This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  How Carey could ever have imagined that Cecil would let him off lightly, or that the King would fight his corner against Cecil, is hard to fathom. Cecil told the King that Carey should be dismissed and the King agreed. No one, not even a kinsman of Elizabeth, put anything over a Cecil.

  On 24 March James was proclaimed monarch by the ‘Lords Spirituall and Temporall’ who made up the Privy Council. The seventeenth-century wording of that first proclamation reflected the sense of uncomplicated achievement of Robert Cecil: ‘James the sixt king of Scotland, is now by the death of our late Soveraigne, Queene of England of famous memorie, become also our Onely, Lawfull, Lineall and Rightfull Liege Lord, James the first, king of England, France26 and Ireland, defender of the faith.’27

  The final lines of the proclamation announced, as ever, the complete loyalty of every courtier, noble, justice, sheriff and bailiff, constable and whoever came to mind and that those of the highest and the lowest of authority would ever be at hand to assist:

  Ayding and assisting from time to time in all things that are or shalbe necessary for the preventing, resisting, and suppressing of any disorderly assemblies, or other unlawfull Acte or Attempt, eithe rin worde or deede, against the publique peace of the Realme, or any way prejudiciall to the Right, honour, State or Person, of our only Undoubted and deere Lord and Soveraigne that now is James the first king of all the said Kingdomes, as they will avoyd the perill of his Majesties heavie indignation, and their owne utter ruine and confusion

  The welcome for the new monarch had to be tempered by the real or contrived sorrow for the passing of the old one. The obedience and love of the people for Elizabeth had waned during her final years. Some had been anxious that her passing should not be delayed. Elizabeth had not thought to apologize for the unconscionable time she was taking to find an exit from her sovereign duties. When she went, the mourning dresses were worn, but so was the indifference on the sleeves of even her close courtiers. The delicate mask between sadness and joy was exquisitely demonstrated in Thomas Millington’s opening sentence describing the procession of James VI south to London: ‘James had his kingdom. He now had to ride south to claim it.’

  There is an odd parallel with James VI and some Eastern European States at the end of the twentieth century. Once free of their former frontiers, many East Europeans saw Western Europe as a honey-pot. For years they had been impressed by the post-war economic miracle and the richness of their West German cousins, French, Italian and British. There had to be plenty of money in the West and surely one only had to ask for it. The Scottish court in 1603 was penniless and draughty. The English throne, surely, sat in the middle of a honeypot. James could not believe anything else. He had sensed the wealth and touched much of it. Travellers’ tales alone encouraged him and his courtiers to believe that the Palace of Whitehall housed the Promised Land. He was not the only one who sensed richness.

  Knights and sundry gentlemen were arriving in Edinburgh by the hour. They had come not, as so often in the past, to contest authority, but to pledge their allegiances and their hopes of preferment. One of the first to arrive from England was John Paiton, the son of the Lieutenant of the Tower of London, Sir John Paiton. The Tower represented constabular authority of the capital. Since William the Norman, the Tower had cast its own authority across the minds of even the most powerful, although its sinister reputation owed something to a sense of pragmatism that would persist among the English nomenklatura until the eighteenth century. The significance of Paiton’s arrival was not lost on James. Perhaps then, James felt a little more assured when, on Thursday 31 March 1603, he was proclaimed King of England, Scotland, Ireland and France at the Market Cross in Edinburgh. That night bonfires were lit in Scotland and burned brightly beyond dawn the next day. With James as King of Scotland, and staying at his castle in Scotland, then the nation had a leader with whom any would-be enemy, usurper or diplomatic opportunist would first have to reckon. Yet if James were going south to England and, worse still, to London, was it not true that Scotland was not at all gaining authority and kudos, but was losing a monarch and therefore power? James, of course, because of his nature, was inclined to construe any sense of gloom about his departure as a feeling of sadness for him personally. Rather magnanimously James assured his people that he would always love them even though far away and he would make a point of visiting Scotland once every three years. The truth was that most members of James’s court were simply longing to get away to London and its promise of everything Edinburgh did not have: good living, authority and, more importantly, a bottomless Exchequer to pay for it all – or so they thought.

  Cecil had already supposed that it was going to be more costly to run the Scottish King than it had been to support the English Queen. Elizabeth was often known for her meanness, perhaps a euphemism for being broke. There was trouble enough in the State without Scottish hands in the nation’s bullion. On the journey south James had knighted 300 good men – that is, those on whom he could count if everything went terribly wrong. At Cambridge he rested on 28 April because this was the day of Elizabeth’s funeral.

  Elizabeth’s corpse was embalmed and bound in waxed cotton. The lead coffin was brought after two days, the body placed in it and left for a further five days. Elizabeth’s remains were then taken to the river at Richmond, placed upon a torch-lit barge and carried to Westminster where they lay in private state at the Palace of Whitehall. Westminster Hall was hung with mourning cloths and banners and the casket removed there. It was the King’s duty, not the Church’s, nor Cecil’s, to give the orders for her funeral. He, of course, wanted to get it over very quickly so that he could get into his capital. Arrangements for royal funerals take time. Even kings-in-waiting must learn patience. Thus, it was not until 28 April that the coffin was borne by a hearse drawn by four horses draped in black mourning velvet to Westminster Abbey.

  Atop the coffin was a life-size model of the Queen. It was fully robed and crowned; in one wax hand the orb, in the other the sceptre of State. Six earls held her regal canopy above the wax doll. Behind the hearse, again in a tradition observed even today, the Master of Horse led the Queen’s riderless but saddled horse. Elizabeth’s chief mourner, the Marchioness of Northampton, was followed by a column of noblewomen each, like the Marchioness, black-cloaked and hooded. Behind them followed almost 1,300, similarly dressed in black. Here was her realm, representative of the highest peerage and office to more than 200 of the very poor. The City of London followed with their Lord Mayor and, bringing up at the rear, the halberdiers of the Gentlemen Pensioners headed by the doomed captain of their guard, Ralegh.

  Thousands in the street watched and wept as the image of their late sovereign passed. The coffin was carried into the abbey, and her Archbishop, Whitgift, read the service. The coffin was, that afternoon of 28 April, taken to the vault in the Henry VII Chapel and placed with the casket of Mary, the Queen’s sister. Then came the final act of the symbolism of authority: the most senior of Elizabeth’s courtiers, her Gentlemen, stepped to the vault and each snapped his white stick of office and tossed the broken rod on to the coffin. Their duty discharged. Her authority ended. James mounted for London. The people started to gather in greater numbers than ever.

  On 3 May, James moved on to Theobalds, Robert Cecil’s house in present-day Hertfordshire. The great officers of State gathered with their monarch: the Lord Treasurer, the Lord Keeper, the Lord Admiral and the now, King’s Council. It was time to mix and match his Privy Councillors. Scottish nobles were added to the Council, including the Earl of Mar, the Duke of Lennox, the Treasurer of Scotland Sir George Home and Lord Kinloss, now to be Master of the Rolls. Of the English, he picked (or had recommended to him by Cecil) Lord Thomas Howard (whom he trusted as one who had warned him of the devilment of some – notably Ralegh) as Lord Chamberlain. He managed to find time to create another twenty-eight knights. Many of these knighthoods did not bring power, but the recipients already had some at least and, of course, they did brin
g, for the moment, unquestionable loyalty.

  Hordes in their thousands had gathered around Theobalds to catch sight of the new monarch. The people had rightly mourned and so now they celebrated their good fortune at having a quiet transition. Yet again we have to remember how people would have lived during this period. While lives were simpler than those in later centuries, certainly the twentieth, there was a need to recognize rank for what it could provide. The symbolism of leadership is very important, particularly in a society ruled so distinctly. If Elizabeth was indeed the last monarch to command the absolute obedience of her people, then this thought suggests that the people quite liked the idea of being obedient. The people’s obeisance was not to a constitutional convention and thus it relied heavily on the personality not of the monarchy, which was accepted, but the monarch, which sometimes was not. As that personality faded so the people waited anxiously for a new era. By March 1603 they had waited long enough. By the end of April the torches of welcome were lit both in James’s honour and the expectations of the people.

  The sheriff and livery of Middlesex greeted James as he approached the capital, just as the sheriffs of each county had met him at the Borders to hand him with dignity to the next sheriff in accordance with Cecil’s instructions. Finally, James was met as he came to London by Sir Robert Lee, the Lord Mayor, who still had five months of his office to run, and 500 velvet-cloaked and gold-chained attendants. Even now this was not the moment to enter the city. This new pageant rode across the fields to Charterhouse and the home of Lord Thomas Howard. Here James rested for three days, but found the energy to eat sumptuously and dub 130 more people as knights. From Charterhouse the procession on the fourth day approached the Thames at Aldergate and there James embarked on the royal barge accompanied by a flotilla of cadet vessels. It appears that he had intended to land at Whitehall, but the coxswain overshot so James went on to the Tower – always a disturbing thought for monarchs. He gazed on the great cannon and then landed at King’s Stairs where Sir Thomas Conisby, Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber, presented James with the sword of the city. James stayed the night in the Tower, relaxed in the knowledge that he was master of all he had at last surveyed and everything that he had not. His island peoples were going much further than he, James, had ever imagined. The transition from Tudors to Stuarts was coincidental with the step-change of British commercial exploration and exploitation that would establish holdings in Asia that would be remembered, more than anywhere else, as the beginnings of the British Empire.

  By the end of the Tudors, in 1603, relations in Europe had changed or were changing and the expansion of colonial ideas was fixed in British minds. From 1603, we can talk about the British rather than just the English because in that year the new monarch, James I, coined the constitutional use of the phrase, Great Britain. James I made a priority the first year of his reign to stop the war between Spain and Britain. It was fruitless in the military and constitutional sense. It was far too expensive. It frustrated imperial ambition.

  Britain now saw the wider horizons more clearly. For example, when in 1587 Drake had captured the Portuguese ship, the San Felipe, he had, apart from the fortune on board, come across the logs and navigational charts that literally opened his eyes to the secrets so jealously guarded by the Portuguese trading in the East Indies. In the 1590s these secrets were so exposed that when the ships fitted out by Sir John Lancaster began returning to England with exotic cargoes from the Far East, investors lined up to finance what would become the English East India Company.

  If Stuart England under its first monarch was a dour society, the whole period of Stuart dynasty was far more important in the nation’s imperial history than the seemingly more romantic Elizabethan age. The years between the start of the Stuarts in 1603 and the Hanoverians in 1714 was the founding century of the counting house that was the British Empire. For example, twelve of the thirteen American colonies28 were established in that period. In the West Indies, the British-held islands produced enormous wealth, mainly through sugar plantations. Lancaster’s East India Company overwhelmed anything that the Dutch, and before them the Portuguese, had managed in Asia. By the time the Hanoverians arrived the first British Empire was established and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713–14) that followed the Duke of Marlborough’s victories in Europe would simply consolidate that imperial holding.

  This first stage of empire building had much to do with the ability to fight for what the British wanted and more importantly it had a lot to do with the British character which reflected the nation’s religious intolerance and commercial greed. If we examine religious bigotry at the highest level of governance of Britain we would see its contribution to the establishment of colonial communities in North America. A more liberal society in Britain, and therefore in British character, might easily have dulled imperial ambitions – apart from probably saving Charles I from execution. Take one example, the Pilgrim Fathers went to America in 1620 not because they preferred the social and agricultural climate, but because of persecution in England and dissatisfaction with the prospects of a new life in the Lowlands. They were not the founders of New England, but they did constitute about a third of the 102 people who sailed in the Mayflower for North America and built the colonial town of New Plymouth, Massachusetts.

  New England was already well on its way to being established. When Captain John Smith (1580–1631, he of the Princess Pocahontas story) arrived in 1614 on the north-eastern seaboard, it was to him, literally, a new England. By then, the colonial terms planting and plantation, nurtured in Ireland, were now in common usage. Smith, for example, in 1616 wrote a treatise called A True Relation of Virginia since the First Planting of that Colony. Here in the name Virginia we have the true colonial spirit and determination that somewhere should be established in the image of the motherland. Once preconception, classical reference and occasion (for example, the relief in rounding a headland thus Cape of Good Hope) are exhausted then it is quite a good idea for the explorer to give his or her patron’s name to a discovery.

  The phenomenon of British migration to a newer world was, in its earlier days, almost entirely a mercantile adventure and hardly an expansion of territory to satisfy regal vanity and certainly not a national and European movement. Most Europeans, even by the late sixteenth century, did not think very much at all about the New World. This was not an intellectual blind spot. Europeans were then quite sophisticated. Their manner and intellectual development had created well-defined strata in Western Europe. A class system based on aristocracy was developing. ‘Old’ families already existed. Religious persuasion had an academical foundation. Yet explorers were hardly likely to excite the deeper interests of sixteenth-century Western Europeans. There was no discovery of magical societies with high levels of sophistication, of classical learning, of enlightened cultural dimension. Gold and savagery made an interesting commercial portfolio but there was no new Rome to be glimpsed.29 Therefore, we might cautiously suppose that there was hardly an intellectual dimension to the early exploration and establishment of Empire.

  As we have seen earlier, the British arrived quite late into the exploration of potential colonies, preoccupied as they were with their European uncertainties and Ireland, and because, for the most part, the English were broke and quite unable, or certainly unwilling, to finance big expeditions. This lack of capital was to be a theme of the British Empire throughout its history. Thus, a further irony of the biggest occupation of the globe by one nation is that the British managed to do so even when they were living beyond their means. They could never really afford their Empire. This of course, did not stop trading companies amassing fortunes. However, the lead to Empire had to come from commerce. So it is not surprising that until the latter half of the sixteenth century, the English interest in the New World was by and large represented by fishermen. They looked for no colonial catch and hardly interested themselves beyond the seaboard of the Newfoundland Banks.30

  The early traders and settlers
looked in two directions: westerly for sugar and easterly for spice. It is here that we have a very Eurocentric definition. The Old World is today an American observation about Europe, the place from which, until recently, most of their ancestors came.31 However, for Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Old World lay across the Arabian Sea to the Spice Islands, the Indian sub-continent, Cathay and Japan. Here lay sophisticated societies with temples, cultures, orthodoxy and architecture that even predated much of Europe. Therefore, it roused the intellectual curiosity of European travellers and those to whom they reported their discoveries. The Americas never managed to excite that intellectual interest.

  There were no tales coming back from the Americas of great palaces, silks and tapestries, no enchantment of music and literature, no rumours of provocative philosophy. No tinkling fountains on marble. The main attraction of America was threefold: a belief in often false travellers’ tales of riches, a determination not to be left behind and, very importantly, as a refuge for those who wanted a new life.

  This latter point should not be ignored when we remember the strong sense of Protestant determination of those who left for America from England and became its founding fathers. The Pilgrim Fathers were a different form of colonial settler: for them New Plymouth was a new life for they wanted nothing to do with the one they had left behind. They were the seventeenth-century equivalent of the twenty-first-century asylum seekers. There are times when in the twenty-first century we have tried to analyse the motives and influences of modern American society in international affairs. The birthmark of Protestantism is an arrogant and surefooted belief that it is the right and godly ordained way of life; so it was the driving ethic within the greatest colony of the first British Empire.