by Simon Schama
But someone, somehow, seems to have thrown a switch. And, then, that utterly unpredictable, unlikely, what-shall-we-call-it? – a misfortune – took place. It was, I suppose, just about the biggest misfortune in our shared history. But there you are. Accidents happen.
Or do they?
For a time, it was rumoured that King James VI and I was about to change his name to Arthur. Well, why not? Hadn’t Camden himself made it clear that ‘Britain’ was not some new invention at all but merely the restoration of an ancient unity, the realm of Brutus the Trojan and of King Lucius, who had been the first to be converted, and ultimately the heart of the great Arthurian-Christian British empire, which had extended from Iceland to Norway, from Ireland to Armorican Brittany. Certainly James himself believed that he was reuniting two realms that had been snapped apart, bringing about dreadful and unrelenting bloodshed. He was reminded by the court preacher John Hopkins of Ezekiel 37, in which the prophet had had a vision of two dry sticks, which he was commanded to put together; and when he did so, lo, they became one and a living thing too, a dream-parable of the reunion of the sundered Israel and Judah. John Gordon, a Scottish minister who had travelled down with James and who fancied himself a cabbalist, unlocked the esoteric significance of the Hebrew etymology of Britannia, in which Brit-an-Yah – translation: ‘a covenant (Brit) was there’ – encoded God’s command to reconstitute Britain from its fractured halves. James was ready and eager to oblige, right from the moment he received the sapphire ring taken from Elizabeth’s finger. By the time that he reached Newcastle upon Tyne in April 1603, the king had already redesigned the coinage, styling his kingdom ‘Great Britain’ and himself as its very Roman-looking, laurel-wreathed emperor. Throughout his reign, one of his adopted persona would be the new Constantine, the first Christian Caesar, born (as it was commonly thought) in north Britain.
Francis Bacon, the philosopher of science, essayist and politician, who would do his utmost to promote the union of realms, feared that the king ‘hasteneth to a mixture of both kingdoms and nations faster perhaps than policy will conveniently bear’. But there was no stopping James. Union meant security, wholeness, peace. Everything, everyone, had to be enfolded within the inclusive embrace of his come-together kingdom. The Great Seal would incorporate all the coats of arms of his three kingdoms (four, if you count, as James certainly did, the lilies of France). A new flag, embodying the union, which James often and over-optimistically compared to a loving marriage, would fuse in connubial bliss the crosses of St George and St Andrew. Many trial designs were made, one with the Scottish saltire and the cross of St George side by side, another with the saltire merely quartered with the red and white. But in the end, the first Union flag, featuring the red and white imposed on the blue and white, was adopted in 1606. Scottish shipowners immediately complained that their saltire always seemed obscured by the cross of St George. It was not a good sign for the prospects of the union that any semblance of equity between the two kingdoms was defeated by the laws of optics, which dictated that a saturated red would always seem to project beyond the recessive blue, dooming St Andrew’s cross to be read as ‘background’.
But never mind the flags: bring on the players. For those who offered themselves to be its publicists and showmen, the fantasy of the happy marriage of realms was a heaven-sent opportunity. Thomas Dekker, for example, East End slum-dweller, hack playwright, chronic debtor and jailbird, seized the moment as a godsend. Together with his much better placed colleague Ben Jonson, Dekker was charged with staging The Magnificent Entertainment for the city of London, by which the king would be formally greeted by his capital. Happy Britannia, of course, would be at the centre of it. ‘St George and St Andrew, that many hundred years had defied one another, were now sworn brothers: England and Scotland being parted only with a narrow river.’ Dekker knew exactly what to do. The two chevaliers, St Andrew and St George, would ride together, in brotherly amity, to greet the king: a real crowd pleaser, Dekker optimistically thought. And he would write a story of the nation in 1603, draped in mourning black and suffering from a melancholy ague, until a miraculous cure was effected by ‘the wholesome receipt of a proclaimed king . . . FOR BEHOLD! Up rises a comfortable sun out of the north whose glorious beams like a fan dispersed all thick and contagious clouds.’
Unhappily for Dekker, the plague dashed the cup of success from his lips just as he was poised to taste it. (‘But OH the short-lived felicity of man! O world, of what slight and thin stuff is thy happiness!’) Between 30,000 and 40,000 died in the summer of 1603. The theatres were closed, the streets empty. So Dekker had to revert to plan B and squeeze some money out of misery rather than jubilation, making the most of the plague in a pamphlet, The Wonderfull Yeare (1603):
What an unmatchable torment were it for a man to be bard up every night in a vast silent Charnel-house; hung (to make it more hideous) with lamps dimly & slowly burning, in hollow and glimmering corners: where all the pavement should in stead of greene rushes, be strewde with blasted Rosemary, withered Hyacinthes, fatal Cipresse and Ewe, thickly mingled with heapes of dead men’s bones: the bare ribbes of a father that begat him, lying there: here, the Chaplesse hollow scull of a mother that bore him: round about him a thousand Coarses, some standing bolt upright in their knotted winding sheets, others half mouldred in rotten Coffins . . . that should suddenly yawne wide open, filling his nostrils with noysome stench, and his eyes with the sight of nothing but crawling wormes.
A year later, though, with the pestilence finally in retreat, Dekker and Jonson got to stage their pageant after all. If anything, the postponement had only whetted London’s appetite for the kind of festivity not seen since the accession of Elizabeth a half century earlier. Dekker was probably not entirely self-serving when he reported ‘the streets seemed to be paved with men . . . stalles instead of rich wares were set out with children, open casements [the leaded glass windows having been taken out] filled up with women’. With this king, however, public enthusiasm created a problem rather than an opportunity, since crowds made James decidedly nervous, wanting to be off somewhere else, preferably on horseback in the hills near Royston, energetically pursuing the stag. But the allegorical outdoor theatre, full of music and gaudy brilliance, disarmed, at least temporarily, the royal churlishness. In addition to the brotherly Andrew and George, Old Father ‘Thamesis’, with flowing whiskers taken from his emblem-book personification, offered a tribute in the form of‘an earthenware pot out of which live Fishes were seene to runne forth’. And it was hard not to be impressed by Stephen Harrison’s immense wood-and-plaster triumphal arches, 90 feet high and 50 wide, punctuating the processional route. One of them was a three-tower trellis structure, thick with greenery, purporting to show James’s realm as a perpetual ‘Bower of Plenty’ and featuring ‘sheep browzing, lambes nibbling, Birds Flying in the Ayre, with other arguments of a serene and untroubled season’. On the arch, erected at Fenchurch, an immense panorama of London rose from a crenellated battlement (as though seen from a distant tower), with the pile of old St Paul’s in its centre and looking a great deal more orderly than the chaotic, verminous metropolis of 200,000 souls it really was. Below this Augustan vision of New Troy was none other than Britannia herself, bearing the orb of empire on which was inscribed Orbis Britannicus Ab Orbe Divisus Est (a British world divided from the world). Sharp-eyed scholars of the classics – and perhaps there were some in the crowd – would have recognized an erudite allusion to Virgil, in particular to the pastoral poems of the Fourth Eclogue, in which the return of a new golden age was prophesied. Right at the beginning of Britannia, William Camden had already identified Virgil’s lines as a recognition of Britain’s historic destiny as a place apart. And much, of course, had been made of the identification by some of the foggier classical geographers of the British archipelago as the legendary ‘Fortunate Isles’ of the western ocean. Until 1603 it was the English who had fancied themselves blessed by this priceless gift of insularity; Shakespeare’
s vision of ‘This fortress built by Nature for herself/Against infection and the hand of war’ confirmed the national faith in a divinely ordained immunity from the rest of the world’s sorrows.
Now, however, this happy insulation was to be understood as British, extended to lucky Ireland and Scotland (notwithstanding the fact that, historically, Scotland had always enjoyed closer connections with Europe than England). In October 1604, to a deeply suspicious English parliament (which had already bridled at being informed by the king that its privileges were a grant from his majesty), James promised that ‘the benefits which do arise of that union which is made in my blood do redound to the whole island’. When he spoke of his realm, he repeatedly referred to it, indivisibly, as ‘the Ile’. His apologists conceded that there had been unfortunate disagreements, even bloodshed, between the neighbours on either side of the Tweed, but much of that could be attributed to the wicked Machiavellianism of interfering continentals (especially the French and the Spanish), who had deliberately set them at each other’s throats. Now, in the person of James – in whom English, Welsh, French and Scots blood flowed and whom God had already blessed with two healthy sons – the long, miserable wars of succession were done with. ‘The dismall discord,’ Camden wrote, ‘which hath set these nations (otherwise invincible) so long at debate, might [now] be stifled and crushed forever and sweet CONCORD triumph joyously with endless comfort.’ Enter masquers, piping tunes of peace; roll on the Stuart Arcady.
As it turned out, the ‘world divided from the world’, the ‘Britain apart’ so cheerfully anticipated by Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, John Speed and William Camden, was the bringer not of concord and harmony but of havoc and destruction. The more strenuously that governments, both royal and republican, laboured to pull the pieces of Britain together, the more abysmally they fell apart. The obsession with ‘union’ and ‘uniformity’ that consumed both James and Charles I turned out to guarantee hatred and schism. In the first year of James I’s reign no one (certainly not Jonson or Dekker) could have predicted this (although the high-handed remarks made by the king to parliament were not a good sign). It would take some time before the ‘British problem’ became dangerously apparent. The clearest warnings came from Charles I’s Scottish friend and ally the Duke of Hamilton as late as 1637, when he counselled the king to back off from his obstinate plans to impose religious uniformity in Scotland as well as England, lest a violent backlash north of the border spread throughout his other two kingdoms.
Ironically, then, the business of building a harmonized Britain was auto-destructive, creating discord both between the three kingdoms and within them. The historians who want us to think of the Stuart realm as an essentially docile polity, bound together by consensus, have contended that arguments about religion and politics, such as they were, could always be contained within the conventions and habits of the settled order of government and society. Stuart England (in common with so much of British history) was, in this view, ruled by a gentlemen’s agreement. The governing classes were agreed on the powers and limitations of the monarchy, agreed that parliament’s job was to supply the king with money, agreed on the fixed hierarchy of society and, under James, agreed on a broadly Calvinist religious consensus. When differences of opinion arose between parliament and Crown, most people wished them to be resolved rather than further polarized. But then again, perhaps the impression given by scholars that there was nothing so seriously amiss about the country as to push it towards disaster results from a narrowly English focus: historians have asked not so much the wrong questions, as the right questions about the wrong country. If the country concerned is England and the questions are about the governing communities of its counties, a case for the containment of conflict can be made (though not, I think, clinched). But if the country in question is not England but Britain – Scotland and Ireland in particular – then very serious trouble did not suddenly pop up in the 1640s to disturb the calm of the English political landscape. It had been there for at least two generations. It was not as if, somehow, the English political commotions were suddenly and unaccountably aggravated by conflicts rumbling away somewhere remote on the storm-lashed Celtic fringe. The trouble was Calvinist Scotland and Catholic Ireland and their deep religious appeal for some factions in Stuart England. Those religious entanglements, as we shall see, carried with them not just theological but also political and even foreign policy implications, which an imperially assertive England attempted to iron out through the imposition of a ‘British’ uniformity only at its own dire peril. The refusal of both Scotland and Ireland to do as they were ordered, except when coerced, brought about the British wars. Britain killed England. And it left Scotland and Ireland haemorrhaging in the field.
So if we return to those questions and put them to the right countries, a rather different accounting between long-term and short-term causes of the disaster becomes apparent. Ask yourself whether English Puritans were angry enough, or strong enough, by themselves, to bring down the Stuart monarchy and the answer is probably no, although they could certainly inflict punishing damage on its dignity and authority. Ask yourself whether Scottish Calvinists, in collusion with English Puritans (both of whom believed that kings were bound in a contract with their subjects), could bring down the Stuart monarchy and the answer is yes. When one of the militant Scottish Calvinist ‘Covenanters’, Archibald Johnston of Wariston, met Charles I at Berwick in the 1639 negotiations that ended the first Bishops’ War, he interrupted the king so repeatedly and so offensively that the normally reserved Charles, unaccustomed to this kind of temerity, had to command Johnston, a common advocate, to hold his tongue. The Scots would inflict far worse indignities on Charles Stuart before they were through. Ask yourself whether an Irish-Catholic insurrection could create a situation in which the king of England were suddenly revealed not as the defender but the subverter of Church and state, and the answer would again be yes. Had James been, say, Dutch or German (as kings were to be in the future), with no strong feelings about Scotland, would there have been a civil war?
But James was a Scottish king, and it mattered. James VI of Scotland, already in his late thirties, became James I of Great Britain with the heartfelt gratitude of a man who for many years has had to endure a stony couch and is at last offered a deep and welcoming featherbed. The stony couch had been James’s painful and protracted education as the king of Scotland. With the unedifying and dangerous example of his mother, Mary Stuart, very much on their minds, the Calvinist nobility who deposed her made sure that her infant son received a stern Calvinist education. In 1570 they consigned James to the frightening tutelage of George Buchanan, beside whom the fulminations of John Knox seemed light as a spring breeze. Buchanan’s briskly undeferential attitude to kingship is best summed up by the story of his response to the Countess of Mar when she protested at his rough handling of the royal child: ‘Madam, I have whipt his arse, you may kiss it if you please.’ No one was under any illusion that Buchanan was himself any sort of arse-kisser; quite the contrary. His view of monarchs, forthrightly expressed in De juri regni apud Scotos (1579), written to justify the deposition of James’s mother, was that they were appointed to serve the people, who were entitled to remove them if they failed to live up to the contract made with their subjects. It naturally followed from this theory of resistance that Kirk and Crown were separate and coeval powers and that royal meddling in the affairs of the Church would also be a warrant for removal. For the Presbyterian Kirk was inimical to any kind of royal governorship. It was a national Church with a single, uniform doctrine, but that doctrine was arrived at, and policed by, a general assembly constituted from delegates of its many congregations.
