19
‘This I must say for Scotland. Here I sit and governe it with my Pen, I write and it is done, and by a Clearke of the Councell I governe Scotland now, which others could not do by the sword.’
James I to the English Parliament, 1607
Some twenty-six years before his death, when the Crowns of England and Ireland were still by no means guaranteed him, James had earnestly urged his heir ‘once in three yeares to visit all your kingdomes’, and in the early months after his succession to the English throne, this precept appears to have remained fixed in his thinking. In 1603, indeed, he had left his homeland amid farewells rather than goodbyes, and in August of the same year negotiated the purchase of the manor of Southwell from the Archbishop of York, making it clear that he required a half-way hunting and resting spot on his regular journeys north. Yet within a year of his accession, the postal service to Edinburgh had been greatly improved by proclamation, and thereafter some sixty royal letters a year, laden with directives, inquiries, exhortations and admonitions, were soon being diligently dispatched along the rugged Great North Road. Ruling a far-off land that was now inclined to peace did not, it seems, entail the king’s personal presence in the way that he himself had envisaged, though the Scottish council register leaves no doubt of James’s ongoing absorption in Scottish affairs. Even with the passing of the years, moreover, as his councillors became more and more adept at tempering or blunting his less judicious instructions, they continued to do so under close supervision and in their sovereign’s best interest. For, as the Earl of Mar told James’s successor in 1626, ‘a hundred times your worthy father has sent down directions to us which we have stayed, and he has given us thanks for it when we have informed him of the truth’.
Certainly, upon his arrival in London in 1603, James had no intention of appointing a Lord Deputy for his native realm, though his need for worthy assistants remained paramount. At first, his right-hand man was Alexander Seton, Earl of Dunfermline, who had served as one of his cost-cutting ‘Octavians’ in 1596, though when faced with the revival of Presbyterian opposition in 1606, James duly opted for the firmer hand of George Home, Lord Treasurer of Scotland from 1601 and later Earl of Dunbar. By travelling between the English capital and Edinburgh at least once a year, and attending the king on his summer hunting expeditions, Home kept his master closely apprised of events north of the Border, regardless of the personal inconvenience and tedium that the royal passion for ‘sport’ imposed upon him. Ultimately, such distractions would be remedied by tireless effort and clarity of purpose, as the Scottish privy council became under his guidance a loyal, cohesive and potent instrument of centralised control. Indeed, until his death in 1611, Home remained the lynchpin of the king’s avowed policy of maintaining an integral political connection between his two kingdoms. And the reinstatement of the Earl of Dunfermline thereafter did nothing to undermine the ongoing process of consolidation. On the contrary, James could not have been more fortunate in enjoying the services of two such talented and selfless assistants, as he demonstrated the art of absentee kingship with a degree of efficiency and finesse he would rarely achieve in England itself.
To its very great credit, the Scottish Privy Council, dominated as it was by a dedicated core of office holders, not only maintained but extended the ambit of royal control. On the one hand, laws imposing heavy penalties for ‘the ungodly and barbarous and brutal custom of deadly feuds’ were strikingly affirmed in 1613 by the execution of Lord John Maxwell after the murder of the Laird of Johnstone who had been slain by a gunshot to the back some five years earlier. Border raiding, too, declined as James strove ‘utterlie to extinguishe as well the name as substance of the bordouris’ in an effort to create a peaceful region of ‘middle shires’. Dunbar’s influence as a Borderer himself proved particularly invaluable in this respect, and in 1605 a joint Anglo-Scottish commission was established to stabilise the six Border counties, employing a small cavalry force which was ultimately dissolved in 1621 as a result of Cranfield’s economies. Meanwhile, in an attempt to add teeth to his general policy of pacification, James also determined to introduce Justices of Peace on the English model, though by the time of his death they were still present in less than a quarter of Scottish territory.
As James governed from London, there were further efforts, too, to extend the sway of central authority in the Western Isles. In 1608 an expedition under the command of Lord Ochiltree, which had been dispatched to collect royal rents, resulted in the peaceful apprehension of a number of Highland chiefs, after which the Scottish council pursued a policy of co-operation encapsulated in the Statutes of Iona, whereby the chiefs’ authority over their followers was recognised in return for an agreement that they would act as agents of royal jurisdiction within their domains. Restrictions on alcohol and the size of lords’ households further undermined the time-honoured Gaelic pastime of fighting and feasting, and, most importantly of all for the longer term, the same lords were not only encouraged to abandon their residual Catholicism for the Protestant Kirk, but to educate their eldest sons in Lowland schools. The influx of Gaelic-speaking Protestant clergy, who made a reality of the parish system and turned it into a powerful agent of social order, was merely one more factor assisting the crucial process of Scottish state building, which had still been very much a work in progress when James first ventured south in 1603.
Only on Orkney, in fact, where sheer distance from Edinburgh allowed Earl Patrick, a distant royal cousin, to rule as a princeling, was there determined resistance to the Scottish privy council. After disregarding the Statutes of Iona, the earl was soon at odds, too, with Bishop James Law, a commissioner for the Northern Isles since 1610 who became a royal revenue collector in 1612. Ultimately, however, even ‘Black Patie’ would find himself bridled by the hangman’s noose in 1615, after a brief attempt at rebellion, which was systematically crushed by the Earl of Caithness and followed by the earldom of Orkney’s retention by the Crown. When, moreover, Caithness fell into debt and contemptuously disregarded the Edinburgh legal proceedings brought by his creditors, he too was driven into exile by the Scottish council in 1623.
Such victories were not, it is true, achieved without cost. Certainly, the last years of James’s reign witnessed the onset of autocratic tendencies that boded ill for the future. In particular, the Five Articles of Perth, introduced in 1617 and forced through Parliament in 1621, were a direct affront to religious feeling in the king’s homeland. ‘I am ever for the medium in every thing’, James had professed characteristically in 1607. ‘Between foolish rashness and extreme length there is a middle way.’ But the understanding of Scottish problems which had done so much to compensate for the potential difficulties of absentee rule was gradually deserting him in his declining years. As early as 1607, in fact, James was remarking of his countrymen north of the Border how ‘I doe not already know the one halfe of them by face, most of the youth now being risen up to be men, who were but children when I was there’. And by 1621 a new political divide had emerged in the king’s northern Parliament after the Earl of Rothes and Lord Balmerino, among others, found their complaints against the Five Articles and the effects of heavy taxation blocked by an unsympathetic phalanx of royal appointees.
In the third and most troubled of his kingdoms, meanwhile, James had neither personal links nor any trace of direct experience to guide him. At the time of his succession, Ireland lay stricken and seething, with links to Rome as strong as ever and any prospect of economic recovery rendered all the more unlikely by a grievous debasement of the currency that had fractured commerce and impoverished the populace. So when news of Elizabeth I’s death reached Waterford, Cork and Clonmel, Ireland’s principal towns, the resulting euphoria had been palpable. The books of Protestant clergymen were, one Irish Jesuit reported, summarily burned ‘and the ministers themselves hunted away’, whereupon ‘masses and processions were celebrated as frequently and upon as grand a scale as in Rome itself’. In the wake of the queen’s death, moreover, Irish men and women had continued to nurture exaggerated hopes of her prospective successor who was, of course, himself the son of a Catholic martyr and king of a land which during the 1560s and 1590s had supplied some 25,000 fearsome ‘gallowglass’ mercenaries to serve across the Irish Sea in the conflict against English expansionism.
By June 1605, in fact, fervent calls for freedom of worship had been roundly thwarted by a royal proclamation in which James made clear that he would never ‘confirm the hopes of any creatures that they should ever have from him any toleration to exercise any religion than that which is agreeable to God’s word and is established by the laws of the realm’. Yet James’s other early actions remained laudable, since he knew full well that his orders for Catholic priests to leave his realms were nowhere more unenforceable than in Ireland where ‘every town, hamlet and house was to them a sanctuary’, and in practice gave scant encouragement to those elements in the Dublin government favouring wholesale repression. ‘He would much rejoice,’ he professed, ‘if the Irish Catholics would conform themselves to his religion, yet he would not force them to forsake their own.’ And in the meantime there was a broader attempt at Anglo-Irish reconciliation, delivered by Elizabeth’s victorious general Lord Mountjoy who restored the rebel Earl of Tyrone to his lands and bestowed upon his ally, Rory O’Donnell, the earldom of Tyrconnell in September 1603. More importantly still, perhaps, James had promptly decided to override Cecil’s worries about a silver shortage, to upgrade the Irish coinage in the same month. For the first time, therefore, a fixed rate of exchange was established, with the result that English coinage was soon circulating freely in former enemy territory and facilitating a marked improvement in both internal and external trade.
Once more, predictably, the king’s success was by no means unalloyed. Sir Arthur Chichester, who became Lord Deputy in 1604, disagreed profoundly, for example, with Mountjoy’s earlier moderation and opted instead for colonisation. Despising the Irish as ‘beasts in the shape of men’, he sought, it seems, to ‘civilise’ the land by demolishing the local power bases of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, and encouraging the plantation of Protestant settlers. The result was the so-called ‘flight of the earls’ in 1607, and the clumsy application of a policy of settlement that James had previously applied with limited success in his own Scottish Isles. Despite a substantial flow of English and, above all, Scottish tenant farmers into Ulster from 1609 onwards, in which James took a close personal interest, numbers were never sufficient to corral the native Irish into restricted areas which could be easily controlled, and the king’s first practical project to push forward his ideal of a ‘greater Britain’ succeeded only in creating a hostile class of Catholic under-tenants who remained cheaper for the settlers to employ than further migrants. Thus were the seeds of a disastrous future conflict sown.
In the meantime, the central problem of Ireland, as far as the English government was concerned, remained finance. Between 1604 and 1619, the annual subsidy sent from England stood at over £47,000 and Cranfield’s boast to Buckingham that he would make the land self-sufficient was never made good. On the contrary, the English Parliament of 1622 attacked corruption and royal prodigality in James’s third kingdom, and when Viscount Falkland became Lord Deputy in 1622, and opted to enforce the recusancy laws as a means of raising money, the threat to internal stability, fuelled by declining relations with Spain, escalated ominously. ‘Ireland is such,’ wrote the Venetian ambassador in the year of Falkland’s appointment, ‘that it would be better for the king if it did not exist and the sea alone rolled there.’ And a month before James’s death, in spite of his personal intervention to curtail the Dublin government’s escalation of religious persecution, John Chamberlain reflected London opinion all too aptly by describing Ireland as ‘tickle and ready to revolt’.
Yet a commission appointed to assess the state of the country in 1622 still made clear the changes of James’s reign. English law was steadily replacing Irish, English counties had been introduced as units of local government, and the merchant companies of the City of London were building new ports at Derry and Coleraine. And although the commission’s report was never published, largely because of its criticisms of Buckingham’s ravenously self-interested clients, there was other evidence, too, of a genuine Jacobean achievement in Ireland. ‘The love of money,’ observed Oliver St John, Chichester’s replacement as Lord Deputy in 1615, ‘will sooner effect civility than any other persuasion whatsoever.’ And where famine had stalked the country during the 1590s, Irish towns now enjoyed greater prosperity than for centuries, as significant communities of artisans, merchants and moneylenders took root, and itinerant pedlars forged networks of internal trade between urban centres and the surrounding countryside. Through wardships and intermarriage, meanwhile, many leading families such as the Fitzgerald earls of Kildare acquired English educations and English wives, as well as links with Scottish noble families.
Overall, the administration of an imperial monarchy encompassing three kingdoms inevitably entailed considerable structural tensions at the heart of government. Resentment at the king’s absence, problems over the disposal of offices and the sharing of war costs, conflicts over trade and colonies, foreign intervention and above all religion were all, in fact, ongoing problems for James to grapple with. Some, indeed, played no small part in triggering the civil war that ultimately consumed his heir and may yet, four centuries later, put paid to his unifying aspirations once and for all. For if conflicts of faith have thankfully receded, modern-day resentment at centralised control from long distance and antagonism over fiscal propriety now rankle with new vigour. Under such circumstances, James’s absentee kingship of his Gaelic realms may well seem increasingly impressive across the centuries, though there is still, perhaps, no small irony in this, since it was precisely because he ruled his outlying kingdoms from afar that those personal indiscretions and inadequacies, frequently so damaging to his English dealings, were unable to compromise his nobler, wiser aspirations. If England, in truth, never consistently warmed to its resident Scottish king, his fellow countrymen and their Irish counterparts experienced no few benefits in his absence. And it remains one of the more curious features of British history that the descendants of ‘the king’s barbarians’ – those savage Irish and brutish Highlanders whom he equally despised – would become, in the fullness of time, the most loyal supporters of his Catholic grandson and that grandson’s ill-starred heirs.