A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  And play it he did, on a massive scale. Up to 1641 close to 100,000 Scots, Welsh and English immigrants were ‘planted’ in Ireland, the vast majority in the nine counties of Ulster (six of which now form Northern Ireland), but with sizeable populations also in Munster (originally ‘planted’ in the 1580s). The seventeenth-century colonization of Ireland was, with the possible exception of Spanish Mexico, the biggest imperial settlement of any single European power to date, and it utterly dwarfed the related ‘planting’ on the Atlantic seaboard of North America. To such as Camden, of course, Hibernia was no more than the ‘western enclosure of Britain’. Since an act of 1541, the status of Ireland had changed from a lordship to a kingdom, whose ruler had the ‘name, style, title and honour’ of a king, and all the prerogatives of a ‘king imperial’. In effect, the throne of Ireland was ‘united and knit to the imperial crown of England’. In Elizabeth’s reign there had been wild-eyed schemes from the likes of Sir Thomas Smith, ambassador and privy councillor, to Protestantize and civilize the island by massive immigration and settlement. And such men imagined the land, as imperial dreamers generally do, either as conveniently vacant or populated by so many grunting Calibans who, once educated out of sloth, superstition and crime, would be impatient to acquire (in some necessarily menial way to begin with) the blessings of metropolitan culture. But Ireland, of course, was neither vacant nor inhabited purely by Gaelic-speaking peasants and cattle-rustling lords. In Leinster there were the ‘Old English’ descendants of the original Anglo-Norman settlers who had come over with Richard de Clare (Strongbow), in the time of the Angevins and who had mostly remained faithful to the Catholic Church. And over the centuries the frontiers, once so sharp between native Gaels and English intruders, had softened to the point of there being many intermarriages and shared estates, especially in the southeast. Although many Old English defined themselves through their loyalty to the Crown, they shared with the native Gaels some basic common causes – a common religion and resentment of the threat of massive immigration from England.

  Both communities were brushed aside in defeat – the Gaels, of course, with more contemptuous brutality than the Old English. James’s attorney-general in Ireland, the poet Sir John Davies, became eloquent on the subject of the murdering natives ‘little better than cannibals’. The confiscated estates of the Earl of Desmond in Munster had been handed over to thirty-five English landlords in large lots of between 4000 and 12,000 acres. Ulster, though, was subdivided into smaller parcels of between 1000 and 2000 acres to ‘undertakers’ and ex-military ‘servitors’ who, in return for their lucky prize of land, contracted to set aside sums for the endowment of the Protestant Church of Ireland and for the schools and colleges that would plant the Reformed religion so deep that no Papist could tear it up. In another unique transfer, Derry was handed over to syndicates of the City of London, which prefixed its name on the ancient city. When James ran out of forfeited and confiscated lands, he continued the process of extraction by requiring all Irish landowners to prove title according to the rigorous standards of English law – a notoriously difficult if not impossible task for estates that had been granted countless generations before systematic records were made and preserved. But that, of course, was the point. Large tracts in Wexford, Longford, Waterford and Carlow were transferred by this route from Irish to planter ownership.

  As far as the king was concerned, the whole project was a huge success, although regrettably slow to take root. When his ‘undertakers’ in Ireland seemed to be unconscionably timid about dispossessing the Irish, he threatened to seize back their land unless they carried out the evictions with greater speed and diligence. By 1620, large numbers of poor farmers had been transplanted from the over-populated, over-zealous Calvinist southwest of Scotland to a place where they could really get their teeth into a challenge, and James had found space and fortunes in Ireland for Scottish lords like James Hamilton, Earl of Abercorn, on whose loyalty he could now dependably count. Along with many of the planters themselves, James unquestionably believed in the socially and morally redemptive nature of the plantation. Free-wandering Irish herds and flocks would be rounded up inside winter stalls to provide heavy manure for the under-nitrogenated Irish pasture, milk yields would multiply, wheat would appear, markets would beckon, and farmers responding to them would be able to afford stone houses, glass windows, wooden floors. The picture-perfect landscapes of the Weald and the Wolds would magically become reproduced in Tyrone and Fermanagh. Towns, those nurseries of civility, would grow and prosper. Literacy in the only language that counted – English – would spread like wildfire, and the unintelligible gibberish of the indigenes would recede into bogland. Such was the vision of the new Hibernia.

  In fairness, it should be said that not all the Old English or even the Gaelic Irish were as uniformly hostile to the newcomers and their innovations as nationalist history needs to believe. Just as Old English and Gaelic cultures had become intermixed over the centuries, so too cities like Dublin and Derry were places where newcomers and natives shared all kinds of commercial, legal and social interests. Institutions like Trinity College, Dublin, turned into extraordinarily flourishing centres of learning. None the less, the plantation, especially in Ulster, was from the start deformed by its neurotically defensive character: Britain’s frontier against Rome and Madrid. And the natives continued to be restless. Stone houses may have arrived with the planters, but beyond their walls and fences the country proved obstinately unwelcoming to Protestantism and that, in turn, perpetuated the insecurity of the planters, who were forever on the lookout lest the Catholic population invite in the Spanish and make Ireland the next major theatre of the ongoing British wars of religion. Seeds were planted in Jacobean Ireland all right, but they would not produce the kind of harvest the inventors of Jacobean Britain had imagined.

  But if there were a strong note of Discord among the Music of British Harmony, one would never know it in Whitehall. Although Rubens’ paintings decorating the ceiling of Inigo Jones’s glorious new Palladian Banqueting House, celebrating the virtues of James as the British Solomon, were commissioned by his son Charles in 1630 and completed in 1634, nine years after James’s death, they are none the less a perfect picture of Jacobean wishful thinking: an orgy of royal good intentions, with Peace and Plenty caught in a tight clinch while the new Augustus presides over Wisdom dispatching War. In view of what had actually happened (and what would happen to demolish the reign of Charles I) the nearest painting to the entrance was the most optimistic: the most famous Solomonic story of all, recycled as an allegory of the birth of a new Britain. The all-wise monarch leans forward to deliver judgement on two mothers who hold up a baby. But a proposal to chop it into two would hardly fit the mood or the message. Instead, James is all benevolence; the women are, of course, the two kingdoms, and the chubby Rubensian baby is none other than Britain itself.

  This hyper-inflated expectation of the blessings to be conferred by the new reign was not just the fantasy of the Stuart court. From his gentleman’s manor of Arbury in Warwickshire John Newdigate, one of the thousands of readers of the king’s Basilikon Doron, decided to write to him personally – ‘my dear sovereign’ – to express his pleasure that the country was now to be ruled by a Solomon and that his countrymen were rushing to witness for themselves, like the Queen of Sheba, the full measure of the king’s wisdom and greatness. But, said Newdigate, warming to his subject, the king had a host of urgent matters to reform: the disgusting habit of men dressing in women’s clothes, for example; gentlemen who spent their entire time in London being swallowed alive in costly lawsuits, while their estates and tenants languished in rustic decay; the loathsome parasites who bought monopolies from the Crown and proceeded to use them to fleece the defenceless; the heavy taxes and levies raised in his own county for foreign wars; and on and on. What Newdigate wanted from the king was not proclamations and legislation but reformation: a great cleansing of the country’s impurities, not least at court it
self. ‘I hope your highness will . . . helpe many reform themselves to your couler,’ wrote the optimistic Newdigate, adding, lest James was tempted to slack off, ‘for all Solomon’s wisdome and good beginning, perseverance was at sume times absent and the blessings of peace made him sinne.’

  Grievously disappointed though they would be, there were many such as Newdigate who had the highest hopes of the new reign. Another godly gentleman who would become a parliamentary militant and survive into the Commonwealth, Robert Harley, of Brampton Bryan in Herefordshire, was happy enough to be included among the sixty-two gentlemen knighted by the king (as a Knight of the Bath, too) in his coronation honours. Such men as Harley and Newdigate had no idea, of course, just how much James despised Puritans, even while regarding them as a minority. Evangelicals, by contrast, James had a bit more sympathy for, even if they did sit ‘Jack fellowlike with Christ at the Lord’s Table’. Men like Harley and Newdigate looked at the godly Kirk in Scotland and thought James was bound to carry its virtues to England, while the king was, in fact, overjoyed to be leaving it behind. ‘Puritan’ was still a term of abuse applied to the ‘hotter’ Christians. But of all the divisions that bedevilled the Stuarts, that which came between those who passionately believed that the Church had not yet been properly reformed and that Edward VI’s godly evangelism had been put on hold for half a century by his sister, and those who were satisfied with the Anglican status quo, was perhaps the most dangerous, because it presupposed two utterly incompatible temperaments and ideologies about the duties of the state. The bugbears of the hot gospellers – the sign of the cross in baptism, the use of the ring in the marriage sacrament, the wearing of the surplice by priests – might seem so much trivia (and, to their fury were defined by James as adiaphora or things ‘indifferent’, which lay within the purview of the king to retain or discard as he saw fit), but to the godly they were relics of abominable Catholic idolatry. They wanted them purged and the Crown instead to promote godly preaching and teaching.

  It is ironic that the only lasting accomplishment to survive the extended theological debates between James and the unsatisfied reformers was the imperishably beautiful Bible that bears his name. For a Church atomized into innumerable individual readers of scripture, engaged in obsessive self-interrogation or shut up with their own family in a hermetically sealed household of godly morality, was, to James’s way of thinking and to that of those ministers he specially favoured, like George Abbot or Lancelot Andrewes, entirely destructive of the unity of Church and nation. To Calvinists, for whom the world both now and hereafter was either black or white, Christ or Antichrist, appeals to ‘unity’ were at best a vain delusion, at worst a deliberate snare to inveigle the innocent into promiscuous communion with the sinful. Was it not obvious that the Almighty himself had no interest in the subject of ‘union’? As Calvin and St Paul had both well understood, God had decreed that mankind was irremediably divided into the damned and the saved, or, as the rector of Holy Trinity Church in Dorchester, John White, forthrightly put it, according to a startled member of his congregation: ‘Christ was not the Saviour of the whole world but of his elected and chosen people only.’ They assumed that James’s refusal of a more ‘thorough’ reformation was amoral spinelessness, when in fact it was a carefully thought-out theology, heavily rehearsed by him at the Hampton Court conference, convened in 1604 to consider these matters. James’s preference for ceremony, sacrament and the ‘decencies’ of the Church was not just some middle way, arrived at by default to position himself between Catholicism and Puritanism. It embodied his active wish for the incorporation of Christians within a big-tent Church – attracting both loyal Puritans and loyal Catholics, separating them from their more extreme elements and offering the possibility (not the certainty) that sinful man might still achieve salvation through good works and observances. And there was the matter of rank and order, which James took very seriously indeed, and which he believed was properly embodied in the hierarchy of the Church, with himself, prince temporal and spiritual, at the top, the archbishops and bishops immediately below. Through his entire reign, in both Scotland and England, James never swerved from his conviction (not unlike Henry VIII’s or Elizabeth’s) that the combination of the royal supremacy and bishops was the strongest way to resist Rome. And he passed that belief on to his son, with, as it turned out, fatal consequences.

  All this was incomprehensible to the evangelicals, for whom any fudging of predestination, any suggestion that good works might to the slightest degree affect the prospects of salvation, was the purest papism. In fact, many Catholics also (and happily) misunderstood such views as the expression of a secret wish to return home to the old Church. When James made peace with Spain in 1604, the rumours about the king’s conversion and his restoration of England to Roman obedience seemed miraculously imminent. The fact that the queen, Anne of Denmark, had already converted to Catholicism, did nothing to dampen these expectations. Had they read James’s wonderful account of his own baptism they might have been better informed about his potential for conversion. ‘At my Baptism I was baptised by a Popish Archbishop [his mother, Mary] sent word to forbear to use spittle . . . which was obeyed being indeed a filthy apish trick . . . And her very own words were “that she would not want a pocky priest to spit into her child’s mouth”.’ Like his mother (but from the other confessional stance) James saw no reason why his queen should not practise a different private religion from the official Church, but at no time did he ever think of himself as anything other than an unequivocal Protestant. Blinded though they may have been to James’s true position, it is understandable that loyal Catholics like Sir Thomas Tresham, out of prison and able to give his attention once more to his Northamptonshire house, Lyveden New Bield, designed to symbolize his faith, could now imagine that their days of persecution and recusant impoverishment were at last over.

  Very soon they realized just how wrong they had been. Instead of offering them relief, James’s regime, enthusiastically enforced by Robert Cecil and Archbishop Richard Bancroft, cracked down even harder on recusants and hidden Jesuits. Predictions of plots became self-fulfilling. It was from the bitterness of having been so thoroughly deceived that conspiracies to eliminate the king and his heretical ministers were born. George Buchanan’s Calvinist teaching of the legitimacy of resistance to an ungodly king was matched on the Catholic side by the Jesuit Juán de Mariana’s doctrine of lawful insurrection against the tyranny of a heretical prince. That absolution fed the ardour and optimism of Catholic conspirators and assassins. Even before the gunpowder plotters had designed their own coup, at least two violent plots had been exposed in 1604, one (a real stroke of genius, this) meaning to abduct the king and hold him hostage until parliament had agreed to demands to tolerate Catholicism in England. But the plan launched by Robert Catesby together with Tresham’s son, Francis, Sir Everard Digby, Thomas Percy, Thomas Winter and Guido Fawkes, a soldier who had served the Spanish armies in the Netherlands, and blessed by a Jesuit, Father Thomas Garnet, was much the most dramatic. The idea was not just to destroy parliament on the opening day of its session, along with the king, Prince Henry and possibly even the four-year-old Charles, but to set their sister, Princess Elizabeth, on the throne in their place, since they supposed that she had been most influenced by her mother, the Catholic Queen Anne, and would at the very least be more inclined to tolerate them. How close it came to success was entirely another matter, since it seems possible that even before Lord Monteagle was advised by an anonymous letter (which probably came from Lady Monteagle’s brother) not to attend the opening of parliament on 5 November 1605, Robert Cecil’s intelligence network had penetrated the conspiracy. A search was made of the cellars beneath the Westminster house whose premises had been rented by one of the plotters, Thomas Percy. There they found Fawkes together with thirty-six barrels of gunpowder, enough to destroy the entire House of Lords immediately above the cellar.

  The confederates came to famously gruesome ends: Cat
esby and Thomas Percy were tracked down to their safe house in Staffordshire and killed in the assault, Catesby dying holding a picture of the Virgin. Their bodies were exhumed from their graves so that their heads could be removed for proper display at the corners of the parliament building they had planned to detonate. Tresham died in the Tower of some monstrous urethral infection after a copious confession, his excruciating condition presumably making the customary rack redundant. Fawkes and the rest were hanged very briefly, then, still living, had their hearts cut out and displayed to the appreciative public.

  More important than the plot itself were the effects it had on the prospects of the Stuart monarchy, which were all positive. Even though he always suffered from the conspiracy jitters (his father, Darnley, had, after all, also been the victim of a gunpowder plot), the king was careful not to go on an anti-Catholic rampage. In fact, he and his government were at pains to separate the ‘fanatics’ like Fawkes from loyal Catholics like the senior Tresham and to hope that they had been scared into settling for private ways of exercising their conscience. But 5 November became the Protestant holy-day par excellence, the new ‘birth-day of the nation’, with bonfires and bells celebrating the deliverance of not only the king himself but also the entirety of the English constitution. James had never seemed so English, so parliamentary as when he had come close to sharing a terrible incineration with the Lords and Commons. Catesby, Percy and Guy Fawkes had achieved something that James could never have done by himself: they had made him a popular hero. Declaring the Gunpowder Treason day a holiday, parliament outdid itself in eulogizing James as ‘our most gracious sovereign . . . the most great learned and religious king that ever reigned’.

  This did not mean, of course, that the next twenty years were a prolonged honeymoon. If anything, the longer the reign went on, the more out of love with each other James and the British became. Godfrey Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester, was just one of many contemporaries who noticed nostalgia for Elizabeth grow ever rosier as the lustre of the Jacobean court became tarnished by outlandish extravagance and scandal. The dimming of reputation, though, was not necessarily a prelude to constitutional crisis, not least because parliament met for only thirty-six months in total out of the twenty-two years of James I’s reign, and this intermittent record seemed no more controversial than it had been in the reign of Elizabeth. Parliament did not yet think of itself as an ‘opposition’ nor even as an institutional ‘partner’ in government. The majority of its members, in both the Lords and Commons, accepted the king’s view that their presence was required principally to provide him with the money needed to conduct the business of state. But – and it was an enormous qualification – they shared the inherited truism that they had a responsibility to offer the king counsel and to see that this revenue was not raised in a way that damaged the ‘liberties’ or the security of the people. This meant that, when the king did come to them for money, they felt duty bound to present him with a list of grievances. The litany of complaints had become a ritual, and the king was expected to respond, after cavilling about the infringement of his prerogatives, with concessionary gestures, such as the impeachment of some disposable officer of state or a few generalized expressions of love for the worthy representatives of the nation. Sometimes James could be relied on to make those gestures, but most often he had to be pushed. Not infrequently he behaved like a sulky adolescent forced to come home and ask his parents to bale him out from the creditors, gritting his teeth and rolling his eyes while they berated him for his wickedly irresponsible behaviour.