main bone of contention. Instead, it was the stipulation that election returns be made, not direct to the House of Commons, but to the Court of Chancery – a blatant reversal of the Elizabethan practice by which the House was the sole judge of cases involving disputed elections. In reality, the Crown’s legal advisers were merely attempting to recover an item of Chancery’s lost jurisdiction. Yet it was the sort of point on which MPs had already learned to be peculiarly sensitive, and the kind of issue, moreover, that required no direct intervention from the king, since, as the Commons respectfully indicated at the outset, it was ‘an unusual controversy between courts about their pre-eminences and privileges’ and therefore best treated as a matter ‘between the Court of Chancery and our Court’.
When, however, the Commons seized upon a disputed election in Buckinghamshire involving a certain Sir Francis Goodwin, who had been chosen in preference to Sir John Fortescue, a councillor enjoying the backing of the government, the king swiftly plunged into the fray, treating the matter in effect as a test case for the status of royal proclamations as a whole. Chancery had, in fact, excluded Goodwin on grounds of outlawry, only to find after two days of debate that its decision had been nullified by the Commons, and this was enough, it seems, to provoke the full weight of royal displeasure. Informing MPs that their privileges depended on his goodwill, James also compared their complaints to the murmurings of the people of Israel and ordered them ‘as an absolute king’ to consult the judges on the legality of their proceedings. And though the response, according to Sir Henry Yelverton, the Attorney General, was merely ‘amazement and silence’, there remained little doubt that the king had overreacted. ‘The prince’s command is like a thunderbolt,’ declared Yelverton, ‘his command upon our allegiance like the roaring of a lion. To his command there is no contradiction.’
There followed three weeks of deadlock, as the Commons reinforced their case with a selection of curious precedents, including one case of 1581 in which an election, voided on the grounds that the candidate had died, had eventually been declared valid by the House when the supposedly defunct MP finally appeared to claim his seat. The debate, it is true, was conducted respectfully and with its fair share of honeyed words. Sir Francis Bacon, representing the Commons at the conference called to resolve the matter, remarked, for instance, that he found James’s voice the voice of God in man, and confirmed that his colleagues were ready to reconsider their position, something they had not done for any previous ruler. James, meanwhile, played his part in smoothing the waters by declaring that he would allow free rein to his kindly nature and decline to press his prerogative against his subjects’ privileges. Yet it was only on 13 April that the Goodwin case was finally settled by a compromise of sorts which entailed the annulment of all previous proceedings and the calling of a fresh election. And when, thereafter, the House swiftly proceeded to decide two further cases without reference to either himself or Chancery, James was left with little choice other than to avoid unnecessary acrimony, as he should have done in the first place, since he had now not only lost but visibly lost.
There was little doubt, of course, that Parliament’s intransigence reflected a sensitivity and assertiveness that, from the king’s perspective, only served to justify his own dogmatism. Nor was it entirely his fault that a minor dispute with the warden of the Fleet Prison was subsequently dragged out by MPs for three weeks on the grounds that their ‘privileges were so shaken before and so extremely vilified’. Certainly, if he had been better advised in January when the offending proclamation that had sparked the Goodwin dispute was first issued, the whole question of parliamentary privilege might never have exploded in the first place. But James had not only chosen the wrong battlefield, he had also failed in advance to prepare the chosen ground sufficiently carefully. For, while Elizabeth had achieved much of her success by cultivating the closest links between her Privy Council and Parliament, and by carefully managing parliamentary debates, the new king found himself personally defending his government’s policy in a way that his predecessor would only deign to do in a position of crisis. And this situation, too, was the result of decisions whose consequences he had failed to foresee.
Above all, James had seriously weakened his influence in the House of Commons by the removal of key figures. His promotion of Robert Cecil to the earldom of Salisbury, for example, meant that Cecil could no longer exercise the same direct influence in the Commons that he had previously done, and the same applied to Sir Thomas Egerton, another wise and experienced supporter of the Crown, who became Lord Ellesmere at the start of the new reign. Indeed, in 1604 only two privy councillors, Sir John Herbert and Sir John Stanhope, were on hand in the Commons, though neither possessed much influence. Herbert, the Second Secretary of State was widely known, indeed, as ‘Mr Secondary Herbert’, and the existence of a significant body of support for the Crown in the shape of individuals like Sir Roger Aston, Sir Richard Levison and Sir Edward Hoby, not to mention the cadets of great courtly families such as the Howards and Sackvilles, would not make good the deficiency. For not only had the presence of talented councillors allowed Elizabeth to exert influence upon the Commons, it had also enabled her to gauge their mood. Herbert, however, had not even risen on the first day of the recent session to ask for the customary subsidy, and in the vacuum that this left, it was hardly surprising, perhaps, that MPs would ultimately find their own leaders and organise their business independently.
By the end of the session, in fact, an alarmed committee of the Commons had put together a document known as ‘The Form of Apology and Satisfaction to be Presented to His Majesty’, which amounted, in spite of its self-consciously respectful tone, to a bold lecture to a foreign king upon the constitution of his new country. Laden with cumbersome statements of love and loyalty, and never actually presented to the king because it was never accepted by the Commons as a whole, the ‘Apology’ nonetheless represents an interesting insight into at least one significant element of parliamentary opinion. Certainly, everything James had said in the previous session and every implication of the language he had used was seized upon, while each of the claims he had advanced was opposed by counter claims which, in the main, were every bit as sweeping, provocative and unhistorical as his own. Not only was the king told that he had been misinformed on several important points but he also heard how these ‘misinformations’ had been ‘the chief and almost the sole cause of all the discontentful and troublous proceedings so much blamed in this Parliament’. Above all, it was suggested, James had threatened the Commons’ privileges, as a result of which ‘the liberties and stability of the whole kingdom’ had been ‘more seriously and dangerously impugned than ever (as we suppose) since the beginnings of Parliament’.
This, then, was strong stuff. Yet the ‘Apology’ did not stop here, for its authors went on to point out that MPs’ privileges were not a matter of the king’s grace, but a ‘right and due inheritance’ no less than lands or goods, and that the Speaker’s formal request to the Crown at the beginning of each session was ‘an act only of manners’. They reiterated, moreover, the same claim to complete freedom of speech which had stirred such coals in the previous reign, and famously complained how ‘the prerogatives of princes may easily and do daily grow’ while ‘the privileges of the subject are for the most part at an everlasting stand’. Worse still, James’s habit of making sweeping statements on fundamental aspects of constitutional theory broadened the authors’ agenda into a summary of a further range of unremedied grievances – matters which, they said, they had previously refrained from pressing upon Elizabeth ‘in regard of her sex and age’. They noted, for instance, the exasperation caused by the excesses of royal purveyors and complained bitterly of the burdens placed on landowners by the activities of the Court of Wards. More importantly still, they reminded James that Kings of England had no ‘absolute power in themselves either to alter religion (which God defend should be in the power of any mortal man whatsoever), or to make any laws concerning the same otherwise than as in temporal causes, by consent of Parliament’. And while they agreed with the king and his bishops on the need for uniformity and obedience, they nevertheless requested that some of the points in dispute – the sign of the cross in baptism, the use of the surplice and of the ring in marriage – should be made optional, while any persecution of dissenters should be in the hands of Parliament rather than Convocation.
Nor did the fact that the ‘Apology’ was never ultimately presented to James prevent him from seeing a copy and reacting with predictable irritation. Ultimately, indeed, the flourish of loyal and affectionate assertions with which the document ended, would do nothing to temper the king’s suspicions about its authors’ overall intentions. ‘The voice of the people,’ they had asserted, ‘in the things of their knowledge is said to be as the voice of God.’ And when James returned to prorogue the session after he had gone off to hunt at Royston at the end of April, in order to gain some respite from his ‘fashious and froward’ opponents in the Commons, his final speech could not have been more forthright. He was sure, he said, that there were many dutiful subjects in Parliament, but the pertness and boldness of some idle heads had cried down honest men, and he would not give thanks where no thanks were due, since it was neither Christian nor kingly to do so. ‘I cannot enough wonder,’ he declared, ‘that in three days after the beginning of Parliament, men should go contrary to their oaths of supremacy,’ and in making this point he confirmed his preoccupation with Puritan opponents. ‘I did not think the Puritans had been so great, so proud, or so dominant in your House,’ he declared, though he ended, sensibly enough, with appeals and admonitions rather than threats. Acknowledging that he had seen no evidence of disloyalty, he told MPs nevertheless that they had done ‘many things rashly’. He was, after all, ‘a king as well born as any of my progenitors’ who required respect and expected MPs to use their liberty ‘with more modesty in time to come’.
However, the main business of James’s first Parliament, apart from obtaining funds, had actually been the matter of the formal union of his two kingdoms, and here, too, he was roundly frustrated. The cold disdain of Englishmen for their Scottish counterparts had not, in fact, been extended to James personally, but fears that Scotland might, in effect, take over her southern neighbour as a result of his accession were common enough. The Scots, wrote one contemporary, ‘were suffered like locusts to devour this kingdom, from whence they became so rich and insolent, as nothing with any moderation could either be given or denied them’. And Ben Jonson’s Eastward, Ho! only confirmed the prejudice that James’s ultimate objective, however nobly and sincerely held, would have to overcome. When one of the play’s characters, a mariner described Captain Seagull, refers in Act III to the Scots residing in Virginia – ‘a land so rich that even the chamber pots are made of gold’ – he is quick to add a biting quip that would swiftly run the playwright into trouble with the king. ‘I would a hundred thousand of them were there,’ the captain continued, ‘for we are one countrymen now, ye know, and we should find ten times more comfort by them there than we do here.’ The result was a brief jail sentence for both Jonson and his co-authors George Chapman and John Marston.
Yet James, predictably enough, remained undeterred by all complaints concerning not only ‘the effluxion of people from the northern parts’ but the proposed union itself. From his perspective, after all, the case for amalgamation was eminently reasonable and therefore infinitely persuasive. ‘Hath not God first united these two kingdoms both in language, religion and similitude of manners?’ James suggested in his introductory speech to the Commons. ‘Yea, hath He not made us all one island encompassed with one sea, and of itself by nature so indivisible as almost those that were borderers themselves on the late Borders, cannot distinguish, nor know, or discern their own limits?’ Then came a reminder that previous trouble between the two realms had been ‘the greatest hindrance and let that ever my predecessors of this nation gat in disturbing them from their many famous and glorious conquests abroad’. After which, James rounded off his appeal with a selection of Scriptural references, spiced with the kind of heavy humour and egocentricity that was unlikely to appeal to MPs far more preoccupied with the legal, constitutional and financial consequences of the king’s proposal. ‘I am the husband, and the whole island is my wife,’ he told them after a brief historical survey of the development of the English monarchy. ‘I am the head and it is my body; I am the shepherd and it is my flock,’ he continued, and on this basis he therefore hoped that ‘no man will be so unreasonable as to think that I, that am a Christian king under the Gospel, should be a polygamist and husband to two wives; that I, being the head, should have a divided and monstrous body; or that being the shepherd of so fair a flock (whose fold hath no wall to hedge it but the four seas) should have my flock parted in two.’
Any hope that MPs would countenance such a project proved wholly unrealistic, however. They gave way enough in the first session, it is true, to set up an Anglo-Scottish commission intended to consider how to ‘make perfect that mutual love and uniformity of manners and customs’ necessary to ‘accomplish that real and effective union already inherent in his Majesty’s royal blood and person’. But when in April 1604 the king announced his wish to assume the title of King of Great Britain and alter the name of England, a line in the sand was quickly drawn. It was a line, moreover, that the Commons, notwithstanding James’s own talents in debate, had little difficulty in defending. Would not a change in the name of the kingdom, it was suggested, abrogate existing laws and necessitate their re-enactment? This, after all, was something that the judges, too, had suggested in spite of considerable pressure from the king. And should a change of name not, in any case, occur until union had actually been realised? A commission had been agreed – albeit it one that would never give the king what he wanted – and this commission should be allowed to submit its conclusions in due course.
Parliament, therefore, had defeated the king in his most favoured and revered preserve – the realm of abstract argument. But in spite of any apparent commitment to the rule of reason, James would still not give way. He had presented the choice before Parliament with all the usual excess of vigour, telling its members how any rejection of his plans would be to ‘spit and blaspheme’ in God’s face ‘by preferring war to peace, trouble to quietness, hatred to love, weakness to strength, and division to union’. And when defeat followed, he would not retreat gracefully. ‘I am not ashamed of my project,’ he told MPs at the end of the session, ‘neither have I deferred it out of a liking to the judges’ reasons or yours.’ Accordingly, in spite of a pledge that he would not for the time being alter his title, he duly began to style himself King of Great Britain by royal proclamation in October 1604 on the grounds that God had given this title to the island, and on the advice, it seems, of Sir Francis Bacon alone, since the council appear to have regarded the gesture as provocative. The king was determined, wrote the Venetian ambassador, ‘to call himself King of Great Britain and like that famous and ancient King Arthur to embrace under one name the whole circuit’ of the island. And, as Bacon suggested, by proceeding through proclamation rather than statute, he could now use the new style in letters, treaties, dedications, further proclamations and upon coins. The result, however, was a largely empty victory and one achieved, ironically, not only at the cost of offending Parliament but of jeopardising all further serious dialogue about the goal of union itself.
Nor would James’s subsequent pressure prove any more fruitful. The English Parliament, for instance, continued to employ the old terminology and though the Scottish Estates were forced to adopt it, Scots themselves were, if anything, even more resentful. Councillors were also asked to consider the feasibility of reducing the laws of the two kingdoms to a single system and to consider the possible benefits that might accrue from free trade, while the king toyed, too, with the notion of making Archbishop Bancroft primate of Great Britain, though obstacles on all three counts proved insurmountable. The conference of English and Scottish commissioners, which assembled in London in October 1604, did not, for instance, even consider the creation of a single parliament, and English merchants, fearing competition, roundly rejected any prospect of free trade, as did English ship owners who protested that while a Scots sailor could live on nothing more than oysters, his English counterpart required beer and roast beef. Ultimately, the pacification of the Borders would continue steadily and there was eventually some progress towards a common currency. But while the College of Arms managed to devise a new flag by imposing the cross of St George upon that of St Andrew, James was still complaining in 1607 of the ‘crossings, long disputations, strange questions, and nothing done’ that had dogged proceedings.
Indeed, the only topic even to receive a full airing at the London conference was the intricate issue of whether the Scots might be naturalised as English subjects. The commissioners, following the English judges, had made a distinction between those Scotsmen born before James’s accession to the throne of England (the so-called ‘ante-nati’) and those born afterwards (the ‘post-nati’). The former, it was suggested, should be naturalised by statute, while the latter should be automatically naturalised by virtue of common law. Only the post-nati, however, were to be deemed capable of holding office – a distinction which James was prepared to accept, so long as it was recognised that his prerogative remained wholly intact. And if this additional proviso made bad reading for the House of Commons, MPs too gave no quarter on the claim that the post-nati were naturalised by common law. Common law precedents, it was suggested, were established in ancient times when nationalism was weak. In any case, argued Sir Edwin Sandys, ‘unions of kingdoms are not made by law but by act express’, and naturalisation should not be conferred so easily by the chance results of royal marriages.
As the debate unfolded, moreover, long-established prejudices against the Scots were swift to resurface. England was depicted as a rich pasture about to be overrun by herds of lean and hungry cattle, while Sir Christopher Piggott, despite royal rage, poured forth a torrent of abuse, deriding Scotsmen as proud beggarly, quarrelsome and untrustworthy. Even the post-nati, for that matter, were to be barred from holding office, and neither category of Scotsmen should be granted the full rights of English citizens. How, it was suggested, could the Scots be subservient to English law and held to the payment of English taxes without the establishment of a single parliament, which, in spite of the king’s wishes, was not a practical option at this stage? And how could Scottish laws be prevented from diverging without one chancellor and one Great Seal. The only practical solution, the Commons suggested, was ‘perfect union’, which was itself impractical at this time, as even the king had come to recognise. Once again, it seems, James had been foiled by the very techniques upon which he himself set so much store, though this did not prevent him from telling MPs that those who now spoke up in favour of perfect union did so only with their lips rather than their hearts.
On almost all counts, then, the first Parliament of the new reign had been little more than an exercise in frustration – and a largely unnecessary one at that. But it was not only the royal prerogative and England’s relationship with Scotland that raised hackles and conjured frowns of frustration. Nor was it only the authors of the ‘Form of Apology and Satisfaction’ who found themselves stirring. For in spite of James’s early guarantees that he would ‘never allow in my conscience that the blood of any man shall be shed for diversity of opinions in religion’, the session also delivered ominous signs of a less tolerant approach to English Catholics. Hitherto, the king had suggested that he was disinclined to ‘persecute any that will be quiet and give an outward obedience to the law’, and where he had hinted at action at all, he had actually tended to suggest that exile might be a preferable solution to capital punishment. ‘I would be glad,’ he declared at one point, ‘to have both their heads and their bodies separated from this whole island and transported beyond seas.’ Likewise, while James made it clear in his opening speech to Parliament on 19 March that Catholics were not to ‘increase their number and strength in this Kingdom’, so that ‘they might be in hope to erect their Religion again’, he also spoke of a Christian union and reiterated his desire to avoid religious persecution, declaring his readiness ‘to meet them in the midway, so that all novelties might be renounced on either side’.
Just one month earlier, however, on 19 February, shortly after he discovered that his wife had been sent a rosary from the pope via one of his own agents, Sir Anthony Standen, James had ordered all Jesuits and Catholic priests to leave the country and reimposed the collection of recusancy fines. Only a week after James’s address to Parliament, moreover, Lord Sheffield informed him that over 900 recusants had been brought before the Assizes in Normanby in Yorkshire, and by 24 April a Bill was introduced in Parliament which threatened to outlaw all English followers of the Catholic Church. The very few Catholics of great wealth who refused to attend services at their parish church were fined £20 per month, while middle-class recusants were fined 1s a week and those of more modest means found themselves liable for a sum totalling two-thirds of their annual rental income. In the atmosphere of increased stringency that followed, the fact that James allowed his Scottish nobles to collect English recusancy fines proved doubly provocative, and 5,560 convictions for refusal to pay followed in 1605 alone. Nor did the otherwise haphazard and negligent collection of all these fines serve to lessen their predictable impact upon Catholic opinion. To Father John Gerard, the king’s speech was almost certainly responsible for the heightened levels of persecution the members of his faith now suffered, while for the priest Oswald Tesimond it was a clear rebuttal of the early claims that James had made – claims upon which the papists had built such confident hopes. More importantly still, however, James’s decision to reimpose the collection of recusancy fines was the fuse that led directly to the gunpowder deposited ‘under his Palace of Parliament House’ in November 1605.
The monstrous simplicity of the Gunpowder Plot was, in fact, the secret of its potential success. For zealots like Robert Catesby and Sir Thomas Percy there was no hope for a triumphant coup d’etat unless some altogether extraordinary disaster should temporarily paralyse the governing class, and the destruction of king, queen, Prince Henry, bishops, lords and Commons in a single, devastating explosion was precisely the sort of event in a society so closely bound to ties of tradition and territorial loyalty at every level that might well ensure the necessary upheaval – at least long enough for the arrival of foreign aid. Certainly, the moral considerations that made the majority of Catholics shudder at such mass murder do not appear to have bothered the plotters themselves. When James eventually asked Guy Fawkes, for instance, if he did not regret his involvement, the answer was succinct and clinical. The only cause for sorrow was the plot’s failure, he retorted. ‘A dangerous disease requires a desperate remedy’ was Fawkes’s sole additional comment. And in expressing himself thus, he spoke no doubt for the whole gang who had employed him to plant and fire the thirty-six barrels of gunpowder that were intended to raise the English Catholic gentry to arms and install James’s daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, upon the throne as the puppet of a Catholic government.
According to latest estimates, Fawkes had more than double the powder he needed and even accounting for deterioration of the explosive in storage, no one inside Westminster Palace – or outside to a distance of 100 metres – is likely to have survived. So long as the plot remained secret, moreover, the assassination plan, if not its intended after-effects, had a more than reasonable chance of success. The king’s ministers, it should be remembered, had no complicated network of spies at their disposal of the kind that had allowed Walsingham to foil so comprehensively all the conspiracies centred round Mary Queen of Scots. And though Robert Cecil would eventually exploit the plot’s occurrence with predictable opportunism, any notions that he somehow knew about the plot in advance remain wholly unsubstantiated. The habit of secrecy was, of course, deeply engrained in those Catholic households where a fugitive priest might lay hidden all day in a space behind a chimney, with his communion plate and vestments, and only dare to ride out to his humbler parishioners under cover of darkness. For their part, neither James nor Cecil had any reason to suspect an imminent plot and would in any case have had no real idea where to start looking for one, since Catesby and his fellow conspirators had set to work in May 1604 and slipped into the English countryside some six months before 5 November. Indeed, even at the time of the plot’s accidental discovery, the other conspirators, with the exception of Percy, who was known to be Fawkes’s employer, remained wholly unidentified.
Robert Catesby, moreover, was a particularly formidable figure in his own right. Born in or after 1572 at the family seat of Lapworth in Warwickshire, he was the son of a prominent recusant Catholic who had suffered years of imprisonment for his faith before being tried in the Star Chamber in 1581 alongside William Vaux, 3rd Baron Vaux of Harrowden, and his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Tresham, for harbouring the Jesuit Edmund Campion. Another relation, Sir Francis Throckmorton, had been executed in 1584 for his involvement in a plot to free Mary Queen of Scots. And if any confirmation of the younger Catesby’s readiness to carry forward the family tradition of zealotry was required, it was furnished by his education. For in 1586, he entered Gloucester Hall in Oxford, a college noted for its Catholic intake, only to leave before taking his degree after refusing the Oath of Supremacy, an act which would have compromised Catesby’s Catholic faith. Presumably to avoid this consequence, he may then have attended the seminary college of Douai in France.
But it was not until the death of his wife, Catherine, in 1598 and the death of his father earlier in the same year, that Catesby became fully radicalised, and reverted to a more fanatical Catholicism. In 1601, for example, he was involved in the Essex Rebellion. And although the Earl of Essex’s purpose lay mainly in furthering his own interests rather than those of the Catholic Church, Catesby nevertheless hoped that if Essex succeeded, there might once more be a Catholic monarch. The rebellion was a failure, however, and the wounded Catesby was captured, imprisoned at the Wood Street Counter, and fined 4,000 marks by Elizabeth I. Thereafter, Sir Thomas Tresham helped pay a proportion of Catesby’s fine, following which Catesby sold his estate at Chastleton. Yet his opinions did not moderate and as Elizabeth’s health grew worse, he was probably among those ‘principal papists’ imprisoned by a government fearing open rebellion. Certainly, he funded the activities of some Jesuit priests, making occasional use of the alias Mr Roberts while visiting them, and in March 1603 he may also have sent Christopher Wright to Spain to see if Philip III would continue to support English Catholics after Elizabeth’s death.
By the start of King James’s reign, therefore, Catesby was already an experienced and devoted crusader for the Catholic cause who would not hesitate to use violence in support of his faith. More importantly still, however, he had not only the skills and tenacity but also the charisma to pose a real and substantial threat to the new monarch and his government. Writing after the events of 1604 to 1606, the Jesuit Father Tesimond’s description of his friend was most favourable. ‘His countenance,’ wrote Tesimond, ‘was exceedingly noble and expressive … his conversation and manners were peculiarly attractive and imposing, and that by the dignity of his character he exercised an irresistible influence over the minds of those who associated with him.’ Fellow conspirator Ambrose Rookwood, shortly before his own death, also declared that he ‘loved and respected him [Catesby] as his own life’, while Catesby’s friend, Father John Gerard, claimed he was ‘respected in all companies of such as are counted there swordsmen or men of action’, and that ‘few were in the opinions of most men preferred before him’. His frustration, meanwhile, at the failure of Essex’s adventure actually seems to have sharpened an already well-honed monomania, which could only have served to increase the potency of any attempt on the king’s life considerably.
However, as a result of lack of funds, the grinding physical labour of tunnelling and the wider objectives of the whole enterprise, the number of conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot became dangerously enlarged and led to their well-known betrayal by Francis Tresham, a wealthy Catholic gentleman who had been enlisted to gather stores of arms and prepare the West Country gentry for the impending insurrection. Distressed, it seems, by the prospect that the Catholic peers attending Parliament would almost certainly perish, Tresham opted to inform his brother-in-law, Lord Monteagle, and expose the conspiracy in a note delivered on the evening of 26 October, some eleven days prior to the opening of Parliament. ‘I would advise you,’ the note warned, ‘as you tender your life, to devise some excuse to shift your attendance at this parliament, for God and man have concurred to punish the wickedness of this time.’ But by instructing that the message be read aloud by his servant when it arrived during dinner, Monteagle attempted at one and the same time – as Tresham seems to have intended – to both thwart the plot and ensure that the conspirators were informed of their betrayal before the news was conveyed to Cecil, who decided to postpone a search until the last possible moment, partly, it seems, out of genuine incredulity, but more importantly in the hope that any conspiracy might thus be exposed more fully.
The king, meanwhile, who was away hunting was not shown the letter until two days before Parliament opened, and agreed that the note was likely to refer to an imminent attack. He remembered, he said, that his father had died by gunpowder, but it was not until three in the afternoon of 4 November that a search was first conducted of the cellar, and not until 11 p.m. that Guy Fawkes was finally arrested, still waiting with his ‘blinde lanterne’ and the watch a friend had bought for him specially, so that he might time his explosion accurately next morning. Knowing already of the warning letter to Monteagle and having encountered Lord Suffolk during an earlier search that afternoon, he had nevertheless pressed forward upon the slenderest hope that the government might not gauge his purpose in time. Yet his eventual discovery by Sir Thomas Knyvet sealed both his own and the plot’s fate, as a few wild-eyed Catholic conspirators continued to gallop westward to raise a stillborn insurrection that even their supporters could see was now quite hopeless. Before long, indeed, John Chamberlain was already recording the lighting of ‘as great store of bonfires as ever I thinke was seen’, as the king’s loyal subjects heard news of his deliverance and the first ‘Guys’ were burnt in celebration.
The king, meanwhile, had already retired for the night, but was awoken after Fawkes’s arrest and promptly instructed that the prisoner be placed under close guard to prevent the possibility of suicide. Transformed, quite literally overnight, into something of a national hero, it was not long either before James was claiming full credit for single-handedly uncovering the plotters’ designs. By early 1606, indeed, James had arranged for the publication of a short tract entitled A Discourse of the Maner of the Discovery of the Late Intended Treason, in which he was directly presented not only as the saviour of his own sacred person but as the deliverer of his kingdom as a whole and Parliament in particular. It was his ‘fortunate judgement’, it seems, that had been responsible for ‘clearing and solving’ the ‘obscure riddles and doubtful mysteries’ associated with the so-called ‘Powder Treason’, as it was known to contemporaries, and it was he, too, who had remained indifferent to the ‘many desperate dangers’ confronting him throughout. Appearing eventually in the king’s collected works, the tract nevertheless makes clear in its preface that it was written by a court official under instruction from James himself, and leaves no doubt of James’s perception of the entire episode’s broader significance.
Since his Protestant faith had been so conclusively confirmed by Providence and he himself had been rescued by his own God-given perspicacity, the conclusions were indeed indisputable from the king’s perspective, and he made them abundantly clear to Parliament only four days after the plot had been foiled. Comparing his escape to that of Noah from the flood and elaborating the parallel between the redemption of mankind and his own miraculous preservation, he reminded MPs that kings bore hallmarks of divinity and, like the tallest trees of the forest, were exposed to the greatest dangers. He had survived the Gowrie Plot, when his destruction would have brought immediate ruin to Scotland and deprived England of its future king, and now he had triumphed over an equally dastardly enterprise. When Tresham’s letter to Monteagle had been presented to him, he had, he claimed, detected ‘upon the instant’ certain ‘dark phrases therein’, though the plot itself was not, he emphasised, the responsibility of English Catholics as a whole but of a few fanatics. Had the plot succeeded, he concluded, he would at least have perished in the noble execution of his regal duties, ‘for Almighty God did not furnish so great matter to His Glory by creation of the world, as He did by redemption of the same …’
No speech, in fact, could have captured more aptly the curious mix of egotism, good intentions and naivety that lay at the heart of James’s kingship. At a time when his subjects were baying for retribution and sensing Jesuits – those ‘reverend cheaters’, ‘prowling fathers’ and ‘caterpillars of Christianity’ – behind every panel, he was prepared nevertheless to absolve the loyal majority of his Catholic subjects. But he remained almost obsessively preoccupied, too, with the plot’s deep significance for him personally – something that manifested itself ultimately in a curious fascination with the trials and executions that followed as he framed specific questions for the prisoners, commanded the use of torture to extract information and pestered the government’s prosecutor, Sir Edward Coke. At one time, indeed, he had thought to interview the captured plotters himself, though the idea, it seems, was ultimately too intimidating for him. Catesby, for his part, had been lucky enough to be shot dead while resisting arrest at Holbeach House, and Percy had died of his wounds soon afterwards. Tresham, on the other hand, who had been in poor health before he joined the conspiracy, would die in the Tower on 22 December. But Guy Fawkes and the other surviving captives would incur no such good fortune before they were finally hanged, drawn and quartered on 27 January 1606.
Even so, neither James nor his subjects would be easily rid of the nagging anxiety and revulsion generated by the conspiracy. ‘The king,’ observed the Venetian ambassador, ‘is in terror,’ refusing to ‘take his meals in public as usual’ and living instead ‘in the innermost rooms with only Scotsmen about him’. ‘His Majesty on Sunday last’, wrote the same Italian in early 1606, ‘while at chapel and afterwards at dinner, appeared very subdued and melancholy; he did not speak at all, though those in attendance gave him occasion’, which was ‘unlike his usual manner’. And though he later ‘broke out with great violence’ against the ‘cursed doctrine’ by which some were ‘permitted to plot against the lives of princes’, declaring that ‘they shall not think they can frighten me, for they shall taste of the agony first’, he would confine his action ultimately to palliatives and pamphlets. The Oath of Allegiance, for instance, which was proclaimed law on 22 June 1606, required those who took it to affirm that the pope had neither ‘any power or authority to depose the king … or to discharge any of his subjects of their allegiance…’ and to acknowledge that no prince ‘excommunicated or deprived by the pope may be deposed or murdered by their subjects …’. But when Paul V denounced the oath and forbade Catholics to comply, James merely plunged with characteristic relish into a protracted battle of print that was soon to spread to every corner of Europe.
‘Hardly a day passes,’ wrote the scholar Isaac Casaubon, ‘on which some new pamphlet is not brought to him, mostly written by Jesuits,’ and as James surrounded himself with his favourite coterie of ‘ripe and weighty’ Anglican divines, ‘ever in chase after some disputable doubts which he would wind and turn about with the most stabbing objections that ever I heard’, he became increasingly convinced, in his own words, that ‘the state of religion through all Christendom, almost wholly, under God, rests now upon my shoulders’. One result was Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, or an Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, produced (or so it was claimed by the Bishop of Bath) over only six days and published in 1607, in which James did his level but laboured best to refute his Catholic critics. Such was the dreariness of the book’s 112 pages that Boderie, the French ambassador, was adamant that James’s principal councillors would have preferred if he had never published it ‘or at least not acknowledged it as his own’. Reiterating time and again the familiar theme that Scripture, church councils and patristic authorities alike all advocated the primacy of secular authority, the king’s last resort was a futile blast dismissing his arch-adversary, Cardinal Bellarmine, as a liar and a madman – an outburst rivalling an even more drastic loss of composure in debate four years later which led to the burning of the Protestant radicals, Edward Wightman and Bartholomew Legate, who became the last men to be executed for heresy in England.
Overall, of course, English Catholics continued to fare better than might have been expected. In the Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, indeed, James was at pains to emphasise ‘the truth of my behaviour towards the papists’. ‘How many did I honour with knighthood of known and open recusants?’ he asked. ‘How indifferently [impartially] did I give audience, bestowing equally all favours and honours on both professions [religions]? And above all how frankly and freely did I free recusants of their ordinary payments [fines]?’ He was even ready to add, for that matter, how ‘strait order’ had been ‘given out of my own mouth to judges to spare the execution of all priests’, and in a later edition of the Apologie, issued in 1609 under the title A Premonition to all most Mighty Monarchs, Kings, Free Princes and States of Christendom, he felt no compunction in describing himself as a ‘Catholic Christian’ and declaring that though ‘I may well be a schismatic from Rome … I am sure I am no heretic’. For the time being, moreover, such professions would be indulged compliantly enough by the majority of James’s Protestant subjects, for while the ‘Powder Treason’ had fuelled the anti-Catholic bile of most Englishmen to new heights, it had also placed them at one with their new ruler as never before or after. But if James VI of Scotland was now, by sheer good fortune, truly King of England in his subjects’ eyes, he could only hope to prosper in the longer term by learning to govern his altogether less regal whims and inclinations.