16
‘Even such is Time,which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust …’
Sir Walter Raleigh’s ‘Epitaph’, written in the Gatehouse
at Westminster Palace the night before his death
The Castilian nobleman Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, better known as the Count of Gondomar, first cast eyes upon England as Spain’s new ambassador in the spring of 1615, though he was to bring with him neither fresh new shoots of friendship nor even buds of compromise. On the contrary, conceiving his embassy as a sortie into enemy territory and taking for his motto the maxim aventurar la vida y osar morir – ‘risk your life and dare to die’ – he had brazenly refused to strike the colours of Spain upon his warships’ entry into Portsmouth harbour, whereupon only an appeal to the king himself averted an exchange of cannon fire that was certain to have sunk the ambassador in his vessel. At the time, a marriage between Prince Charles and Christine of France, sister to Louis XIII, was already under negotiation and Gondomar had fostered little hope that an alternative bride in the shape of Philip III’s daughter, the Spanish infanta Maria, could be plausibly presented to his English hosts. But the man whom Thomas Middleton characterised as the Black Night in his play A Game at Chess knew his craft and, more important still, the way to ply and prime the increasingly penniless king who now confronted him.
James chose for the intricate diplomacy in store a man of intelligence and exceptional honesty, Sir John Digby, who relayed from Madrid in May 1615 what appeared to be wholly unrealistic Spanish demands. The children of any marriage were, on the one hand, to be baptised and educated as Catholics, and guaranteed the right to succession. In the meantime, moreover, the infanta was to be granted Catholic servants and a chapel which was to be a place of public worship for English Catholics, against whom all penal laws were to be rescinded. And while such terms were shocking by any standards, the bait of a Spanish dowry amounting to some £600,000 and James’s fear that the King of Spain ‘had many kingdoms and more subjects beyond comparison’ proved sufficient to fix him in a dangerous scheme of deception. Though clearly unacceptable, as his margin comments upon the Spanish proposals make clear, James nevertheless refused to reject them out of hand, preferring instead to play the kind of double game at which he considered himself so skilled - all of which perplexed his subjects and undermined their confidence in his commitment to the Protestant cause. His hankerings for peace, dislike of rebels and republicans, and prejudice against the Dutch, not to mention his vanity, fears of assassination and growing indolence, were all, it seemed, eminently exploitable by one such as Gondomar, and when the wily Spaniard returned to his homeland in 1618, accompanied by 100 Catholic priests whom James had seen fit to release as a gesture of goodwill, the worst fears of many appeared confirmed.
Nor was James’s dalliance with Spain the last eccentricity imposed upon him by financial necessity. Indeed, his decision to release Sir Water Raleigh from the Tower of London in March 1616 was not only equally astonishing in its way, but driven even more directly by a vain hope that his problems might somehow be solved at a stroke through bold action and a timely gust of good fortune. For some time, in fact, James had been under pressure from the anti-Spanish faction led by George Abbot, Sir Ralph Winwood and the earls of Southampton and Pembroke, to liberate Raleigh and permit him to make a return voyage to the Orinoco River that he had first visited in 1595. Such a strategy could be guaranteed to outrage the King of Spain and also proffered a vast store of gold, which, according to Raleigh himself, lay only a few inches below the ground ‘in a broad slate, and not in small veins’. ‘There was,’ he claimed, ‘never a mine of gold in the world promising so great abundance.’ And though he was now over 60, grey, lame and malaria-ridden, he remained ready to enact his dreams of creating an English empire in Guiana, centred on the Orinoco delta, that might eventually destroy Spanish power in the Indies. In The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Beautiful Empire of Guiana, he told how he was still haunted by ‘the strange thunder of the waters’ and how he seemed to hear these same same huge waters – ‘each as high over the other as a church tower’ – while lying in his prison cell. And now he had a king to share his fantasies.
On 27 March 1616, therefore, John Chamberlain informed Dudley Carleton how ‘Sir Water Raleigh was freed out of the Tower the last week and goes up and down seeing sights and places built or bettered since his imprisonment’. In the meantime, however, James had extracted the most solemn pledges from Raleigh that no Spanish subject should be molested without forfeit of his own life, and had also attempted to smother the Count of Gondomar’s protestations with a series of further pledges of his own. The notorious sea-captain would be sent to Madrid bound hand and foot, he assured the ambassador, if a single Spaniard were harmed, and there were further assurances that Raleigh’s release had involved no free pardon or any revocation of the death sentence imposed upon him in 1603. In effect, the great Elizabethan, who now trudged the streets of a capital made unfamiliar to him by years of incarceration, had therefore been granted a one-way ticket to disaster, though it was one he had both purchased and stamped with glowing confidence.
The king, in all fairness, may well have had some rightful grounds for sharing that confidence or at least wagering at reasonable odds upon a potential windfall of considerable proportions. Already, in 1604, Charles Leigh had established a settlement on the banks of the river Wiapoco, which lasted two years, while another party, encouraged by Prince Henry, had sailed soon afterwards under Robert Harcourt and survived until 1613. Likewise, a third expedition to Guiana – partly financed by Raleigh to the tune of £600 – had been led by Sir Thomas Roe in 1610. And there were grounds, however slender, for believing, too, that Raleigh’s expedition of 1595 had established some kind of English claim in Guiana, notwithstanding the fact that the Spanish were firmly established upon the coast of modern-day Venezuela and at the very site of the mines of San Thomé that had captured James’s imagination in the first place.
But if James was indeed making a genuine bid for treasure and for territory that might rightfully be his, and in the process granting Raleigh a chance to gain his freedom and achieve his dreams, the likelihood of success actually remained minimal. In the event, Raleigh’s ship, The Destiny, would not leave Plymouth until June 1617 since the storms at sea were the worst since the sinking of the Spanish Armada almost thirty years earlier, and from the outset the expedition was dogged by misfortune. Initially compelled to land at Kinsale harbour in southern Ireland, Raleigh’s seven warships and three pinnaces were subsequently forced to weigh anchor at Lanzarote in the Canary Islands, where Gondomar had little difficulty in persuading his government that the heavily armed vessels were planning to attack the Spanish fleet. Deaths among his leading officers from a strange sickness were then followed by the desertion of Cyrus Bailey, who ultimately returned to England to spread rumours that Raleigh was turning pirate. And though the coasts of Guiana were finally sighted in mid-November, the expedition’s leader was by that time stricken by fever, cared for by his son Walter and nephew George.
The Indians who eventually greeted Raleigh’s men were, however, friendly. ‘To tell you that I might be here King of the Indians were a vanity,’ he informed his wife in a letter, ‘but my name hath still lived among them. Here they feed me with fresh meat and all that the country yields; all offer to obey me.’ Yet Raleigh was unable to lead the subsequent search for gold and appointed Laurence Keymis, who, in spite of specific instructions not to provoke hostilities with the Spanish, nevertheless misjudged his landing spot and arrived too near the fortified village of San Thomé. While Raleigh himself was therefore waiting in Trinidad with other sickly members of his crew, hoping to trade with the Spaniards, Keymis found himself under a surprise attack, in which Raleigh’s son was killed while leading a gallant stand at the head of a group of pikemen.
‘God knows, I never knew what sorrow meant till now,’ Raleigh wrote soon afterwards. But though he was heartbroken and infuriated with Keymis, who subsequently committed suicide, he nevertheless resolved upon one last attempt to reach the mines, which his captains refused to support. The result was a wretched return to England, where arrest by his kinsman Sir Lewis Stukeley, Vice-Admiral of Devon, awaited him soon after his arrival at Plymouth on 21 June 1618. He had been tempted to sail The Destiny to Brest and subsequently contemplated escape to France after being placed under house arrest. But he was betrayed and subsequently placed in the Tower, and when Roger North, one of his captains, denied the existence of any South American mine, Raleigh became the object of the king’s cold, vindictive fury. Shortly after Bailey’s return with tales of piracy, Sir Thomas Lake had noted how ‘his Majesty is very disposed and determined against Raleigh and will join the King of Spain in ruining him’. But now, considering himself the victim of a despicable hoax, and prey increasingly to Gondomar’s taunts and goading, James determined to strike.
On 18 August, therefore, Raleigh was duly summoned before a commission to answer for his misdeeds. The king, much to his discredit, had already submitted to Gondomar’s insolence in demanding that any sentence might be carried out in Spain, and in doing so had ridden roughshod over the opposition of his council, declaring that he could take what course he pleased ‘without following the advice of fools and badly disposed persons’. He had also taken pains to guarantee that Raleigh should not be afforded the opportunity of a public hearing, since ‘it would make him too popular, as was found by experience at the arraignment at Winchester [in 1603], when by his wit he turned the hatred of men into compassion for him’. Yet the commission itself, which included Archbishop Abbot and Sir Edward Coke, had the appearance at least of equity, even if no such gathering could have been unmindful of the king’s express will. For Raleigh stood accused not only of disloyalty and deceit but of compromising the king’s avowed policy of international peace. And though Prince Henry had admired him, and the queen would intercede on his behalf by means of her ‘kind dog’ Buckingham, the accused was by no means popular at court. Ultimately, therefore, Raleigh’s death sentence, inevitable as it was, represented not so much the sacrifice of a national hero by a weak, embittered Scottish king as a calculated act of realpolitik. If, in the final analysis, an expendable liability might be offered up in the broader interests of peace and personal credibility, then James, as ever, was equal to his kingly obligations.
And the sentence, which at Philip III’s behest was eventually carried out in England rather than Spain, duly resulted in a fitting addition to national folklore. ‘He was the most fearless of death that ever was known,’ wrote one observer, ‘and the most resolute and confident, yet with reverence and conscience.’ For on 28 October 1618, as he was about to be taken from the Tower to the Gatehouse at Westminster, where he was to pass the night before his execution, Raleigh encountered an old servant who noticed his untidy hair and tearfully offered him a comb. ‘Let them kem it that are to have it’, replied the condemned man in his broad West Country accent. ‘Dost thou know, Peter,’ he continued, ‘of any plaster that will get a man’s head on again when it is off?’ And when delivered to the block itself the following day, there was similar bravado. Feeling the edge of the axe, Raleigh could not resist a remark to the presiding sheriff. ‘This is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases,’ he quipped before laying his head on the block and uttering a final exhortation to the headsman: ‘What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike.’
The Americas, meanwhile, would remain for James a faraway and meagerly exploited realm. The first of the East India Company’s voyages had set out in 1601 and returned under Sir James Lancaster a few months after James’s accession, with cargoes yielding a 100 per cent profit. And though contemporary commentators condemned the trade for emptying the kingdom of gold bullion in exchange for goods, it was much too profitable to be suppressed entirely. There had therefore been another expedition in 1604, and from 1607 onwards similar excursions occurred annually. The richer peers, courtiers and politicians joined Sir Thomas Smith and his City colleagues as regular patrons of these ventures, and when, in 1609, the charter was renewed and the company reorganised, the earls of Salisbury and Nottingham, as well as the Earl of Worcester, all joined the board. In the meantime, as English interest in the Indian trade and Persian Gulf expanded, so Portuguese control of these same areas slackened, largely through lack of support from a Spanish government painfully overcommitted elsewhere.
But progress in establishing American settlements was altogether slower and less spectacular, and the Virginia Company, which received its first charter in 1606, proved a regrettably neglected enterprise which failed to realise its true potential before the King of England finally abandoned control of it in 1612. Raleigh and his half-brother Humphrey Gilbert, had dreamt of an overseas empire in strikingly modern and purely nationalist terms, and had used the hope of finding gold primarily as a lever to secure official support and financial backing. But this early imperialism had resulted in a series of costly failures at Roanoke, and King James, like most of his contemporaries, showed little imagination from 1603 onwards beyond treating American settlements as convenient repositories for the kingdom’s surplus population. Moreover, the inexperience and jealousies of the pioneers and the hostility of the native Indians all but wrecked a second series of plantations in 1606, where only the adventuring genius of Captain John Smith and the friendship of Princess Pocahontas, daughter of the most important of the local chiefs, averted total disaster. Even in 1609, indeed, when James and Salisbury took a hand in the London Company’s wholesale reorganisation, the results were limited. Though the Jamestown settlement on the Delaware River became secure, the colony succeeded ultimately for what all the backers considered at the time to be the wrong reason: tobacco. And while James, in particular, would rail against the spread of a filthy habit, which led to a rise in consumption from £20,000 in 1617 to £50,000 by the end of the reign, the windfall both to the government and the venture’s backers remained comparatively paltry, and represented, like the rest of the king’s colonial policies an uninspiring case of squandered possibilities.
Of more abiding interest to James, however, was another far-off realm – albeit one that was altogether more familiar to him personally and one that entailed no ocean-going perils to reach. By the end of 1616, as Raleigh pressed on with preparations for his impending voyage, the king had resolved, in fact, to make a long-deferred return to the homeland he had previously promised to visit every three years. Obeying a strong impulse, and taking advantage of an opportunity that he claimed to be the first, but sensed might be the last, he therefore informed the Scottish Privy Council on 15 December 1616, of his intended visit. ‘We are not ashamed to confess,’ he wrote, ‘that we have had these many years a great and natural longing to see our native soil and place of our birth and breeding, and this salmon-like instinct of ours has restlessly, both when we were awake, and many times in our sleep, so stirred up our thoughts and bended our desires to make a journey thither that we can never rest satisfied till it shall please God we accomplish it.’
Yet the king’s homing instincts were unpopular with his courtiers, none of whom relished a progress of unprecedented to a length to a land where only cold, discomfort and barbarism appeared to await them, and there were more pressing concerns, too, about the likely cost. Indeed, the whole council, including Buckingham in the first instance, had implored James not to go, though the favourite’s opposition had melted soon enough for him to be granted his earldom once the journey was underway. Even the queen, for that matter, had balked at the prospect of accompanying her husband and was granted leave to stay at home. But no such indulgence was granted to the noblemen and clerics who sallied forth from Theobalds on 14 March 1617. Three English bishops – Andrewes of Ely, Neile of Durham and Montagu of Winchester, who had edited the king’s Collected Works the year before – were all in James’s entourage, along with a bevy of his Scottish kinsmen, such as the Duke of Lennox and the Marquis of Hamilton, and the English earls of Pembroke and Montgomery.
On the one hand, the leisurely journey along the Great North Road, which took him all of two months to complete, represented a nostalgic attempt to recapture his lost youth and experience anew the kind of euphoria that had greeted him on his journey to London in 1603. Attended by hundreds of gentlemen ushers, grooms and other officers, James enjoyed the hunting so much around Lincoln that he neglected to meet the county’s sheriffs, who had gone to welcome him. But he nevertheless lapped up in full the state reception offered to him once more at York, where the kneeling Lord Mayor presented him with a cup of silver double gilt and a purse containing 100 double sovereigns. Neither the illness of the queen, whose physicians, according to John Chamberlain ‘feared an ill habit of body’, or the fever of Secretary Winwood, who also found himself ‘much vexed with the perpetual visits of great folks’ after being left in charge of English affairs, could dim the king’s enthusiasm when he finally reached Berwick on 13 May and crossed the Border into the land of his birth.
Three days later, the royal entourage entered Edinburgh itself and it was here, on 19 June, that James celebrated his fifty-first birthday. The English, Chamberlain had informed Dudley Carleton just over a fortnight earlier, were ‘much caressed’ in Scotland, while the king himself continued to exhibit the kind of generosity that had been such a feature of his journey south over a decade earlier. ‘So many knights are made,’ wrote Chamberlain, ‘that there is scarce a Yorkshire esquire left to uphold the race, and the order has even descended to the Earl of Montgomery’s barber and the husband of the Queen’s launderess.’ Even so, many courtiers found their quarters along the Royal Mile inadequate and uncomfortable, and while James enjoyed his hunting enormously at Falkland and Kinaird, he was nevertheless more critical of his fellow Scots than previously, wishing that they might imitate their English counterparts more in their worthy habits than in drinking healths, ‘tobacco takin’ and ‘glorie of apparel’.
There were darker memories, too, that James had plainly failed to displace. Left alone with a guide in a mineshaft at Culrose in Fifeshire, he suddenly suspected an assassination attempt and dissolved into cries of ‘Treason’, which were only calmed with considerable difficulty. It seems likely, too, that his visit to Stirling on 30 June was conducted with mixed emotions as he once again surveyed the site where his grandfather had met a violent end, and that his stay at Perth was also tinged by recollections of his narrow escape from death at the hands of the Gowries. Not dissimilarly, there were also echoes of a sullen Scottish Kirk, soaked in cynicism and suspicion regarding their king’s religious plans. For James had already gone as far as he could in bringing Scotland candles and choristers, and when an organ from the Chapel Royal of Whitehall arrived for use at Holyroodhouse, the reaction was predictable. ‘The organs are come before,’ grumbled one Calvinist divine, ‘and after comes the Mass.’
It was the restless Scottish Kirk, moreover, that had partly prompted James’s visit in the first place. Still beguiled by dreams of unification, he hoped to enforce upon Scotland the notorious ‘Five Articles of Perth’ which required, amongst other things, kneeling at Holy Communion and the administration of Confirmation by bishops. Thus, or so he believed, might the Kirk’s practices be brought into line with the Church of England. But though the Articles were indeed formally adopted by the General Assembly which met at Perth in 1618, James was nevertheless sufficiently attuned to the resulting opposition to realise that they could not be imposed as vigorously as he might have wished. And heady rhetoric of the sort produced by William Hay upon the king’s visit to Glasgow belied a range of deeper realities. Eulogising James as ‘that great peacemaker’ and ‘only Phoenix of the World’ – the man who had achieved what others ‘neither by wit, nor force, nor blood’ had been able to accomplish – Hay not only proceeded to describe him as the king who had ‘united two [of] the most warlike nations of the world’ and ‘made a yoke of lions’ but entirely ignored the very insensitivity on James’s part that exacerbated the gaping rifts that still remained. For when even the Scottish bishops objected to the gilded figurines of the apostles and patriarchs that had accompanied the king’s organ to Holyrood, he could not resist a half-sneering letter in which he deplored the ignorance of the native clergy and suggested that his English doctors should give them instruction. Had he ordered figures of dragons and devils instead, he quipped, the Scots would have raised no objection.
And if James’s own prejudices against his countrymen were not proof enough of the gulf between his kingdoms, the now notorious account attributed to Sir Anthony Weldon, who accompanied him on his northern odyssey, rammed the point home with all the cudgel-bluntness so characteristic of English commentators in general. ‘For the country,’ the author begins, ‘I must confess it is too good for those that possess it, and too bad for others … There is great store of fowl – as foul houses and shirts, foul linen, foul dishes and pots, foul trenchers and napkins, with which sort we have been forced to fare …’ But the tirade mounts in intensity as it unfolds. ‘The country,’ we hear, ‘affords no monsters but women … To be chained in marriage with one of them were as to be tied to a dead carcase and cast into a stinking ditch; formosity or a dainty face are things they dream not of …’ ‘And therefore to conclude,’ the account ends, ‘the men of old did no more wonder that the great Messias should be born in so poor a town as Bethlem in Judea, as I do wonder that so brave a prince as King James should be born in so stinking a town as Edinburgh in lousy Scotland …’
So much, then, for any lofty expectations that a union of Crowns might really lead to unity of vision and purpose, and as the king’s entourage rode southward again, leaving Carlisle in August and traversing once more ‘that wild northern country, which no other English sovereign had passed for centuries’, the relief was palpable – not least, it must be said, for many Scots themselves. For the official welcomes and pageants in every city, not to mention the cost of refurbishing seven royal palaces, and the mere expense of housing the English court for four months had taxed Scottish resources to the limit, though this, it seems, was of less than pressing concern to James himself as he continued on his way towards Preston and Hoghton Tower, home of Sir Richard de Hoghton, where on 17 August, at a feast given by the host, he would famously knight ‘Sir Loin of Beef’ for services to his palate. ‘Swan roste, Quailes 6, Redd Deare Pye, Duckes boyld and Shoulder of Mutton roste’ were also made available for the king’s delectation, for, according to the Venetian diplomat Antonio Foscarini, he generally preferred meat to more exotic food, though fruit, and especially melons and cherries, had been specially transported from England during his Scottish stay. Such was Sir Richard’s hospitality, moreover, that he eventually found himself consigned to the Fleet Prison for debt.
By the time that Hoghton Tower was behind him, however, the nagging realisation that his holiday idyll was almost over was doubtless weighing upon James increasingly heavily. On his journey south, he had revelled in the Lancashire countryside, hunting the stag and making a special visit to Hoghton’s alum mines. Knowing of Sir Richard’s involvement in the famous Pendle witch trial, he had also, it seems, encountered a group of witches, though he had gone on to insist that they should be kept beyond the outer walls. But his homeward journey through Coventry, Warwick and Compton Wyngates, and arrival at Windsor on 12 September offered little consolation for the ennui, sickness and vexation in store. According to the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Batista Lionello, James was eventually met in London by ‘five hundred of the leading burgesses on horseback and a countless number of people, who shouted for joy at his return’. But he was soon poorly with arthritis and gout and succeeded, it seems, in spraining his leg in bed. The queen, moreover, was now constantly ill and Christmas at Whitehall appears to have been particularly dull and dreary for the king, though he took some pleasure in a gift from the Czar of Russia, since it was richer than any given to Queen Elizabeth. ‘I am sorry to hear,’ wrote Chamberlain, ‘that he grows every day more froward.’
Even the news of the birth of his second grandson in the Palatinate did not cheer James, and by May of 1618 altogether more ominous news from the same far-off land would plunge all Europe into crisis. The marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V of the Palatinate on St Valentine’s Day 1613, had in Robert Allyn’s words seen England ‘lend her richest gem, to enrich the Rhine’, and the subsequent celebrations matched the significance of an event that would not only result in the creation of the Hanoverian dynasty a hundred years later but carry England into the very heart of European politics. Though the outstandingly extravagant Lords’ Masque was considered ‘long and tedious’ by one observer, all else went so well, it seems, that public officials and ambassadors subsequently applying to the treasury for their ‘Extraordinarys’ were met with the not unfamiliar response that ‘the King is now disfurnished of money’. Spectacular shows and fireworks, costing £9,000 had been staged along the Thames, while the Inns of Court excelled themselves in elaborate entertainments, and Lord Montague lavished £1,500 on frocks for his two daughters. And though the groom had been dismissed by some as ‘a slight edifice on a small foundation’ and was considered ‘too young and small timbred’ by Chamberlain, he was nevertheless a figure of considerable importance: the leader of the Evangelical Union of German Calvinist rulers and one of the so-called electoral princes of the Holy Roman Empire, whose privilege it was, along with the Princes of Saxony and Brandenburg, the King of Bohemia and the Archbishops of Mainz, Treves and Cologne, to elect the Holy Roman Emperor himself when that throne fell vacant.
By 1618, however, a marriage which had initially seemed to confirm James’s credentials as what one contemporary tract termed the ‘King of peace’, was presenting him with the kind of challenge that few could have envisaged when his charming, vivacious, auburn-haired daughter – ‘Th’eclipse and glory of her kind’ – had taken her wedding vows. ‘I have ever, I praise God, kept peace and amity with all,’ James had told his first English parliament before informing MPs how of all ‘the blessings which God hath in my person bestowed upon you’, the first is peace. In flowing from James’s dominions, moreover, peace was to become universal, it seems, as he boasted in 1617 that he had established harmony in all neighbouring lands. ‘Come they not hither,’ asks a tract entitled The Peace-Maker, or Great Brittaines Blessing and written mainly by Lancelot Andrewes with small additions by the king himself, ‘as to the fountain from whence peace springs? Here sits Solomon and hither come the tribes for judgement. O happy moderator, blessed Father, not father of thy country alone, but Father of all thy neighbour countries about thee.’
But the King of England’s chosen self-image of ‘rex pacificus’, like so many of his high-flown aspirations, conformed poorly with earthier realities. Friendly with all nations, allied with Protestant states, on peaceful terms with Spanish territories, the King of England intended to survey from on high an imposing vista of peace and concord on a European scale fashioned by his own hand. But no champion of Protestantism could realistically hope to flirt with Spain, and while James had succeeded with such diplomatic promiscuity in Scotland, he could not hope to do so in his southern realm, where both people and Parliament were hostile to a strategy that was never adequately explained, and where the impending convulsions on the Continent were beyond all hope of mediation. Rightly or otherwise, James was described by the country gentleman, Sir John Oglander, as ‘the most cowardly man I knew’, but the more general claim about his aversion to war as an instrument of policy remains indisputable. ‘He could not,’ wrote Oglander, ‘endure a soldier or to see men drilled’ and ‘to hear of war was death to him’. But now, as Counter-Reformation Germany fractured into armed religious camps, hard-headed Dutchmen pursued their implacable enmity with Spain, and Spain herself assumed the offensive after the assassination of the French king, Henry IV, in 1610, war was not merely the best but the only policy available in the longer term. Indeed, having chosen ‘Beati Pacifici’ – ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ – as his personal motto, James would swiftly discover that peacemakers like himself were much more likely to feel themselves accursed rather than ‘blessed’, since the marriage alliances he had arranged with concord in mind had actually linked the English Crown to the very ruler who would now become one of the main protagonists in the outbreak of Thirty Years’ War.
When the childless Holy Roman Emperor, Matthias, who also held the electoral throne of Bohemia, instructed in 1617 that his Catholic Habsburg cousin, Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, should be nominated as his successor to the Bohemian throne, the native Protestant lords were committed by May of the following year to rebellion. And when the King of England’s son-in-law, Frederick of the Palatinate, pitched into the struggle with wild-eyed promises of support and hopes of wrecking Habsburg power throughout Germany, the blue touch paper was finally lit for the renewal of a general war of religion that had previously been abandoned in exhaustion in 1555. Since the Spanish Habsburgs were bound to come to the rescue of their cousins in Vienna, the danger was already critical, but when Frederick himself subsequently accepted the Crown of Bohemia from the rebels in October 1619, he not only unleashed a catastrophic conflict that had been looming for at least a decade, but at once plunged his father-in-law into the thick of a European maelstrom that he scarcely apprehended.
James’s ignorance had not, however, prevented him from already leaping at a cynical suggestion made by Gondomar as a means of keeping England inactive for a few vital months, that he should mediate between the Bohemians and Ferdinand. ‘The vanity of the present King of England is so great,’ wrote Gondomar, ‘that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be made by this means, so that his authority will be increased.’ And with his mind thus clouded, James had duly dispatched a grandiose mission to Prague, headed by James Hay, who swiftly discovered that his king’s mediation was considered wholly inappropriate not only by Ferdinand, whose military position had improved, but by the Bohemians too, who declared their preference for armed assistance rather than olive branches. And while Hay’s 150 strong entourage vainly crossed and re-crossed Europe at a cost of £30,000, the election of Ferdinand as emperor and his deposition as King of Bohemia unfolded regardless.
Even so, James would be afforded an opportunity for more decisive action in August 1619 when Frederick sent Baron von Dohna to London to seek his advice on the offer of the Bohemian Crown – a prospect which rightly filled the English king with mortal dread. For not only would his personal honour now oblige him to intervene on behalf of his son-in-law, he would be hotly encouraged to do so by his own subjects. His daughter Elizabeth, after all, had already endeared herself to English men and women alike, and her marriage to a sound Calvinist was now a potential rallying call to all seeking firm action in defence of the Protestant cause in Europe. Only if swift action was forthcoming and war was somehow averted by Frederick’s rejection of the Bohemian Crown might James therefore avoid the descent of his own kingdom into the abyss. But he remained, as he himself admitted, ‘in a great strait, being drawn to one side by his children and grandchildren, my own flesh and blood, and to the other side by the truth and by my friendship to Philip [of Spain] and to the House of Austria’. And while James studied the niceties of the Bohemian constitution in quest of an answer, others drew their own conclusions. ‘It seems to me,’ wrote Tillières, the French ambassador, ‘that the intelligence of this king has diminished. Not that he cannot act firmly and well at times and particularly when the peace of the kingdom is involved. But such efforts are not so continual as they once were. His mind uses its power for a short time, but in the long run he is cowardly. His timidity increases him day by day until old age carries him into apprehensions and vices diminish his intelligence.’
And by the time the King of England had finally made up his mind, it was, indeed, already too late. For in October 1619, while his father-in-law hesitated, Frederick duly arrived in Prague to claim his new throne, and in doing so committed what James had already admitted to Baron von Dohna would be an act of insupportable aggression. Since his subjects, James told Frederick’s emissary, were as dear to him as children, he would not ‘embark them in an unjust and needless quarrel’. But while James protested that the Bohemians had committed an outrageous act of rebellion against Ferdinand, their rightful king, and that any assistance to his son-in-law would both wreck his reputation as peacemaker and necessitate a summons of Parliament, he appeared to resort once more to the double game that came so naturally to him. Confiding to the Venetian ambassador his ongoing fear of Catholic plots, James declared how he could not even remain alive except by peace with Spain, and once more blamed Frederick as the usurper of a kingdom not his own. Yet on other occasions, it seems, he was inclined to express himself altogether differently. ‘The king is taking great pains at present,’ the ambassador informed the Venetian Senate on 22 November, ‘to make everybody think so, showing displeasure at the election and at the Palatine’s acceptance without his consent, but those who converse familiarly with him, tête à tête, easily perceive his delight at this new royal title for his son-in-law and daughter.’
Ultimately, James would neither directly discourage Frederick’s acceptance of the Bohemian Crown nor actively support it – merely preferring to imply that he would acquiesce in the accomplished fact. And this was something that even his daughter’s most earnest entreaties could do nothing to alter. Proclaimed upon her arrival by a wildly enthusiastic populace, Bohemia’s ‘Winter Queen’ had given birth on 17 December 1619, to her third son, who was to be known to history as ‘Rupert of the Rhine’. But by September of the following year, she was imploring her brother Charles to be ‘most earnest’ with their father about his ‘slackness to assist us’. And after a year of playing cheerfully and incompetently at their roles as King and Queen of Bohemia, both Elizabeth and her husband were indeed plunged into headlong flight amidst the remnants of their army which had been ripped to shreds by the troops of the Catholic League on 8 November 1620 at the Battle of the White Mountain. Bereft and beleaguered, and facing the imminent conquest of the Palatinate itself by Don Ambrosio Spinola Doria’s Spanish troops, they were now no more than homeless pretenders to a Crown that would never be theirs again.