Global Crisis

by Parker, Geoffrey

  Geography, too, posed a serious challenge to effective government of the new composite state. Even England possessed some ‘dark corners of the land’ (such as Westmoreland and the Cambridgeshire Fens) where few heeded the religious and political measures decreed by London, while much of Wales proved even less tractable. In Ireland rivers and bogs separated the staunchly Catholic hinterland from the Protestant enclaves along the coast and in Ulster. In addition, commands and resources sent from London could take weeks to cross the Irish Sea, which storms or the prevailing westerly winds often rendered impassable. Although James boasted to the English Parliament ‘This I must say for Scotland, and I may truly vaunt it: here I sit and governe it with my pen; I write and it is done’, and although royal messages regularly travelled between London and Edinburgh in four days, in the Highlands and Islands clan chiefs normally ignored the crown and pursued the vicious feuds and rivalries that had lasted for centuries.4

  To overcome such diversity, and to guard ‘against all civill and intestine rebellion’, James strove to foster a common loyalty among his subjects. He assumed the title ‘king of Great Britain’ and stated that ‘his wish above all things was at his death to leave one worship to God, one kingdom entirely governed, [and] one uniformity in laws’ throughout his realms. In Ireland, his agents completed the work of their predecessors in imposing English law and administrative practices until by 1612, according to an official addicted to metaphors, ‘the clock of civil government [in Ireland] is now well set, and all the wheels thereof do move in order; the strings of this Irish harp, which the civil magistrate doth finger, are all in tune’. That ‘tune’ became steadily more Protestant. The Catholics lost their majority in the Irish Parliament, thanks to the grant of Irish peerages to British Protestants and of parliamentary seats to the new towns of Ulster; and when some Catholic leaders protested, James excoriated them as ‘half-subjects of mine, for you give your soul to the pope and to me only the body – and even it, your bodily strength, you divide it between me and the king of Spain’. His efforts to advance both the religious and political influence of Ireland's Protestant minority therefore continued.5

  James also strove to ‘Anglicize’ his native Scotland. In secular affairs he worked through the Privy Council, a body of nobles and officials sitting in Edinburgh whose proclamations had the force of law. After 1612, a standing committee of the Scottish Parliament, known as the ‘Lords of the Articles’, prepared legislation for ratification by the full assembly and enabled James to control the parliamentary agenda. Sometimes arguments arose over the imposition of taxes – which tripled between 1606 and 1621 – but every increase eventually received approval. The only area of policy where James encountered spirited resistance was religion. When he returned to Scotland in person in 1617 and tried to impose English liturgical practices on the General Assembly of the Church, his efforts provoked the first public discussion in Stuart Britain of the limits of royal authority. When the Presbyterian minister David Calderwood explained his refusal to obey the king's direct commands on worship, James shot back:

  King. I will tell thee, man, what is obedience. The centurion, when he said to his servants, to this man, Goe, and he goeth, to that man, Come, and he cometh: that is obedience.

  Calderwood. To suffer, Sir, is also obedience, howbeit not of that same kind …

  King. Consider, I am here. I am a king. I may demand of you when and what I will.

  Although James silenced Calderwood for a time by ordering him to be deported to Virginia, he lost the argument because any ruler who finds it necessary to justify his authority to his subjects automatically undermines it.6

  Shortly after this exchange, foreign events began to undermine the king's authority further. Elector Frederick of the Palatinate, husband of James's daughter Elizabeth, accepted the crown of Bohemia and provoked a counter-attack by both Austrian and Spanish Habsburg forces, who confiscated his hereditary lands (see chapter 8 above). James decided to assist his son-in-law in two ways: first, by sending him money and (later and very grudgingly) troops; and second, by seeking to marry his son and heir Charles to a Spanish princess, with the restoration of the Palatinate to Frederick as (in effect) her dowry. When marriage negotiations languished, in 1623 Prince Charles travelled to Madrid together with the duke of Buckingham, his father's Favourite, to advance his suit in person. Meanwhile, to facilitate the ‘Spanish Match’, James relaxed anti-Catholic penal laws in England – a move guaranteed to alarm and alienate his Protestant subjects at any time, but especially during an economic depression.

  The El Niño autumn of 1621 brought torrential rains that ruined the harvest throughout Britain. In Scotland, ‘there was never seene in this countrie in so short a time suche inequalitie of prices of victuall; never greatter fear of famine nor scarsitie of seede to sow the ground’. Before long, ‘everie man was carefull to ease himself of suche persones as he might spaire’ – that is, to dismiss employees and servants. ‘Pitifull was the lamentation not onlie of vaging [wandering] beggars, but also of honest persons.’ Northern England also saw many ‘wandering beggars’. In 1623 the vicar of Greystoke in Cumbria buried ‘a poor fellow destitute of succour’ in January; ‘a poor hunger-starving beggar child’ and ‘a poor hunger-starved beggar boy’ in March; and ‘a poor man destitute of means to live’ in May. Marriages in Greystoke and elsewhere in England plunged to their lowest point between 1580 and 1640 (because no one could afford to set up a new home) while conceptions fell by half (either through abstention or amenorrhoea). Even in areas that normally exported grain, the magistrates feared that ‘this time of so extraordinary a want both of corn and of work’ would ‘breed in those of their condition a dangerous desperation’.7

  Amid such tensions, and with English tracts, poems and sermons railing against the ‘Spanish Match’, some foreign ambassadors predicted rebellion should Prince Charles bring back a Spanish bride. Instead, the marriage negotiations failed and the prince's return as a bachelor precipitated ecstatic rejoicing. Charles and Buckingham became national heroes and they exploited their popularity by persuading James to declare war against Spain, primarily to put pressure on Philip IV to restore Frederick of the Palatinate's confiscated estates. To pay for the war, James summoned Parliament, where Charles and Buckingham persuaded the House of Commons first to impeach a minister who opposed the war and then to vote £300,000 in new taxes to fight it.

  Although this assembly earned the epithet ‘Felix Parliamentum, the happy Parliament’, it created two serious problems for Charles. First, resort to impeachment (common in the fifteenth century but little used since then) set a dangerous precedent that could be used against any royal official who displeased Parliament. Second, as James himself had observed many years before, ‘a wise king will not make warre against another, without he first make provision of money’ – but in 1624, although the war with Spain was predicted to cost £1 million a year, the English treasury had no such ‘provision’. This shortage made the crown a hostage to Parliament as long as hostilities lasted, and Charles reconvened Parliament as soon as he succeeded his father in March 1625, and requested more funds to prosecute the war. The acrimonious debates that marked this and the three subsequent sessions destroyed both the king's popularity and the national unity created by the failure of the Spanish Match. In the words of Richard Cust, the king's most perceptive biographer, ‘Charles's honeymoon with the English people was over’. How did it end so fast?8

  ‘The crisis of Parliaments’

  One major reason for popular disenchantment in the later 1620s lay beyond Charles's control. No sooner had he secured a declaration of war on Spain than another run of poor harvests drove up food prices and drastically reduced the demand for manufactured goods. The magistrates in Buckinghamshire in 1625 complained that poverty ‘enforces many to steal or starve’, while those of Lincolnshire thought the ‘country was never in that want it now is’ and reported that thousands had ‘sold all they have, even to their bed-straw, and ca
nnot get work to earn any money. Dog's flesh is a dainty dish, and found upon search in many houses.’ Meanwhile plague broke out in London, killing some 40,000 people and halting trade. In Essex, normally a prosperous county, ‘Scarce any man has half an ordinary crop of corn, clothiers have no vent [sale] of their wares, graziers and marketmen have no sale on account of the infection in London.’ The adverse weather continued: on the Isle of Wight, normally a grain-exporting region, a landowner noted in 1627 that ‘the coldness of the summer and the great fall of rain in August and September’ ruined the harvest; while ‘the winter of 1629 was one of the wettest that ever I knew. It rained almost every other day’, killing most of the cattle and destroying the winter wheat. At the same time, a smallpox epidemic of particular virulence killed and disfigured many people as well as disrupting travel and trade. Charles could hardly have chosen a worse time to wage war.9

  The king exacerbated the situation with two policy decisions. First, in the hope of creating an anti-Habsburg alliance to support his Palatine policy, he proposed marriage to Henrietta Maria of France – but her brother Louis XIII demanded a measure of toleration for English Catholics before he would consent. Accordingly, Charles suspended the penal laws again, provoking the predictable anti-Catholic agitation. Second, he and Buckingham (still the royal Favourite and chief minister) decided to spend the funds voted by Parliament for the new war on two ambitious ventures: an army to raise the Spanish siege of the Dutch city of Breda and a fleet to capture the Spanish port city of Cádiz. By the time Charles met his second Parliament in 1626, both operations had failed (see chapter 9 above) and these setbacks, combined with famine, plague and the failure to persecute Catholics, produced widespread exasperation.

  The English Parliament was a volatile body. With almost 150 peers in the House of Lords and almost 600 members in the House of Commons, it formed the largest representative assembly in the entire early modern world; and, since every freeman with property worth £2 could vote, a general election of ‘Members of Parliament’ (MPs, as those who sat in the Commons were known) could involve up to 500,000 people. Moreover, since both Houses normally held their debates in the Palace of Westminster, which also housed the central law courts, Parliament functioned under the gaze of thousands of spectators: lawyers, petitioners and supplicants; servants, families and advisers; those who wished to see and be seen; those who sought to influence the outcome (Fig. 35). Finally, London itself – where almost one-third of all families lived at or below the poverty line, and perhaps 6,000 young men and women arrived each year in search of employment – constituted an enormous reservoir of potential unrest. Securing approval for the crown's proposals, and avoiding any attempt to exploit the crown's fiscal needs to extract concessions, therefore required careful ‘management’ not only of general elections and of the two Houses, but also of the capital in time of Parliament. No seventeenth-century government succeeded in these vital tasks, creating a fundamental and recurring instability at the heart of the state.10

  35. Plan of the Palace of Westminster, England. Parliament and the Law Courts shared the same complex of buildings at Westminster. The House of Commons met in St Stephen's Chapel (7), but members could enter and exit in various ways, including by ‘Parliament Stairs’ to the river Thames (39), used by the ‘Five Members’ when Charles I came to the Commons to arrest them in January 1642.

  Charles summoned and then dissolved Parliament three times between 1626 and 1629. In each instance, the House of Commons began by blaming the crown for pursuing disastrous policies and demanded redress for its grievances before it would vote money to fund the king's wars; Charles took offence at its demands, tried to bully it into submission by arresting recalcitrant members; and when those efforts failed, he dissolved it. Since the war with Spain continued, in the absence of parliamentary funding the government raised money by demanding loans from leading subjects (and imprisoning those who refused) and by enforcing regalian rights (such as billeting soldiers in private households). But Charles's decision in 1627 to declare war on France as well forced him to summon another Parliament. Much was at stake when it met the following year. As one MP put it, ‘This is the crisis of Parliaments. By this we shall know if Parliaments will live or die’, adding perceptively that ‘our lives, our fortunes, our religion, depend on the resolution of this assembly’, because ‘if the king draws one way, and the people another, we must all sink’.11 Some MPs nevertheless refused to vote further taxes until Charles had redressed what they saw as the abuses of previous years, invoking principles and precedents drawn from a careful study of history and the Classics. ‘Every man knows,’ stated one MP about billeting, that ‘our houses are our castles, and to have such “guests” put upon us, our wives, and children, is a violation of the laws’. ‘The subject of our discourse is to vindicate the fundamental liberties of the kingdom,’ claimed another. After several weeks of wide-ranging debate, MPs incorporated their various grievances into a single document, known as ‘The Petition of Right’, which not only required the crown to cease billeting soldiers and sailors in private homes and to stop subjecting civilians to martial law, but also forbade the imposition of taxes without parliamentary consent and the imprisonment of any subject without showing due cause – two prerogatives that Charles regarded as an integral part of monarchical power. They also begged Charles to ‘take a further view of the present state of your realme’ and to dismiss his Favourite, the duke of Buckingham, whom they blamed for ‘the miserable disasters and ill successe that hath accompanied all your late designes and actions’. The king once again responded with an immediate dissolution of Parliament.12

  By the time Charles made peace with both France and Spain in 1630, his debts totalled four times his annual revenues. In addition, both economic malaise and bad weather continued. The year 1629 saw ‘so wonderful and great a flood as had not been seen of forty years'; 1630 saw widespread harvest failure; the summer of 1632 was ‘the coldest that any then living ever knew'; spring 1633 was ‘wet, cold and windy’ and the following autumn ‘a marvellous ill seed-time'; summer 1634 brought drought; and the following winter saw such ‘very intense cold’ that the entire Thames froze over. Then came two summer droughts, that of 1636 so ‘excessive’ that ‘everyone declares that there is no memory of such a misfortune in England, whose usually damp climate is so changed that the trees and the land are despoiled of their verdure, as if it were a most severe winter’.13

  Nevertheless, Charles managed to govern without Parliament for 11 years – in part because England's foreign trade underwent a rapid expansion: since war ravaged Europe while Britain enjoyed peace, many merchants shipped their wares through English ports, despite high customs duties. By 1639 the king had both paid off his debts and raised his annual revenues to £900,000, almost twice as much as a decade before. Customs duties accounted for only half the crown's increased income, however. Much of the rest came from the ruthless enforcement of ‘regalian rights’, such as fines for encroaching on royal forests, fees from those eligible to become knights, and (most lucrative of all) ‘Ship Money’, a levy to pay for the Royal Navy. Legal doubts surrounded every one of these extra-parliamentary income streams. The customs duties consisted principally of an ancient tax known as ‘tonnage and poundage’, which the 1625 Parliament had granted to Charles for only one year; thereafter his officers collected it without parliamentary approval. ‘Forest fines’ increased largely because crown lawyers arbitrarily extended the boundaries of the royal forests to their former, medieval limits; while Ship Money, which had no precedent except in maritime counties, was now collected everywhere. When a few courageous subjects challenged the legality of each of these levies, Charles brought a test case to the law courts – and each time his judges ruled in his favour. The king's courts, formerly the arbiters of his subjects’ lives, had become partisan protagonists. When in 1637 the judges upheld the legality of Ship Money, some landholders in Kent argued that their king was now ‘more absolute than eyther France
or the great duke of Tuscany’.14

  Charles also strove to become ‘more absolute’ in religious matters. Although he neglected the penal laws against Catholics, he persecuted Presbyterians. Throughout the 1630s his bishops enforced conformity to the doctrine and liturgy of the Church of England by summoning resisters – and there were thousands of them – to the church courts and, when convicted, handing down harsh punishments. Those who remained unbowed came before the king's courts, especially the Courts of High Commission and Star Chamber, where they received even harsher punishments. The most spectacular example occurred in 1637, shortly after the Ship Money decision, when Star Chamber condemned three prominent critics of episcopacy: William Prynne, Henry Burton and John Bastwick. All three were gentlemen who had attended university and also received professional training (Prynne as a lawyer, Burton as a preacher, Bastwick as a physician). At the instigation of William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury and the king's principal adviser on ecclesiastical affairs, the judges of Star Chamber (which included Laud) charged each man with seditious libel and condemned them to pay the enormous fine of £5,000 (equivalent to perhaps £1 million today); to life imprisonment without access to their family or to pen, ink or paper; and, despite their elite status, to have their ears sliced off by the common hangman in a degrading public ceremony. Such savagery, coupled with flagrant contempt for social status, caused widespread outrage. Many regarded the three men as martyrs.15