Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  This boy, of great rank and greater prospects still, was largely brought up at Stirling Castle. It was a strange, insecure kind of childhood. A series of regents who ruled Scotland on his behalf were murdered in quick succession, and the boy’s own life was more than once in danger. On his fourth birthday, a tutor arrived at Stirling Castle, charged with the responsibilities of creating a king in his own image. George Buchanan was a scholar known throughout Europe, and through him James would have one of the most rigorous and academic educations possible. Dour and self-opinionated, Buchanan was also a leading figure in the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk. He and his fellow Presbyterians believed that the supreme authority in the state was not the king, as it was in England, but the General Assembly of clergy.

  Kings also, Buchanan believed, were mere servants of their people, who could and should be punished if they misbehaved. Indeed, his hatred of monarchy was not even disguised and, in his little pupil, he had a convenient target to hand. Like many sixteenth-century teachers, Buchanan thought that sparing the rod spoiled the child, especially if that child was a king, and he set about beating and birching his beliefs and learning into King James with gusto. It was a kind of pre-emptive punishment of a ruling monarch, intended to beat out any residual monarchical pretensions. Buchanan was charged with creating a Scottish monarch out of the small boy, one who would submit to the authority of the Kirk and the dominant Scottish lords and learn that kings were not absolute or possessed of divine powers, but weak-minded mortals. And, as James would in all probability be king of England one day, zealous Protestantism would be immeasurably strengthened there as well.

  This treatment indeed succeeded in making James a considerable scholar. But in terms of religion and politics, it produced only an equal and opposite reaction to which James was able to give expression with unusual force and clarity when he grew up.

  And the result was a work of scholarship that rejected every aspect of Buchanan’s anti-monarchical lessons. It is called The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, which James wrote and published in 1598. In it, he says succinctly: ‘Kings are called Gods; they are appointed by God and answerable only to God.’ James grounded these assertions, just as Henry VIII had his claim to the Royal Supremacy, in the biblical story of the Old Testament kings. But James went beyond even Henry VIII by claiming that kings were accountable to no human law at all, above all in affairs of state. They were bound by God’s laws, and were answerable to Him only. This was what he meant by a ‘free monarchy’. Subjects, for their part, had the obligation to treat kings as if they were God’s representatives and judges on Earth. To act against the king was to rebel against God.

  But all this was fantasy in Scotland, where James had neither money nor following with which to challenge the dominance of the Kirk and the aristocracy. Here his grandiose claim of divine majesty was a reaction to a situation in which he was one of many competing powers in the kingdom. Only in England, where kings were indeed supreme, could he hope to realize his vision of monarchy. But his claim to the English throne was not secure. Just as Elizabeth had refused to name Mary Queen of Scots as her heir, so she refused to name James, terrified that if the succession were known an attempt would be made on her life. James was, for her, a ‘false Scotch urchin’, and he was left waiting.

  But matters were taken out of her hands. In 1601, with the ageing queen’s health beginning to fail, Elizabeth’s leading ministers began to make moves to secure James’s path to the throne. A successor had to be established before the queen’s death, or else there would be an interregnum, perhaps a violent one. James was closest in blood to Elizabeth. He had to succeed to keep intact the claims of the monarchy to be a divine institution for which God provided a known line of successors. Worried Englishmen looked back wistfully to Henry VIII, who had left a will and an Act of Parliament ensuring that the crown would pass peacefully through the generations. But that certainty was at an end while Elizabeth retained the authority to nominate a successor but kept silent. Indubitable succession by the closest relative was historically the most peaceful method. The alternatives were horrifying. In the past kings had taken the crown by conquest, civil war or election when the succession was in dispute. The spectre of ambitious families jostling for supreme power brought to mind the Wars of the Roses.

  The matter became pressing during the Christmas holidays of 1603, when both Elizabeth’s health and her temper suddenly worsened. In mid-January she moved to Richmond for a change of air, but within a few weeks she was clearly dying. She lay on a pile of cushions on the floor of her privy chamber, refusing to eat and unable to sleep. Finally she was carried to her bed, became speechless and died in the small hours of the morning of 24 March after Archbishop Whitgift had lulled her into her last sleep with his impassioned prayers.

  Elizabeth had restored Protestantism, preserved the Royal Supremacy, protected her country from invasion, and allowed nothing to challenge either her crown or her popularity. Above all, her studiously broad religious settlement had brought peace, though at the inevitable price of alienating extremes of all forms. With the Great Queen dead, all eyes now turned to Scotland and to James.

  II

  James VI of Scotland was proclaimed king of England within eight hours of Elizabeth’s death. And his first parliament proclaimed that he was by ‘inherent birth right and undoubted and lawful succession’ the successor to the Imperial Crown of England and Scotland. It sounded good because it retained the monarchy’s constitutional position. But it was a dangerous doctrine since it implied that James’s title to the throne was above and beyond the law, as of course James himself, as the author of The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, firmly believed.

  In April 1603, James arrived in London in triumph, the undoubted heir of his great-great-grandfather, Henry VII. Henry VII had commissioned the Imperial Crown as the symbol of the recovery of the monarchy from the degradation of the Wars of the Roses. Now James, the first ruler of all Britain, would endow it with a larger significance still. James’s aim was to be rex pacificus, the peacemaker king. He had ensured the smooth passage of the crown without bloodshed. He would reconcile Catholic and Protestant, thus re-establishing Christian unity at home and abroad. He would end England’s debilitating war with Spain, and above all he would terminate the ancient feud between England and Scotland, and fuse instead the two warring kingdoms into a new, greater united realm of Britain. It was an enormously ambitious programme, and to realize it James, in a strikingly modern gesture, summoned three major conferences on peace, religion and union with Scotland.

  The peace conference and ensuing treaty at Somerset House were commemorated in a notable painting, which shows the English and Spanish delegates confronting each other across a richly carpeted table. Through its successful outcome James ended the twenty-year war with Catholic Spain. It was an auspicious start for James the international peacemaker. But the result, paradoxically, was trouble at home. On the one hand, the Somerset House treaty meant that the hotter Protestants were shocked to discover that England, now at peace with the leading Catholic power, would no longer be the champion of their fellow Protestants in Europe. And, on the other hand, the more extreme Catholics were equally dismayed to find out that Spain had not exacted toleration for Catholics as a price of the peace. Abandoned by their allies abroad, such Catholics turned in desperation to direct action at home.

  At the beginning of November 1605, James was shown a tip-off letter warning that the political establishment of England would receive a ‘terrible blow’ in the parliament he was due to open on 5 November. James immediately appreciated that the wording of the letter pointed to an explosion. But in order to catch the plotters red-handed it was decided not to search the vaults under the Parliament chamber until the night of the fourth.

  At 11 p.m. the search party entered and found a man standing guard over a pile of firewood, thirty-five barrels of gunpowder and with a fuse in his pocket. His name was Guy Fawkes. If the gunpowder had exploded as planned it would
have been the ultimate terrorist bombing, wiping out most of the British royal family and the entire English political establishment.

  Nevertheless, the immediate political consequences were small. To James’s credit there was no widespread persecution of Catholics in England and the peace with Spain held. But in the longer term the plot played an important part in the development of the anti-Catholic myth in England. At this early stage of the seventeenth century the reality was that English Catholicism was a beleaguered minority faith. But in the fevered imagination of the hotter sort of Protestants it became instead the fifth column of a vast international politico-religious conspiracy masterminded by the pope in Rome and aiming not only at the conversion of England but at the subversion of English Protestantism and English freedoms by the foulest possible means.

  And so, at the second of James’s great conferences, held at Hampton Court in January 1604 to determine the nature of religious settlement under James, those hot Protestants, known pejoratively as Puritans, demanded that the English Church be purged of what they regarded as its damnable popish elements, which had been retained by Elizabeth. But they reckoned without the seductive powers of the English monarchy and the English Royal Supremacy.

  In Scotland, James VI had sat in the body of a church as the preacher ‘bore down upon him, calling the king but God’s silly vassal’. Another time the minister of St Andrews said that ‘all kings are devils’ children’. He was lectured that as far as the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Kirk went, he was not a king or master, but a member equal with all the rest. But in England it was the same man, now known as King James I, who sat on high in the Chapel Royal, enthroned in a magnificent royal pew while the preacher, under correction, went about his humbler task far below. It was the most graphic possible illustration of the power of the Royal Supremacy, which James was determined to keep in England and, if he could, extend to Scotland.

  Instead of making the Church of England more like the Scottish Kirk, therefore, as the Puritans had hoped, James used the Hampton Court conference to proclaim that he was satisfied with the Elizabethan religious settlement, and was resolved to keep it, as it stood. Beaten by Buchanan and hectored by zealous Presbyterians, James associated Puritanism with disloyalty to monarchy. He would not, any more than Elizabeth, soften Whitgift’s hard line in enforcing ceremonies and vestments, which the Puritans thought scandalously Catholic. And, above all, he would allow not an inch of movement by bishops away from the English government of the Church towards a role for assemblies of presbyteries or clergy as in Scotland. ‘No Bishop, No King,’ he summed up memorably.

  He even managed to subvert the Puritans’ demands for a new translation of the Bible. James eagerly agreed, since he detested the so-called Geneva version of the Bible, which was then used by Presbyterians in Scotland and Puritans in England, because of its marginal notes, which show typically hot Protestant disrespect for kings and queens. The King James version of the Bible, on the other hand, as the large and learned team of translators explained in the preface, was to tread soberly the middle way between ‘popish persons’ on one hand and ‘self-conceited brethren’ – that is, the Puritans – on the other. Thus this monument of the English language was born out of a long-dead politico-theological dispute, and it is the only classic to have been written by committee. Nevertheless, the King James Bible became the book which, more than any other, shaped the English language and formed the English mind.

  James’s other lasting legacy was to be the union of the crowns of England and Scotland, and he set out his case in a speech from the throne at the opening of his first English Parliament in March 1604. His succession had united the kingdoms of England and Scotland, ending the ancient divisions of the island of Britain. It was, said James, impossible to rule two countries, ‘the one great, the other a less’. It would be easier ‘for one head to govern two bodies, or one man to be husband of two wives’. Moreover, the king claimed, these divisions were largely in the mind. Were not England and Scotland already united by a common language, the Protestant religion and similar customs and manners? Was not the border practically indistinguishable on the ground? It was as though God had always intended the union to happen.

  To resist union, therefore, James concluded, was not simply impolitic but impious: it was to put asunder kingdoms that God Himself had joined together. But the English Parliament, impolitically and impiously, decided to look the gift horse of union in the mouth. Partly their decision was governed by straightforward anti-Scottish xenophobia. But more fundamental causes were involved as well. These centred on James’s apparently innocuous wish to rename the Anglo-Scottish kingdom ‘Britain’.

  A new name meant a new kingdom. It would, one MP said, be like a freshly conquered territory in the New World. There would be no laws and no customs and James, by his own rules in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, would be free to set himself up as an absolute, supra-national emperor of Great Britain. The English Parliament, in contrast, would be left as a mere provincial assembly. It was not an enticing prospect for MPs, who saw themselves as the Great Council of the realm.

  James’s reaction to their opposition was to try to enact the union symbolically, using his own powers under the royal prerogative. By proclamation he assumed the title of king of Great Britain. He restyled the royal coat of arms, with the lion of England balanced by the unicorn of Scotland, and he insisted on a British flag, known as the Jack after the Latin form of the name James, again by proclamation. But not content with symbols, James also practised a kind of union by stealth. The English political elite had prevented him from establishing an evenly balanced Anglo-Scots council. But a king could do what he liked with his own court. So, in revenge, James filled his bedchamber, the inner ring of his court, almost exclusively with Scots. It was a pleasure, since James took a more than fatherly interest in braw Scots lads with well-turned legs and firm buttocks. But it also suited him politically since it compelled proud Englishmen to sue his Scots favourites for patronage and to bribe them as well.

  But James’s policy of union by stealth had a fatal flaw. He had inherited a substantial debt from Elizabeth. He had a large family to maintain, and he wanted to continue pouring money, and, to his eyes, his new-found wealth, on his favourites and his pleasures. For all this, the crown’s so-called ‘ordinary income’ from land and custom duties was hopelessly inadequate. There was no choice but to ask Parliament to vote money. The English Parliament, however, saw no reason why taxpayers’ money – their money – should end up in the pockets of Scots favourites, and they said so rather crudely. How, asked one MP, could the cistern of the treasury ever be filled up if money continued to ‘flow thence by private Cocks’? ‘Cocks’ meant taps and, well, what it means now …

  So James’s project for British union remained an unfulfilled dream, while his relations with Parliament, which he thought he could master, turned into a disaster. The king was forced to fall back on his scriptural argument about the divine rights of kings. And, mundanely enough, the issue was tax. Blocked by Parliament in his pursuit of an adequate income, James used his prerogative to levy money from indirect taxation. Many saw this as unconstitutional, but, backed by the opinions of judges, James got his own way. But it meant a head-on collision with Parliament. If ever an English king managed to raise enough money by indirect means without consent, MPs reasoned, he would be able to dispense with parliaments altogether and reign as a tyrant.

  Addressing Parliament in 1610, James went far beyond all his predecessors in arguing for his rights as king. Although he would respect Parliament, he said, MPs had no right to question his prerogative of taxing without consent. It may have been a constitutional or legal matter, but James went one step further. ‘The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth,’ he told Parliament; ‘for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God Himself they are called gods.’ James had after all been brought up a scholar, and this was the intellectu
al justification for what he was doing. He would not turn the monarchy into quite the absolutist institution which many were coming to fear would be the ultimate outcome of the Stuart succession. But that was because of his moderation and not because of any limitation on his quasi-divine majesty.

  But James’s words fell on deaf or deliberately uncomprehending ears. And, faced by widespread obstruction, by the time of his death, in 1625, he had retreated into a sort of internal exile, abandoning the task of government, and secluding himself with his favourites and horses at Newmarket. Nevertheless, he had managed, by a mixture of tact, duplicity and masterful inaction, to stick to the middle ground and hold together the warring extremes of the Church of England on the one hand and the differing religious policies of England and Scotland on the other. The result was a smooth succession on both sides of the border of James’s son Charles to the glittering inheritance of the Imperial Crown of Great Britain. Within a decade and a half, Charles, by his intransigence and his ineptitude, had thrown it all away.

  III

  Charles was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey on 2 February 1626. For James, divine right had been an intellectual position; for Charles it was an emotional and religious one. This was immediately made clear by his coronation service, which, meticulously organized by the up-and-coming cleric William Laud, lovingly reproduced all the splendour, solemnity and sacred mysteries of the medieval Catholic rite.

  The ceremony is one of the best-documented as well as the best-organized of coronations thanks to the survival of two fascinating service books. One is Charles’s own copy of the coronation service, which he used to follow the ceremony. The other is Laud’s version of the same text, which he used as a kind of score to conduct the service. He also made notes in the margins in a different-coloured ink to record unusual features of the ceremony as it actually took place.