by Simon Schama
Seen in this light, the grip that the Howards appeared to have on the government of England seemed evidence of a Satanic conspiracy to subvert the godliness and manliness of the aristocracy, whose privileges were still conditional on its status as an exemplary warrior caste. To soldiers like Barnaby Rich, writing in 1617, the atrophy had gone devilishly far, as it had with the Romans. No wonder the evil genius behind the Howard–Somerset plot had been the fashion queen, Mrs Turner, since ‘our minds are effeminated, our martial exercises and disciplines of war are turned into womanish pleasures and delights . . . we are fitter for the coach than the camp’. As for the bishops, they too had also demonstrated the criminal worthlessness of their office by becoming party to infamy. (This was no surprise to Puritans, who made much of Mrs Overall, the notorious wife of the future Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, who had run off with one of her many lovers in 1608.) The king won some credit from the critics of the court for his evidently sincere determination to get to the bottom of the crime. But the fact that he had forborne from punishing the principal malefactors with the full severity of the law while condemning their minions to death seemed further proof that James was impotent to prevent the descent of England into a pit of pagan immorality.
In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, it became a received wisdom that the Puritans were, especially by the 1620s, no more than a small if very vocal minority in England. (It is much harder to minimize the significance of ardent Calvinism in Scotland, which, of course, knew as much about the Howard affair as England.) And it is not to be imagined that episodes like the Howard scandal suddenly brought a majority round to thinking of the court as somehow irreversibly corrupt. But what it did do was reinforce the conviction of those who were already committed to the cause of moral cleansing (and who were doing something about it in their own households and local towns and villages) that the band of the Elect would, by definition, be a select but zealous troop. For the moment, the godly had to concentrate on local purifications, beginning, as always, with themselves and their immediate family and extending outwards into their community. A few would come to the conclusion that England was so far gone in abomination that to create a Zion apart required putting the distance of the Atlantic between them and Albion-Gomorrah. There was, to be sure, no strategy about any of this. It was not ‘stage one’ of some sort of timetable to create a true Jerusalem in England, but equally only the most myopic focus on the immediate circumstances of the outbreak of the civil war in 1641–2 could possibly write off the strength and spiritual intensity of the godly as of no consequence at all to the fate of Britain. Of course, the Puritans had no inkling whatsoever that the path ahead would involve an overthrow of the monarchy. But the agents of all such upheavals – in eighteenth-century France and early twentieth-century Russia, for example – are invariably zealous sects who believe themselves moved by some higher calling to a great and general scouring.
In the early years of the seventeenth century, the construction of Zion was a local business. But what the godly might achieve in places like the Dorset cloth town of Dorchester must have supplied for some, at least, practical evidence that with God’s help his Faithful might yet prevail against the hosts of darkness. In 1613 – the year of the Howard-Somerset marriage – Dorchester, then a town of only 2000 souls, was ravaged by a terrifying fire, which destroyed 170 of its houses, miraculously taking just one life. To the Puritan rector of the Church of Holy Trinity, John White, who had been appointed to Dorchester in 1606, it was a communiqué from Sodom: a clear sign of God’s wrath at the stiff-necked sinfulness of the people and their wickedly complaisant magistrates. Together with recent immigrants to the town of like-minded godliness, White set about, through preaching and teaching, to make a great and holy alteration. His targets were the usual suspects: fornication in general; adultery in particular; drunkenness; cursing, sports and pastimes (like bear-baiting and street theatre), which were especially vile when profaning the Sabbath but reprehensible at all times; chronic absenteeism from church; and casual rowdiness and violence. His enforcers were the constables (three of them), the part-time night-watchmen, the daytime beadles and the local justices, who were to send offenders to the stocks or, if necessary, to gaol. But White and his zealot friends also meant to make a positive change in the habits of the community by exhorting the flock to charity, even or especially at times of economic distress. The funds gathered from church collections were to be used to refashion the town: to create new schools and a house of learning and industry for children of the poor, and to care for the sick and old. Dorchester became a veritable fount of charity, not just for its own distressed, but also for any causes identifiable as morally deserving: victims of the plague in Cambridge and Shaftesbury, and victims of a fire (with which the locals had special sympathy) in Taunton, Somerset.
The fact that White and his fellow Puritans, a majority of whom came to dominate the town corporation, correctly believed themselves to be contending with a county society that was far from sympathetic to their goal of conducting a new godly reformation, only strengthened their passionate conviction that God’s work had to be done. And between the year of the fire and 1640 they did accomplish an amazing change in the little town. Their moral police bore down on offenders with tireless zeal. Landlords who took advantage of their tenants’ or their debtors’ wives by forcing themselves on them were exposed, fined or pilloried. Compulsive swearers like Henry Gollop, who was presented to the magistrates for unleashing an awesome string of forty curses in a row, had their mouths stopped. Women who kept houses of assignation and alehouse-keepers, whose taverns were a place of constant riot, had their premises shut down or were evicted. Traditional festivals, which were notorious for promoting drunkenness and licentiousness, were expunged from the local calendar. Notorious absentees from church (especially among the young) were driven back there and sternly awaited every Sunday. Theatre disappeared. In 1615 an actor manager called Gilbert Reason came to town armed with a licence from the Master of the Revels in London entitling him to play before the townspeople. Dorchester’s bailiff refused him in no uncertain terms, and when Reason replied that, since he was disregarding a royally authorized document, the bailiff was no better than a traitor, he found himself spending two days in gaol before being sent on his way. More sadly, a ‘Frenchwoman’ without hands, who had taught herself to do tricks with her feet (like writing and sewing) for a livelihood, was likewise sent packing.
In 1617 the killjoys were dealt an unexpected blow by the king’s Book of Sports, which expressly allowed certain pastimes (like music) on Sunday evenings, while upholding the ban on bear- and bull-baiting and bowling. James’s demand for a relaxation on censoriousness had been provoked by a stay in Lancashire en route back from Scotland, where he discovered that a particularly ferocious moral regime had been inflicted on innocent games and pastimes. But in Dorchester, the Book of Sports was heeded less than the vigilance of the local magistracy. The number of pregnant brides fell dramatically, as did the packs of beggars and unlicensed transients. Children were taken into the new schools and a ‘hospital’ established for the encouragement of sound work habits and piety. There were two new almshouses and a municipally funded brewhouse to employ the ‘deserving’ (that is non-begging) indigent. A house of correction was built with a homily carved over the door summing up the prevailing ethos in Dorset’s little Jerusalem: ‘Look in yourselves, this is the scope/Sin brings prison, prison the rope.’
In 1620 there was a new and urgent cause for which the godly in Dorchester were asked to empty their purses: Protestant refugees fleeing from an invasion of the Rhineland Palatinate by Catholic troops of the king of Spain. Some of the fugitives even came to settle in Dorchester, such was the international reputation of White, whose German assistant made sure the town was in close touch with events in continental Europe. Those events in the Rhineland, apparently remote from English and British concerns, became immediately a topic of supreme importance in the countr
y’s political and religious life, the subject of innumerable tracts, sermons and pamphlets, to the point where they changed Britain. By marrying his daughter Elizabeth to the apparently dull but safe Protestant Elector Frederick, James had unwittingly put his entire reputation as the king of peace in terrible jeopardy. The consequences of that marriage and the predicament in which it put the Crown would dog James until his death in March 1625 and would cast a long shadow over the beginning of his son’s reign.
The problem could hardly have been anticipated, happening in the same place that even three centuries later Neville Chamberlain would notoriously describe as a ‘far away country of which we know little’: Bohemia. In 1618 the Protestant Estates rejected the Catholic nominee for their crown (the archduke who would become the Emperor Ferdinand) and made their point by throwing the envoys sent from the Emperor Matthias out of the windows of Hradčany Castle in Prague on to the substantial dung-heap below. Invitations went out to eligible Protestant candidates, and Frederick, certainly to his father-in-law’s consternation, accepted the throne in August 1619. In November 1620 his army suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor at the battle of the White Mountain, and at the same time Spanish troops invaded his Rhineland home territory of the Palatinate. Frederick and Elizabeth – the Winter King and Queen, from their short stay in Prague – became the most famous and fashionable refugees of their age, travelling between England and France and finally settling in The Hague, where they established their own court in exile.
In the more Protestant centres of Britain, from London to Edinburgh (and certainly in Dorchester), a hue and cry went up for war against Spain and the Catholic powers. To the godly this was the battle of the Last Days, heralding the coming of the kingdom of the saints. Sides had to be taken. And the king, it was clear, would have to be pushed. But James’s deep reluctance to turn warrior was not just a matter of ending his long and successful career as a pacifist; it was also a matter of bankrupting the realm. His trusted adviser, and later, from 1622, his Treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, who knew what he was talking about, coming as he did from a commercial and financial background, and who by dint of painstaking economies had managed to contain, if not reverse, the damage to the Exchequer from years of profligate spending, now warned of the fiscally catastrophic consequences of a war. But James was equally aware that to do nothing about the humiliating predicament of his daughter and son-in-law, to say nothing of the standing of the Protestant states of Europe, was to compromise beyond any possibility of recovery the authority of his government.
James felt personally betrayed by the Catholic offensive because for some time before 1620 he had been making overtures to Madrid for a marriage alliance between his son, Charles, and the daughter of King Philip III of Spain. In return for expressions of his own sincerity in seeking the match, James had been told not to worry about the Palatinate itself. Even after the occupation, the Spanish disingenuously claimed that their presence in the Rhineland was merely pressure to dislodge Frederick from Bohemia. Such was his aversion to conflict that, given this straw to grasp at, James was prepared to believe the transparent lie. He was abetted in this pathetic self-deception by his new favourite, George Villiers (the son of an impoverished Leicestershire knight), whose star had risen when those of Somerset and the Howards had crashed. In rapid succession Villiers had been promoted to become Knight of the Garter, privy councillor, baron, earl, marquis and, finally, especially shocking since there had been no dukes in England since the execution of Norfolk in the reign of Elizabeth, Duke of Buckingham.
The last Spanish marriage – between Mary Tudor and Philip II – had not turned out well for anyone, so the gambit was from the beginning fraught with controversies that went to the heart of national and religious sensibilities. There were those, like the Puritan Sir Robert Harley in Herefordshire, who were old enough to remember the Spanish Armada. And Camden’s immensely popular history of the reign of Elizabeth ensured that the epic of the wars against Spain was very much alive in Jacobean England. The Spanish court and government simply sat back and enjoyed the inexplicable desperation of the English, delighted that they were so keen to rule themselves out as adversaries in the wider European war. Their terms were aggressive. As a condition of the marriage they insisted (pushed by an equally overjoyed Rome) that the Infanta Maria be allowed not just a private chapel but a church that would be open to the public as well. Until they were into their adolescence, the responsibility for educating the children of the union would fall to the infanta, not the prince. And, most daring of all, they stipulated that English Catholics should now be allowed open freedom of worship. James must have known that to accept these terms would be to light a wildfire in both England and Scotland, but he was in absurd thrall to the beauteous Duke of Buckingham. In letters James addressed him as ‘Steenie’, a Scots endearment referring to his supposed resemblance to an image of St Stephen. In return Buckingham wrote back to his ‘deare dade’, knowing that no flattery would be too cloying for the besotted king, thus: ‘I naturallie so love your person and upon so good experience and knowledge adore all your other parts which are more than ever one man had that were not onelie all your people but all the worlds besids sett together on one side and you alone on the other I should, to obey and pleas you, displeas, nay despise them.’ Gouty old men should, of course, be wise enough in the ways of the world to discount sycophancy on this scale. But evidently James needed someone to lean on, both metaphorically and literally, and Buckingham, who had been entirely ‘made’ by the king as much as if he had fathered him, was obviously assigned the role of the perfect son: virile, clever and dynamic. He could do no wrong, especially when expanding on the wonderfulness of King James.
Charles might have been a tougher nut for Buckingham to crack, being so reserved in his demeanour and alienated from the unbuttoned bonhomie of his father, but a special feast that Buckingham gave for him took care of that. Together, Charles and Buckingham managed to persuade James – over what was left of his better judgement – that a way to nail the match was for them to go to Madrid, woo the infanta in person and confront the court there with a fait accompli. James was so anxious to avoid a war that he agreed to the hare-brained plan. In 1621 he had come through the fiercest political conflict of his whole reign when he had summoned parliament to provide a subsidy in the event of a war. The initial session in early 1621, with the prospect of doing damage to Spain in the offing, had turned into a virtual love fest, with parliament offering funds and James offering up the usual sacrifice of a minister for them to impeach (in this case, Lord Chancellor Bacon, who was accused of taking bribes) and conceding that he had brought some of the ruin on himself by being ‘too bountiful’ when he first came into the kingdom. By the end of the year, however, news of the serious consideration being given not to a war but to a Spanish marriage had soured relations. Parliament now adamantly refused to grant monies in advance of a commitment to go to war. In response, James turned furiously on them, denying their right to discuss matters such as a royal marriage and affairs of war and peace. ‘You usurp upon our prerogative royal and meddle with things far above your reach.’ This was, in fact, virtually the same position that Elizabeth had taken when she, too, had turned on parliament in 1566. But in the intervening period, History had happened, in particular, a richly developed historical discourse, which held that parliaments had, since time immemorial, been able to discuss such things and that their right to speak freely on matters of state was, in the words of their ‘Protestation’ of 1621: ‘the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England; and that the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the King, state and defence of the realm and of the Church of England, and the maintenance and making of laws and redress of mischiefs and grievances which daily happen in this realm are proper subjects and matters of counsel and debate in parliament.’ James, who continued to insist that any such ‘privileges’ were a grant, not a right, may have been on more
accurate historical ground, but he was, as his son also would be, the ideological loser of the argument. And losers turn petulant, especially Stuarts. The king’s response was to have the offending page torn from the Journal of the House of Commons and the most offensive speakers locked up.
So perhaps it was the need to bring about an evacuation of the Palatinate without having to go to parliament for war funds that moved James to allow Buckingham and Charles to proceed with their adventure. Or perhaps James was just losing his grip, as an extraordinary letter to ‘Steenie’ and ‘babie Charles’ suggests, when he addressed them as ‘my sweete boyes and deare ventrouse Knights worthy to be putt in a new romanse’. From the beginning, from when they chose the persuasive incognitos of ‘Tom and Jack Smith’ complete with false whiskers (which fell off en route), to Charles’s adolescent determination to climb the garden wall in Madrid to get a better view of the object of his adoration, the entire enterprise began to resemble one of the more puerile products of the Jacobean stage. The Spanish, at any rate, were hugely amused at the pit of embarrassment that Smith and Smith had so boyishly dug for themselves. For while Buckingham and Charles naïvely imagined that they were hastening a conclusion, the Spanish realized that they had been handed, in effect, two diplomatic hostages. If James had allowed such a thing, their reasoning went, he must be desperate for the marriage. And if he were desperate, then they would extract the most extortionate terms they could from his predicament. Not only would there now be a royally protected public Catholic church created for the infanta, but Prince Charles would also have to agree to take instruction from her chaplain. To their amazement this, too, was accepted by the prince, along with more or less anything else the Spanish could think of. Testing the limits of English tolerance, they now went one step too far. The marriage, they stipulated, was to be considered made on paper but strictly subject (for its actual realization and consummation) to the satisfactory completion of a one-year probationary period, to be served not just by Charles himself at Madrid but also by his father’s government and kingdom. If during that period the terms of the treaty had been properly fulfilled, the infanta and her husband would be free to travel back to England; if not, well then not.
