Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  The trouble with these conflicting interpretations is that hindsight is 20/20. More recent historians, examining a wider array of sources with more circumspection, have largely abandoned earlier assumptions. First, it does not follow that the Civil Wars were ever inevitable, whether in 1588 or 1603 or even in 1640. A different turn of events, a different royal personality or education for the young Prince Charles, a slowdown of the inflation discussed in chapter 6: all might have led to a different result. Second, no one anticipated or wanted a civil war, nor, before its outbreak, were king or Parliament striving consciously to increase their respective power at the expense of the other. Rather, more recent work has argued that early Stuart kings and parliaments (and the wider constituencies they represented) were both striving throughout the period for mutual agreement and cooperation, not dominance. Third, no early Stuart social group was homogeneous in viewpoint or united in aim. It is therefore ludicrous to speak of “Parliament,” or “the merchants,” or “Puritans” as being monolithic parties made up of individuals who all sought the same thing – let alone fought to dominate their society. Finally, it should not be assumed that most ordinary English men and women had long-cherished hopes of overthrowing royal power and establishing some sort of democracy. As we learned in chapter 6, the English people were, by and large, a traditional and deferential lot. The vast majority were content that the king should rule and they should obey. Admittedly, they wanted the king to rule wisely and justly, with respect for the law. But even when Charles I was perceived as failing to do so they would oppose him only gradually and reluctantly – though perhaps a bit less reluctantly than they would have done Queen Elizabeth.

  From the 1970s onwards, an influential group of historians has sought to revise the old Whig, Marxist, and Weberian interpretations by arguing that early Stuart policies and politics should be judged on their own merits, without reference to the Civil Wars. After all, James I and Charles I ruled three kingdoms, successfully, for nearly half a century. These historians, often labeled Revisionists, argue that the Civil Wars were not a product of a long-term conflict between king and Parliament or king and people, let alone aristocrats and merchants, or Puritans and more traditional members of the Church of England. Rather, these groups rarely disagreed over basic principles or constitutional ideology and for most of the early Stuart period the king and his ruling elite worked in close partnership. Revisionist historians deemphasize the role of parliaments, pointing out that they met only rarely and always at the pleasure of the monarch. They clashed with the king even more rarely. These historians argue that the only permanent venue in which the king had contact with his subjects and their problems was the court; that this was the great arena for the pursuit of conflict and, more often, the forging of consensus. They also emphasize that James I and Charles I were not merely kings of England but of Scotland and Ireland as well. Indeed, to the extent that the Civil Wars (or “Wars of the Three Kingdoms” as many Revisionists would style these conflicts) did have any long-term causes, they can be found in the ramshackle structure of the triple crown that the Stuarts wore. That is, the early Stuart state(s) was (were) eventually overwhelmed by the difficulties inherent in ruling three different peoples, each with a different majority religion, legal system, social structure, and culture. These new explanations have re-energized research on the period, but they raise their own problems – not least because they are often better at explaining why the Civil Wars should not have happened than why they did!

  Thus, if the British Civil Wars are the most dramatic events covered in these pages, their causes are also the most complex and subject to historical argument. Lawrence Stone, author of one of the many books seeking those causes, has compared the search to trying to trace a strand of DNA.2 Nevertheless, the authors of this book must separate out these strands, even if this leads to a certain amount of oversimplification. In our view, the English, Scottish, and Irish Civil Wars did not happen by accident or overnight. They arose out of unanswered questions, tensions, and flaws inherent in the Tudor and early Stuart polity which, despite the desire for consensus and cooperation detected by the Revisionists, became worse as the seventeenth century approached its mid-point. We see five major areas of uncertainty and tension in the early-seventeenth-century English polity.

  1. The problem of sovereignty, law, and counsel: What is the king’s relationship to the law; is he above it or subordinate to it? Who, primarily, should advise the king: courtiers, councilors, or Parliament? If the last, whose interests does Parliament represent: king or people? Later, what should be the respective, proper roles of king and Parliament? When push comes to shove, who decides on policy?

  2. The problem of government finance and the economy: How should the government pay for itself? Does the king have a preemptive right to the property of his subjects? What role should government play in the national economy?

  3. The problem of war and foreign policy: What is England’s proper role in Europe? Should the English taxpayer support a more active role?

  4. The problem of religion: What should be the state religion of England? Should other faith traditions be tolerated? Who makes religious policy: king, Parliament, the bishops, local communities, or a combination of all four? What should be the answers to these questions for Scotland and Ireland?

  5. The problem of local control: What is the proper relationship between the central government in Westminster and the English localities? What should be the relationship between that government and those of Scotland and Ireland?

  It would be going too far to say that these problems “caused” the Civil Wars or that the king and his subjects were always or even frequently very divided over them. We accept the Revisionist argument that, most of the time, early modern English people were looking for peaceful, consensual solutions to these problems – to the extent that they dealt actively with them at all. But so long as they remained unresolved, they had the potential to lead to conflict. As we have seen, the Tudors had been adept at papering over, postponing, or winning temporary consensus on them. One might argue that another, shorter-term “cause” of the British Civil Wars was that the Stuarts were not the Tudors: neither so skillful, nor so lucky. That is, the Stuarts sometimes misunderstood the political and religious cultures of each of their three kingdoms in ways that the most successful Tudors would not have done. Admittedly, if one recalls the Tudors’ often disastrous attempts to impose their authority on Scotland and Ireland, the bar was sometimes set pretty low. In all their kingdoms, the Stuarts inherited troubles not of their own making, but then, often, made them worse. As a result, the potential for violent conflict was reached in Scotland in 1637, in Ireland in 1641, and in England in 1642, during the reign of Charles I.

  The Problem of Sovereignty, Law, and Counsel

  On the surface, there was no problem of sovereignty in early Stuart England: clearly, the sovereign was sovereign. That is, according to the Great Chain of Being, the king was God’s lieutenant on earth and the head of the body politic. He had long possessed the prerogative to make peace or war, appoint all major government officials, and direct how government monies be spent. His powers had actually increased during the Tudor period, when he became the Supreme Head of the Church of England and, thus, assumed command of his subjects’ souls as well as their bodies. No wonder that Henry VIII had said “of our absolute power we be above the laws.”3 But, to confuse the issue, he had also conceded that his power was at its greatest when it assumed the form of king-in-Parliament (see chapter 3). As we have seen, throughout the late medieval and Tudor periods, Parliament had successfully maintained the right to be partners with the king in making law, and, especially, in levying taxes, which could be done only with its approval. Under the Tudors royal and parliamentary power had increased simultaneously, as successive rulers turned to their parliaments for religious legislation. This is paradoxical only if one sees these two bodies as being naturally in conflict, which no one did in 1603.

  Neve
rtheless, the king-in-Parliament formula introduced ambiguity and possible tension into the English constitution. Under the early Stuarts, that tension first centered around the king’s relationship to the law: was he above the law, as Henry had believed, or subject to it? Put another way, since the king was the fountain of law, could he break the law – his law – with impunity? Late Tudor and early Stuart monarchs tried to get around this difficulty by pledging in their coronation oaths to govern within the law. But what if they broke that promise? What if a parliament, or the people, disagreed with the king’s interpretation of the law? Indeed, whose interests was Parliament supposed to serve: king or people? Once again, early Stuart monarchs would insist that those interests were identical. But what if they were not? And if Parliament’s ultimate responsibility was to the people of England, did this not charge them with the duty, or give them the right, to disagree with the king when he pursued policies which they judged harmful to the good of the realm? Might not such a disagreement raise the deeper issue of who – or what – was the true sovereign power in England?

  Few of James’s subjects had followed the implications of these questions to their conclusions in 1603. Still, throughout Elizabeth’s reign, Parliament had, as we have seen, frequently annoyed the queen by debating – admittedly, often at the behest of her own privy councilors – such sore subjects as religion, foreign policy, her marriage prospects, and the limits of free speech. Sometimes Elizabeth had dealt with this annoyance by peremptorily exercising her constitutional rights of veto, dismissal, and prorogation; but more often through persuading her ministers or, in really tight situations, deploying her own great personal charm. As we saw in the debate on monopolies, this often served only to postpone a resolution. As a result, she left for her successor a country still grumbling over high taxes, monopolies, purveyance, and wardship, still at war with Spain and Irish rebels, and still divided in religion; a revenue inadequate and growing more so due to inflation; courtiers who were increasingly greedy and unsatisfied; and a parliament which felt competent to raise all these matters with that successor. As a result of this legacy, the broad theoretical questions raised above would grow more pressing in the new reign. What sort of man inherited this situation?

  James Stuart, the only son of Elizabeth’s old nemeses, Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley, long had a bad press among English historians. This was, in part, because he possessed an unconventional personality for a king, especially after the forthright authoritarianism of the Tudors. For example, unlike the last two Henries, he was not a military man: in fact, a military salute on the Isle of Wight once frightened him. Rather, he fancied himself a Rex Pacificus (peaceful king) who would bring peace and concord not only to the three kingdoms but, as a moderator among his fellow monarchs, to all of Europe. In this, he was ahead of his time. He was also a relatively tolerant man, preferring, like Elizabeth, to let Catholics and Puritans live in peace if they maintained their political loyalty to him. His failure to engage in military adventures against the Catholic powers or to enforce the penal laws against Catholics at home would be controversial with his subjects. In fact, his decision to end the war with Spain in 1604 was precisely what the English economy needed, while his flexibility over religion promoted sectarian peace for 20 years.

  Rather than assuming the Henrician mantle of a great warrior, the new king was an accomplished scholar, publishing widely on subjects ranging from demonology to tobacco (which he detested) to the art of governing. As this implies, he had considerable intelligence and, like his Tudor cousins, he could be crafty behind the scenes. As his attitude toward Catholics and Puritans implies, he was also flexible and willing to compromise when necessary. Consequently, he proved especially adept at balancing off factions, something which he had learned to do in Scotland. In fact, James had ruled Scotland quite successfully for two decades; this was no mean accomplishment, for the northern kingdom remained riven by opposing noble factions: Catholic versus Presbyterian, Highland versus Lowland. James’s strategy in each of his kingdoms was to negotiate and compromise with loyal moderates in private, while hitting hard at radicals and emphasizing his exalted status as God’s lieutenant on earth in public.

  Unfortunately for his image, both then and later, the new king did not look, sound, or act, to contempory eyes and ears, very much like a surrogate for the Supreme Being. It is not James’s fault that he was a rather odd-looking man (see plate 13): skinny legs supported an ungainly body, crowned by a somewhat ponderous head. That head housed a tongue that was too large for its mouth, causing a pronounced lisp. The lisp exacerbated a stutter and what to English hearing was a thick Scots accent. In our politically correct age all of this might be overlooked or even celebrated in the name of diversity. But contemporaries used to the regal bearing of the Tudors and bound by their own prejudices could not help but draw unflattering conclusions. In particular, James’s Scottish descent was difficult to stomach for English men and women who had long seen their northern neighbors as rude, impoverished brigands. Some charged that the king had swept down from his poor northern kingdom accompanied by “the hungry Scots”: Scottish courtiers who saw England as a vast treasure house to plunder.

  Plate 13 James I, by van Somer. The Royal Collection © 2008 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

  The new king’s manner also contrasted sharply with that of his Tudor predecessors, sometimes to his disadvantage. Once again, some of his personal traits were far more damaging then than they would be today. For a king, he could be remarkably informal, even affable. He was not a stickler for ceremony and was good at putting people at ease. This was, in some ways, an advantage, for it meant that, early in the reign, at least, his court was welcoming to men and women of all political and religious persuasions. This openness meant that the king always had a pretty good idea of what various sides in a debate were thinking; while each might hope that their view would prevail. On the other hand, the Tudors’ success had stemmed, in part, from their ability to keep people off balance and inspire loyalty, awe, and fear. The new king’s personality and reputation worked against these feelings in several ways. For example, there were rumors of excessive drinking, made worse by a poor ability to tolerate its effects. More seriously, and unlike his Tudor predecessors, the new king hated crowds and rarely showed himself to his people outside London. Once, when told that a number of his subjects had gathered to express their loyalty to him, he responded testily and with characteristic earthiness, “God’s wounds! I will pull down my breaches and they shall also see my arse.”4 Worse, as the reign wore on he grew increasingly lazy, leaving pressing matters to government ministers with whom he did not always communicate and whom he sometimes undermined. This actually served to increase faction because on any given issue there always seemed to be hope of changing the king’s mind. An athletic man – he introduced the Scottish sport of golf to England – he preferred to spend his time hunting with his favorites at his beloved lodge at Theobalds, Hertfordshire.

  And then there is the matter of the favorites themselves. Though James’s marriage to Anne of Denmark (1574–1619) produced several children, his sexuality has long been a matter of debate. It soon became clear to frequenters of his court that he preferred the company of handsome young men. His correspondence with these favorites reveals a depth of playful affection that is certainly homo-erotic, if not homosexual. Admittedly, historians are still debating how people in the past constructed their sexuality, and what they would have considered to be heterosexual or homosexual behavior or identity. In any case, sodomy, as it was then most often called, was considered a heinous sin in Church law, dangerous to allege against a ruler. What we can say is that James’s relations with his favorites – Esmé Stuart, duke of Lennox (ca. 1542–83), in Scotland; Robert Carr, earl of Somerset (ca. 1585–1645), and then George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, in England – were, if not overtly sexual, certainly physical, and contemporaries noticed. They remarked at length on how James hung about their necks, in the words
of one scandalized Puritan gentleman, “kissing them after so lascivious a mode in public [as] … prompted many to imagine some things done in the tyring house [dressing room] that exceed my expression.”5 Anti-court poems and pamphlets drew a connection between what they saw as the king’s personal moral corruption, and corruption in the State. Thus, James’s unconventional sexuality had political consequences. Like his abhorrence of military pursuits and devotion to scholarship, they contrasted sharply with Queen Elizabeth’s dignified bellicosity and flirtatious interest in the opposite sex. Whatever we might make of such inclinations today, they did not fit contemporary images of a king, in particular one who claimed to be God’s representative on earth.

  And claim James did. As a young man, he had reacted against the teachings of his tutor, George Buchanan (1506–82), as well as a number of other Presbyterian, Huguenot, and Jesuit writers who, during the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, responded to royal persecution of their respective faiths by arguing that an oppressed people had the right to oppose, depose, or even assassinate an unjust king. James, appalled, had spent most of his career loudly trumpeting the Divine Right of Kings; that is, the notion that, because kings received their power directly from God Himself, they were untouchable, having no one to answer to but God. Thus, kings were clearly above Parliament and the law, though a good ruler might agree to consult the former and abide by the latter. Above all, James argued that no subject had the right to resist a divinely appointed monarch, even if he violated the law or was a manifestly bad king. Only God could remove a king.