Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History

by Bucholz, Robert

  Plate 14 George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, by William Larkin. National Portrait Gallery.

  But a more apt comparison might be drawn with Leicester in the previous reign, for Buckingham had James’s heart as fully as “sweet Robin” held Elizabeth’s. In fact, James was far less discreet than his predecessor, informing his Privy Council in 1617 that “Christ had his John, and I have my George.”16 Moreover, again unlike Elizabeth, James gave in to his heart more often than to his head. In particular, after Salisbury’s death in 1612 there was no one at court powerful enough to restrain the king from showering his favorites with wealth and power. In response, Parliament grew even less willing to finance his pleasures. It should therefore come as no surprise that the next parliament, called in 1614 to deal with the king’s debts, became known as “the Addled Parliament” for its failure to initiate any important legislation. As we shall see, the 1621 Parliament was to prove more cooperative, but at a price.

  By this time, James’s debts stood at over £1 million and City loans were drying up. Without a parliamentary subsidy to stave off his creditors and critics, he cagily turned to one of them, a London merchant named Lionel Cranfield (1575–1645). Initially supported by Buckingham, Cranfield was named lord treasurer in 1621 and earl of Middlesex the following year. Middlesex introduced vigorous cost-cutting and almost succeeded in eliminating the king’s debts. But as James noted “All Treasurers if they do good service to their master, must be generally hated.”17 In particular, his attack on expenditure threatened Buckingham and his considerable following. For a while Middlesex fought back, even trying to promote another young male courtier as a rival to Buckingham. But the latter was too powerful with the king and had too many followers in Parliament. A compliant House of Commons impeached Middlesex in 1624. The king pardoned him a year later, but he would never again play an important role in government. James continued to spend time and money on his favorite and on his favorite’s projects. By 1624, those projects included something more ambitious and expensive than before: a war.

  The Problem of Foreign Policy, War, and England’s Place in Europe

  As we have seen, one of James’s first acts as king of England was to negotiate a peace treaty with Spain. For most of the remainder of his reign, he pursued a pacific foreign policy. This was wise, for it kept England out of the last round of bitter and bloody European Wars of Religion, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). This conflict pitted Habsburg Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and their mostly Catholic German allies against Bourbon France, Protestant Denmark and Sweden, and a number of northern German States. The former were, for the most part, Catholic countries, the latter mostly Protestant. (While France was officially Catholic, it had a large number of Protestant Huguenots, thanks to Henry IV’s Edict of Toleration of 1598.) So, on one level, the Thirty Years’ War was another War of Religion. But the fact that Catholic France fought Catholic Spain indicates that it was also a geopolitical contest between the two most powerful European nations. Governments spent massively to field vast armies which criss-crossed central Europe, laying waste to the countryside and destroying, directly or indirectly, as much as one-third of the population in some areas. In the end, these wars would devastate the Holy Roman Empire, bankrupt Spain, and convince many contemporary Europeans that religious uniformity could not – and perhaps should not – be won by force of arms.

  The Thirty Years’ War was one of the great tragedies of early modern history. James showed greater wisdom than his predecessor, Henry VIII, by staying out of this continental quagmire. In fact, one of his long-cherished goals was to engineer a European-wide peace using an old Tudor strategy: diplomatic marriage. The linchpins of James’s new European plan would be two royal matches: that of his eldest son, Prince Henry, to a princess of Spain, the principal Catholic power; and that of his daughter, Elizabeth (1596–1662), to Frederick V (1596–1632), the ruler of Rhine-Palatine and a leading Protestant. Through the lineage of the Rex Pacificus, the two sides would be brought together in peace. James would be arbiter of Europe.

  It was not to be. The Catholic marriage was scuttled when Henry died of typhoid fever in 1612. The Protestant marriage to Frederick V went off the next year without a hitch. English Puritans were thrilled when, in 1618, the rebellious Protestants of Bohemia, in the opening act of the Thirty Years’ War, threw off their allegiance to the Catholic Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor and offered their crown to Frederick. They were ecstatic when he and Elizabeth decided, before consulting the cautious James, to accept that crown. They were correspondingly alarmed when the emperor decided to fight back; and suitably devastated when, in the autumn of 1620, Bavarian forces allied with the emperor crushed Frederick’s Protestant army at the battle of the White Mountain. Frederick and Elizabeth fled their new kingdom after less than a year. Soon a Spanish army drove them out of their ancestral lands of Rhine-Palatine also, making them refugees. These events were reported avidly, dramatically, even apocalyptically in contemporary pamphlets and newspapers (the first English-language corantos – derived from Latin for “current” news – which dealt only in foreign news). They caught the public imagination and put tremendous pressure on James’s pacific regime. This was the chance for which many red-blooded Protestant Englishmen had been waiting. If James wanted peace with Catholic Europe, his most enthusiastic Protestant subjects wanted war with the forces of anti-Christ. In particular, Puritan MPs, egged on by Puritan preachers, fearing the extinction of European Protestantism, saw the Thirty Years’ War as an apocalyptic struggle between good (Protestantism) and evil (Catholicism) that England was morally bound to join. They found the court’s pacifism, profligacy, and obsession with pleasure disgraceful. In fact, if James’s ambitions for a European peace were wildly ambitious, so were Puritan hopes for a Protestant crusade. Like Henry VIII before them, few had any realistic idea of how much such a war would really cost or of how puny English power really was.

  The Parliament called in 1621 to deal with the European crisis met in the midst of a deep economic depression. As a consequence, its members intended to exact a price for their cooperation. Many supported legislation to abolish monopolies, end the impositions, and impeach Lord Chancellor Bacon as an example for taking bribes. James would concede some of this program if the Commons voted funds sufficient to raise an army to restore Frederick to his ancestral lands. But many peers and commoners wanted more: a full-scale naval war against Spain in the spirit of Drake. James and Buckingham opposed this because they still wanted the freedom to contract a Spanish match for the king’s surviving son, Prince Charles. In fact, they hoped that the threat of war would compel Spain to pursue the match more eagerly. But talk of such a marriage revived long English memories of the union of “Bloody” Mary and Philip II, the Protestant martyrs, the Armada, and more recent Spanish atrocities in the European war. The king responded to Parliament’s obstinacy by falling back on his predecessor’s old argument that it had no right to debate foreign policy or how the money it voted should be spent. This once again raised the issue of Parliament’s privileges, this time, that of free speech. The Commons replied by registering a written protest which extended the argument of the 1604 Apology:

  That the liberties, franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England; and that the arduous and urgent affairs concerning the King, State, and defense 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 within this realm, are proper subjects and matter of counsel and debate in Parliament.18

  Obviously, the problem of foreign policy had collided with those of sovereignty and finance. This prompted James not only to dissolve Parliament, but to imprison some of the Commons’ leaders and to rip the protest out of the Commons’ Journal with his own hand. So much for cooperation between the king and his Parliament. From henceforward, the tensions between them would grow m
ore serious, the stakes higher.

  In the winter of 1622–3, over the objections of a hostile populace, Buckingham reopened negotiations for a marriage between Prince Charles and the infanta (or Crown princess) of Spain. The Spanish were not uninterested, but would never acquiesce to England’s additional demand for restitution of the Palatinate to Frederick. So, they refused to grant diplomatic credentials or safe-conduct passages for Buckingham and the would-be groom. Undeterred, the duke concocted a mad scheme to travel to Spain in disguise. Armed with false beards and calling themselves “Thomas and John Smith,” the prince and the favorite crossed Europe; Charles actually got to the point of climbing the garden wall of a Spanish royal palace to get a look at his inamorata. When their embarrased Spanish hosts made it clear that the Palatinate would not be part of the deal, the ardent wooers returned to England without either prize.

  This bizarre escapade had three results. First, upon their return in 1623 Charles and Buckingham found themselves wildly popular – the first and only time in their lives that they would be so – because they failed to contract a Catholic marriage. The citizens of London and other cities, recalling the disastrous marriage of Mary and Philip II, rang bells and lit bonfires in the streets to celebrate this latest example of providential delivery from a Catholic takeover – or at least a Spanish demand for Catholic toleration. The second result of the escapade was that Buckingham forged a paternal relationship with Charles, the heir apparent – a necessity as the aging James was slowing down rapidly by the early 1620s. Thus, when James died in March 1625, Buckingham remained in charge of his son and, therefore, of his son’s government.

  It was, in fact, nothing new for Charles to be dominated. As a youth he had lived in the shadow of his dynamic and charismatic elder brother, Henry. When Prince Henry died in 1612, people grieved genuinely because he had projected the sort of chivalrous and Protestant bellicosity that many expected of an English king and which James had failed to provide. The son who survived and succeeded in 1625 as King Charles19 was a very different sort of man. Nevertheless, in some ways he, too, fulfilled kingly expectations rather better than his father had done. Unlike James, Charles looked every inch a Divine Right monarch, despite his relatively short stature (see plate 15). That is, he bore himself with regal dignity and maintained proper courtly etiquette at all times. He was also monogamous and kept a much more respectable court than his father. Highly cultured, he was probably the greatest connoisseur ever to sit on the English throne. Charles sent his diplomats scouring the studios of Europe to fill Whitehall Palace with the most distinguished collection of artwork of any early modern ruler. At his insistence both Rubens and van Dyck came to England and painted for the Stuarts. Van Dyck’s portraits of the royal family are one of the great achievements of Western art and kingly propaganda, projecting an image of monarchy serenely confident in its exercise of divinely inspired royal power.

  Unfortunately, that image concealed a more ambiguous reality. As with so many rulers before him, the new king’s good qualities had a dark side. Charles’s sense of royal dignity often struck his subjects as mere aloofness; indeed, it cannot be said that he was often generous or possessed of a common touch. Perhaps his punctiliousness compensated for insecurity: over his short stature, his stutter, and his general awkwardness in dealing with people. Unlike his voluble father, Charles was a shy and reticent man who, nevertheless, rarely took advice. He would make a decision or issue an order as a matter of royal prerogative, without consultation, and then expect unquestioning obedience, no matter how apparently absurd the demand. He felt no need to explain himself to his parliaments or his people. As a result, his enemies were able to put their own “spin” on his motives. His authoritarianism was the product of an inflexible mind which saw dissent as disloyalty, retreat as a sign of weakness. That is, unlike James, Charles was very nearly incapable of compromise or even understanding opposing viewpoints. His court may have been more decorous than his father’s, but it was also more narrow. Buckingham was allowed no rival in distributing patronage and politicians out of royal favor received clear signals that they were not welcome. This left the court isolated from opinion in the rest of the country. Charles did not wish to moderate between competing views; he expected compliance and he was perfectly capable of being disingenuous or duplicitous in order to win it. Such an attitude may seem appropriate to an absolute monarch, but not to one who had to work the subtleties of that delicate and sometimes recalcitrant machine known as the English constitution. Even his art collection had a “down” side. Its propaganda value was limited to those members of the elite who went to court; but its cost was borne by every English taxpayer, much to their resentment. It should therefore come as no surprise that the new king’s relationship to Parliament and his financial situation would be no happier than those of his father. Moreover, to these areas of tension would now be added the problem of foreign policy and war.

  Plate 15 Charles I, by Van Dyck. The Royal Collection © 2008 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

  The third result of the Spanish escapade was that Buckingham, smarting at the insult to England’s honor, convinced that Spain intended to retain the Palatinate, went over to the war party. The issue came before Parliament in 1624, just before the old king’s death. Middlesex argued that England was in no shape to go to war against the most powerful nation on earth. As we have seen, Buckingham and Prince Charles responded by securing his impeachment. Parliament proved equally compliant in voting for war, especially after James conceded that it could establish a commission to monitor how the funds were spent. This was unprecedented. Never before had Parliament interfered in how the king spent money which they had voted. There could be no greater indication of the distrust which existed between that body and the Crown. Even after this concession, Parliament voted far less money than Buckingham had asked for. As James said just before his death, they provided enough “to make a good beginning of the war. For what the end will be, God knows.”20

  James’s pessimism and Parliament’s distrust were well placed, for Charles I was no Henry V and Buckingham was no war minister. As had happened so often under Elizabeth, several pointless continental expeditions only served to highlight an inefficient and corrupt royal administration. Soldiers and sailors complained of rotten food and decrepit ships. At one point the Royal Navy was forced to reuse sails which had first seen service against the Armada nearly 40 years earlier. Back at home, the English people complained of high taxes, the imposition of martial law by deputy lieutenants, and of having to billet and feed soldiers in their homes. As the recorder of Taunton complained, “Every man knows there is no law for this; we know our houses are our castles.”21 Modern historians have sought to absolve Buckingham of at least some of the blame for these disasters; certainly, he never had the funds to fight a proper war. By 1625 the king’s military needs exceeded £1 million a year; and yet the Parliament of that year voted only a fifth of that amount.

  In fact, contemporaries had no difficulty in assigning blame. In 1626 the Commons called for Buckingham’s impeachment. In order to shield his favorite, Charles took two drastic actions. First, he violated Tudor precedent by taking personal responsibility for the miscarriages of the war. Up to this point the king could do no wrong: his ministers always took the blame for policy failures. This step may appear generous today, but it was also dangerous, for it opened to the contemporary mind the possibility that the king might actually be at fault. Charles’s second step was to dissolve Parliament and imprison those who had led the charge against Buckingham. This forestalled impeachment, but also any additional funding for that year’s military and naval campaign. In order to pay for the war, the king imposed another forced loan. The resulting £260,000 helped, but it was not enough. Parliament would have to be called again soon. Worse, when 76 gentlemen refused to pay, claiming that this was a tax unauthorized by Parliament, Charles imprisoned them without charge. This prompted five of the prisoners to sue for a writ of habeas corpus.
In the end, the judges refused to rule on the Five Knights’ Case, but the implication that the king had broken the law and abused his authority was clear for all to see. And worse was to come.

  Late in 1626, the Buckingham administration bungled its way into a second, simultaneous war with France over shipping rights, the treatment of the Huguenots, and resentment at the French failure to support the war against Spain. Foolish as some of the Tudors had sometimes been in their choice of enemies, none was ever so reckless as to take on both European superpowers at once. This war, too, went badly, culminating in a botched amphibious assault on the Isle of Rhé, off La Rochelle, between June and October 1627: less than 3,000 troops returned empty-handed from a force of about 7,000. As a result, the 1628 Parliament met in an angry mood. In its elections, some of those who had refused to pay the forced loan won seats. Many feared that if they funded a royal army sufficiently it might be deployed not against the Spanish or the French but to suppress English liberties. They took the position that before the Commons voted any money, the king would have to agree to a document called the Petition of Right. Couched as a petition confirming existing rights so as to make it seem less radical, in fact this legislation went much farther than the Form of Apology and Satisfaction. It had four major planks:

  1 No man could be compelled to pay a tax not voted by Parliament.

  2 No free man could be imprisoned without reason shown (the right of habeas corpus).

  3 No soldiers or sailors could be billeted on the population without their consent.