A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  This last demand appalled King James, who now became genuinely (and rather touchingly) distraught at the possibility of not seeing his beloved ‘Steenie’ and his ‘babie’ for at least a year, during which time, God alone only knew, his aching old bones might have to be put in their tomb. Fortunately for James, Charles and Buckingham had also been affronted by the notion of their probation, and the heady romance of the Spanish affair had cooled. One of Charles’s companions, the young Buckinghamshire gentleman Sir Edmund Verney, had struck a priest in the face when he attempted to administer the Catholic last rites to a dying page in the prince’s retinue. The indignity of being captives rather than suitors began to seem like the humiliation it was. To secure their freedom Charles and Buckingham pretended to go along with the treaty, only to make it clear even before landing in England that they would repudiate it. By the time the party had got home, livid at the indignities, Buckingham had completely recast the prince’s role (and his own) not as Spanish bridegroom but as Protestant hero. Instead of a wedding there would now be a war. There is nothing like a bad pre-nuptial agreement, it seems, to bring on an attack of belligerence.

  When Charles returned home in October 1623, still a Protestant bachelor, the country exploded in relief, the likes of which had not been seen since the unmasking of the Gunpowder Treason. Once more, there were bonfires and bells. The spring session of parliament, summoned in February 1624 to provide a subsidy for the king, immediately turned into a concord between king and nation. Another minister (this time the relatively blameless and tireless, if well-rewarded, Lord Treasurer Cranfield) was duly served up for disgrace and ruin, and, now that the country was going to get its patriotic-Protestant war, parliament was prepared to give the king his money.

  It was not quite the war they had bargained for. Memories of Elizabethan strikes against the Don, much glamorized by the passage of time and the embellishments of history, must have led many to assume that there would be swift and lethal raids and the capture on the high seas of Spanish treasure. But apparently there was to be a land campaign too, waged in the Rhineland by the mercenary general, Count Ernst von Mansfield, using troops impressed – that is to say coerced – from England. No one was chafing at the bit to sign up for this doubtful enterprise. Men sawed their fingers off or blinded themselves in one eye to avoid impressment, but 12,000 poor souls, digits and eyes intact, were plucked by the constables from alehouses and street corners and marched to Dover. By the time they could find a port willing to land them on the other side, at Flushing in Zeeland, the entire force had been so badly hit by the plague that bodies had to be thrown into the harbour every day, until just 3000 troops remained, scarcely enough to make any kind of military impact. So the Mansfield expedition ignominiously collapsed before it ever got under way.

  It was to have been the last great campaign of the peacemaker king. But in March 1625, the king, who had become so stricken with gout that he could barely move at all, made his own peace with the Almighty. ‘And Solomon sleeps with his fathers,’ was the text of the funeral sermon preached by John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, invoking the dusty cliché of Jacobean eulogies. But this time it was literal, since the great tomb of Henry VII in Westminster was opened and James’s own remains were placed next to the founder of the Tudor dynasty. If he had had trouble making a union of his two realms in his life, at least he would manage one particular peaceful cohabitation in death. For although James was hidden from view, the tombs of his mother and his predecessor, Mary and Elizabeth, the one brilliantly coloured, the other virginally white, were made, by his order, to share the same space. Magna Britannia: R.I.P.

  If James had been Britain’s Solomon, could his son aspire to be its imperial Charlemagne? Carolus Rex Magnae Britanniae appears on a shield hung over an ancient oak in the most imposing of all of Van Dyck’s equestrian portraits, in which the golden-spurred king rides forth in a pose unmistakably reminiscent of Titian’s great equestrian portrait of the armoured Habsburg emperor, Charles Von Horseback, of 1548. Behind him is the sylvan glade of England, before him the cerulean sky of the new golden age over which he will preside, Roman Emperor and miles Christianum, Christian knight. Because he was so little, Van Dyck had to take liberties with the relative proportions of king and horse, so that Charles would seem a naturally commanding Caesar. Riding and ruling were supposed to be one and the same. Antoine de Pluvinel, the most famous riding instructor in all Europe, had published a widely read treatise that not only compared the stoical, perfectly calm control of a fiery charger to the ruler’s government of his realm but actually argued as well for equestrian education in this style as a precondition of establishing proper princely authority. To command the great horse – impassive, fearless and still – as the statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Campidoglio in Rome made clear, was the mark of a true Caesar.

  It is a certainty that Charles would have read deeply in the classics as part of his humanist education, and that the Stoics, Seneca in particular, would have been at the heart of such instruction. From an early stage the new king cultivated an aura of stoical self-possession, which made a startling contrast with the garrulous, expansive, disconcertingly unbuttoned informality of his father. Perhaps Charles, like so many others, had been impressed with the gravitas that ruled the Spanish court. At the Escorial sobriety ruled, and the king’s presence was closed off from the common mob of courtiers by a solemn and elaborate fence of ritual. Sir Edmund Verney, who had not shown himself overly decorous by attacking a Jesuit, was now repaid by being awarded the office of Knight Marshal of the Palace, saddling him with the unenviable task of policing the court and its environs. It was Verney who had to see to the yards and corridors of the royal palaces, especially Whitehall, clearing them of the innumerable over-dressed louts, dunning tradesmen, doubtful men-at-arms and sundry petitioners who hung around the premises. There was, in any case, much in Charles’s own reserved (not to say secretive) and rather prim manner that predisposed him towards solemnity. Of course, the more demure atmosphere he brought to the court could hardly have been thought a liability. A thorough cleansing of the Augean stables was, after all, what polite (not just Puritan) opinion had been clamouring for. And the substance of Charles’s policies was not, in principle, so very different from that of his father, who had also refused to acknowledge the illegality of extra-parliamentary taxation, or the right of parliament to debate what it saw fit. When he bore down on parliament for presuming such things, he was doing no more than reiterating what he could be forgiven for thinking an accepted article of the Jacobean creed about sovereignty.

  It was not so much what Charles said that got him and England into trouble as the way he said it. The violent ups and downs of James’s political apprenticeship had educated him early and well in the need for timely, pragmatic concessions, and he was capable of alternating Caledonian wrath with equal bursts of ingratiating charm. Charles, though, set great store by consistency. Perhaps he had overdosed a little on Seneca and his seventeenth-century neo-Stoic admirers for whom there was no greater virtue in public men than constancy, for Charles was constitutionally incapable of seeing two (or more) sides to any matter. More seriously for the government of the realm, he was even more incapable of acting against his own decided convictions.

  Charles would not, for example, do what kings of England had done since the days of Edward III and the ‘Good Parliament’ of 1376 and jettison a royal favourite for the sake of an improved working relationship between Crown and parliament. Cynicism and disloyalty shocked him deeply. Instead, Charles insisted on looking at the individual merits of the case. This was a terrible mistake. You will not find any chapters in constitutional histories devoted to the rituals of therapeutic disgrace, but creative scapegoating had, none the less, long been an integral element of English politics. Concentrating odium for unpopular policies on the head of a politician (which, of course, might fall as a result) preserved the fiction that the ‘king could do no wrong’. By insisting from an honourable
but obtuse loyalty (in the case of Buckingham and, later, Laud and Strafford) that there was no difference between the king’s view and his servant’s, he wrecked the convenience of impeachment. Blame had nowhere to go but back to HM himself.

  None of this, of course, would occur or could be explained to Charles himself even when, as in Buckingham’s case, the favourite had reserved most of his energies for the accumulation of an immense empire of patronage rather than for the prosecution of the war he said he was so impatient to fight. In 1625 the doomed Spanish marriage project had been replaced by a successful French match (to Henrietta Maria, sister of Louis XIII), and, as part of the alliance, English ships and troops were supposed to join a French attack on Spain. But Cardinal Richelieu proved not much less manipulative than the Spanish and absorbed the English force into an attack on the Huguenot enclave of La Rochelle. When, in addition, it became apparent that Henrietta Maria was to enjoy the same conditions of freedom for Catholic worship that would have been guaranteed to the Spanish infanta and, even worse, that the recusancy laws were to be suspended as a condition of the marriage, it suddenly seemed that England was fighting a war against, rather than on behalf of, the Protestant cause.

  The suspicion that the country had somehow been turned aside from a godly Protestant crusade to a sinister quasi-Catholic war, designed to insinuate popery back into the Church, was shared by the Puritans both in parliament and in the shires. Sir Robert Harley’s letters to his third wife, Lady Brilliana (whose wonderful name had been taken from the seaport of Brielle or Brill, where the Dutch revolt had had its first success against Philip II, and where Brilliana’s father had been commander), are heavy with mistrust and anxiety. What capped it for Harley was the appointment by Charles of Richard Montague as court chaplain. To men such as Harley, Montague was a notorious ‘Arminian’, which was little better than an outright Papist, perhaps even worse because of his pretence of remaining within the Church of England. In fact, Montague’s brand of theology was no different from that preached and practised by ministers favoured by James, like Lancelot Andrewes and his successor, John Buckeridge. But the Puritans knew that in the cockpit of theological combat in the Dutch Republic the struggle (which had degenerated into a real civil war in 1618) between ‘Arminians’ and their more militant late sixteenth-century Calvinist adversaries was precisely over the crucial issue of predestination. The followers of the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminius believed that salvation was not exclusively predetermined and that God might (not necessarily, but possibly) be persuaded to relent by the penitent good works of the sinner, and that therefore the boundaries between the saved and the damned were not hard and fast after all. Rightly or wrongly, they had been anathematized in Holland as little better than Catholics, and the same was true of their counterparts in England, including Montague and William Laud, whom Charles would appoint to be Bishop of London and then Archbishop of Canterbury. Like his father before him, Charles saw the anti-Calvinist theology as broadening the Church, conceivably even managing to bind up the wounds that had hurt it since the Reformation. To the godly, though, this was nothing but a counter-Reformation by the back door.

  When Charles’s first parliament convened in June 1625, summoned to provide funds for the war, it made clear – from the niggardly sums voted and the deliberately insulting grant of the usual customs duties, ‘tonnage and poundage’, not for life but for one year – that religious issues were going to be linked to the supply of revenue. A parliamentary commission of inquiry was appointed to investigate Montague, and the next on the list of targets was bound to be Buckingham, who had botched a raid on Cadiz so badly that suspicions were being voiced that his heart had never been in it. To persuade parliament otherwise, Buckingham abruptly switched tack to give them a war they might like – against, rather than on behalf of, the French and in support of the beleaguered Huguenots.

  By the standards of past liability, Buckingham had already done enough to earn himself impeachment thrice over, but during Charles’s second parliament, in June 1626, the king made it clear he would never countenance proceedings against his favourite. On 12 June, a tornado cut a path through southern England, opening the graves of plague victims who had been buried the previous year. The godly knew what this portended, but apparently the king did not. Faced with parliamentary refusal to vote subsidies for the new war unless Buckingham was impeached, Charles decided to levy a forced loan. This was bound to be inflammatory. The medieval tradition of ‘benevolences’ – money required without parliamentary sanction for the defence of the realm – had been outlawed in 1484 and abandoned since 1546, as it invariably raised serious constitutional questions about the king’s exclusive right to judge when a war constituted an emergency or not. In 1614, however, James had revived benevolences, though they remained bitterly controversial. It was predictable that those whom Charles believed to be conspiratorial rabble-rousers, the orchestrators of ‘popularity’, should misrepresent the loan (as he thought) as an illegal confiscation. But the scale and breadth of outraged resistance must have startled him. Had not William Laud preached that since no power but God could judge the king, obedience to God extended, without demur, to obeying the king? The point, however, was not well taken. It was not just Puritans who denounced the loan as unlawful. The heart of the resistance came from sections of the political community on whom the king relied for stable government: the nobility and the gentry of the counties. Even so, not all the shires were equally incensed. It helped that the administrative arrangements for the loan were left to the counties themselves to organize, and the fact that £240,000 was raised, despite the hue and cry, suggests that by no means all of England and Wales was up in arms.

  But some sections of the country were, indeed, belligerent in defence of the ‘liberties’ and property of the subject as never before. In Cornwall, for example, often thought of as loyal and royal, the MP William Coryton made it clear to the commissioners for the loan that he had consulted God, his conscience and historical precedent and had been instructed by all three that the loan was emphatically illegal. Coryton was imprisoned in the Fleet prison in London for his resistance. Some of the greatest and most powerful figures in the country became resisters: the Earls of Warwick, Essex, Huntingdon and Arundel. The twenty-seven-year-old Theophilus Clinton, Earl of Lincoln, an unlikely opposition hero, none the less mobilized resistance among seventy prominent gentry in the county and, when deposited in the Tower for his presumption, made sure his steward carried on the work of frustrating the commissioners. The spectacle of the mighty leading the charge in counties like Essex, Suffolk, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire gave heart to godly preachers and men who would normally be thought of as pillars of stability. And the crisis provoked statements of shocking defiance and militancy. ‘If it [the loan] goes forward,’ wrote one Lincolnshire knight, ‘we make ourselves and our posteritye subject to perpetual slavery without any recovery to be taxed at pleasure without any limits.’ And in Yorkshire Sir John Jackson warned that ‘if any of his men had give anie they should never hold land of him and if anie of my tenants shall give, God’s wounds I could or would hange them with my owne hands’.

  The sound and fury did not die away once the money was collected. In the thirty-two contested elections for the parliament of 1628, opposition or submission to the forced loan became a critical issue in mobilizing the freeholders to defeat court-approved incumbents. Coryton and his friend, Sir John Eliot, who had also been jailed for resistance, were pressured by the government not to stand in Cornwall. But stand they did, turning their incarceration into a badge of honour and, more significantly, organizing like-minded gentry in a region supposedly warmly loyalist to ensure their triumphant return to parliament. Even more ominously for Crown control of politics, some of the more fiercely contested elections saw feisty mob scenes. At Cambridge Joseph Mead, the collector of political intelligence for his news ‘separates’, reported that in London not only had a linen draper, who had
been in prison for resisting the loan, been elected, but the crowds had also been ‘very unruly’. At Westminster supporters of the court-sponsored candidate, Sir Robert Pye, attempted to cry up his chances by parading the streets shouting, ‘A Pye! A Pye! A Pye!’, but were met with derisive counter-cries of ‘A pudding! A pudding! A pudding!’ and ‘A lie! A lie! A lie!’ Many of the names that would become a fixture of parliamentary ideology and local political organization in the early 1640s – Francis Rous in Cornwall, John Pym at Tavistock – had their first political blooding in these elections, which were unlike anything that had yet been seen in English political life.

  Of course, England was not yet on the verge of revolution, or even approaching it, but moments like the forced loan crisis were, unquestionably, politically transformative. Rightly or wrongly, they fixed in the minds of an active, nationally educated political community the suspicion that this king was bent on breaching parliamentary defences of their property and their common law. It was an explosive apprehension, and from the most anxious it produced statements of unprecedented militancy about the limits of royal power. In Canterbury, for example, the city’s MP Thomas Scott responded to the dean’s sermon demanding unconditional obedience to the king with the statement that ‘conscientious Puritans’ (the word now self-attached as a badge of pride) were required to resist the abuses of unjust rulers: ‘subjects may disobey and refuse an unworthy kinge his command or request if it be more than of duty we owe unto him.’