In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  Her own feeling is that his success may be reflected in what happened in succeeding centuries, as Indian culture after Ashoka and the Maurya was very impressive, and also in the spread of Buddhism and Ashoka’s ideals. Richard Gombrich argued that the evidence for sophisticated societies, before and after Ashoka, was written down too late for it to relate reliably to his period. Notably, he said, many of Ashoka’s views ran counter to those of the later Hindu rulers.

  A detail of the Northern Gate of the Great Stupa at Sanchi.

  RICHARD GOMBRICH: Ashoka, for instance, doesn’t mention the caste system; he doesn’t support the caste system because he’s a Buddhist. He also forbids blood sacrifices; he also denigrates, in very strong language, the rituals that are being carried on. In other words, in just one word, he’s anti-Brahmin, he’s anti-Hindu.

  Richard Gombrich emphasised how crucial the caste system was in India at the time. It was the very essence of society and the job of a king was normally to support the caste system, and somebody who did not do that, or did not support Brahmin priests in their sacrifices, was going to be cataclysmic in India. He added that, while there were many Buddhist kings and kingdoms in India in the 300–400 years after Ashoka, he was not celebrated by the Brahmins and he is generally known in India now as a Hindu king.

  Over time, Ashoka’s inscriptions were forgotten and even Buddhists remembered him differently.

  NAOMI APPLETON: They remembered him as a king who set up stupas or shrines, who established pilgrimage to the sites associated with the Buddhist life, who patronised the Buddhist community, supported the monastic community very highly with great gifts, very, very elaborate gifts. He’s said to have given everything away. Right up unto his deathbed, he gave away his last belonging, which was half a piece of fruit.

  The way of life that was described by later Buddhists, with Ashoka’s support for monastic communities, created a model of kingship that was followed by kings throughout the Buddhist world in subsequent centuries. It appears Ashoka also insisted on religious tolerance.

  RICHARD GOMBRICH: He says it is very bad to praise your own religion and denigrate other people’s religion. You must inform your neighbours and you must inform each other about your religions and he repeats, ‘Do not praise your own religion and don’t denigrate other people’s’, you will only suffer demerit for doing wrong for that. And he says, ‘It is very difficult to do good and easy to do evil, but it is most difficult to do good if you’re high up in society.’

  In Jessica Frazier’s estimation, what Ashoka did was to see that it was practical to pursue his ideals and ethics, to create an empire that was based on compassionate welfare, on the principles of virtue that made communities self-sustaining. He was sincere and pragmatic, and his great genius was to see that both worked well together.

  THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH I

  In February 1603, Queen Elizabeth I began to complain of insomnia and loss of appetite. She had been on the throne for forty-four years. It was clear that she would leave no heir, and her death had been long expected; but when its imminence became apparent, and there were widespread fears of insurrection, a complex, highly staked series of manoeuvres followed, and there were devils in the details. To some, Elizabeth’s passing and the arrival of a younger, male monarch, James I, with wife and children, seemed as much a liberation as a loss; and yet in death she became a mythic figure and remained all too present as her Scottish successor began his troubled reign in England.

  The tomb of Elizabeth I in Westminster Abbey, London.

  With Melvyn to discuss the death of Elizabeth I were: John Guy, fellow of Clare College, Cambridge; Clare Jackson, lecturer and director of studies in history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge; and Helen Hackett, professor of English literature at University College London.

  The discussion began in February 1603, when Elizabeth fell ill and people were not expecting her to recover. John Guy spoke of how there was a fear of disorder as she had made no provision for succession, an omission that he characterised as quite irresponsible. There was a lot to take into account, including the need to bring Catholics back into the system after their years of alienation.

  JOHN GUY: How will the succession be handled? People are, of course, expecting that James will be an important candidate, but he is 400 miles away. He is a Scot – that is a matter of great concern.

  It was noticed that Elizabeth had reacted badly to the death of her friend and cousin Catherine Howard, Countess of Nottingham, on 24 February and she had lost her appetite and her ability to sleep. There were rumours of Elizabeth’s death even while she was still alive.

  There was a risk of everything falling apart, and the man who was trying to hold everything together was Sir Robert Cecil, the queen’s chief minister. He had taken on his rival Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and had him executed in 1601, and Cecil was powerful but vulnerable to a sudden change. He had been writing to James in Scotland and to the Earl of Northumberland to make plans.

  MELVYN BRAGG: And these are potentially treasonous activities, aren’t they?

  JOHN GUY: They are potentially treasonous. And, of course, he had to pretend to Elizabeth that he wasn’t doing it. And, of course, she knew that he probably was, but she chose to turn a blind eye.

  There was a broader sense of unease. Clare Jackson mentioned the harvest failures, with prices going up, wages falling and the population rising, and, in the towns, there had been plague and influenza, decimating communities. These strains on Elizabeth’s subjects were exacerbated by the wars that Elizabeth had been pursuing in the 1590s after a period of non-intervention.

  CLARE JACKSON: There is rising xenophobia and war-weariness in the 1590s. There are criminally inclined deserters, troops being billeted on the populations, there is a rise in crime and vagrancy. A lot of that is met with quite harsh, repressive authoritarianism. So there is a real sense that there might be an undercurrent of trouble.

  There was a fear that England could, at any point, be encircled by superior counter-reformation forces. Spain had invaded Ireland in 1601 unsuccessfully, but there was always a worry that Ireland might be a side door into England for Catholic armies.

  Despite the uncertainty over her succession, Elizabeth had resisted all attempts to persuade her to name someone. She did not want an alternative constituency around her and, Clare Jackson said, from the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth expressed her view that ‘people will look to the rising [rather] than to the setting sun’. She had been aware during Mary’s reign that those who were opposed to Mary were looking to her, and she did not want to create an alternative power base. That reticence may have solved one issue, but it created others. As early as 1593, a puritan MP, Peter Wentworth, urged her to declare her succession and he was put in the Tower for refusing to keep silent about that.

  CLARE JACKSON: He makes the argument that, if she doesn’t declare her successor, she will remain unburied at her death, because all of her courtiers and all of her officials will only have their posts for as long as her reign continues. Elizabeth tries to get around this by saying that she is not to be disembowelled, so the court indicates rapidly that she will have to be buried.

  As with so many programmes, the evidence for what happened at this time had to be teased from different sources. Helen Hackett looked at the literature written when Elizabeth’s death was in prospect. There was poetry that proclaimed she had conquered time, was ever young and immortal, although this protestation of immortality seemed, to Helen Hackett, rather to reflect consciousness of her mortality. There were other, more cynical verses, such as those spoken by Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, alluding to Elizabeth with the image of the moon, which had often stood in for her in poetry: ‘How slow / This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires / Like to a stepdame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man’s revenue.’

  HELEN HACKETT: We can quite plausibly read into that impatience among the young men of the nation about this old woman lingering and a feeling of s
tagnation that’s coming with that.

  As for what happened in the weeks leading up to Elizabeth’s death, there is an incomplete and inevitably unreliable picture. There was the evidence of Sir John Harington, a favoured godson, who talked of visiting her in November 1602 and finding her melancholy, walking around her chamber stabbing the arras with her sword in case there were interlopers and treasonous plotters there. Others talked about her suffering from fever and sleeplessness, with swelling in her throat and increasing difficulty in speaking. She spent the last three days of her life in private, with three or so ladies-in-waiting. One of these was Lady Southwell, who later talked of Elizabeth being haunted by visions of her own wasted body.

  HELEN HACKETT: She talks about how a playing card of the queen of hearts, with a nail through its head, was found on the bottom of Elizabeth’s chair, and, after Elizabeth’s death, she says that her corpse was so full of noxious vapours that it exploded in the coffin. Now she is the only one who gives us these details, so they are perhaps not entirely reliable …

  John Guy told how Elizabeth, in her illness, refused to go to bed as she would never get out of it. He thought she knew that her number was up and was just waiting.

  JOHN GUY: You see, one has to get a sense of what Elizabeth is actually like.

  MELVYN BRAGG: That’s what I want to get.

  JOHN GUY: At that time … I mean, she is bald, she wears a wig; her breath stinks, her teeth are bad because she had a fad for sugar much earlier in her life. She puts a silk perfumed handkerchief in her mouth when she receives any visitors, and she won’t appear without her make-up; and to look beneath her make-up would essentially require an archaeological dig. There are quite a lot of people who would like to see the back of her.

  On 24 March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I died and King James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne as James I, uniting the Scottish and English crowns.

  Clare Jackson brought up what she called a very poignant moment about a month before Elizabeth’s death, where her ring, which had been her sign of her marriage to the state as opposed to any man who might have produced an heir, had to be cut from her finger as it had grown into the flesh, which a lot of people took to be an omen that her contract with her country was now broken. That prompted John Guy to say that there is a different version of the story, which emphasised again how much is unknown or unproveable. He sets some weight by a later account of Robert Carey, who said the Privy Council had an audience with Elizabeth on 23 March, the day before her death.

  JOHN GUY: And when James’s name was mentioned, she raised her hand to her head, as it were, in a gesture. Now, if that were true, and, actually I personally believe that it is true, if that were true, then, by the law of wills, the testamentary law, that could be construed as a nuncupative will. You could make a will on your deathbed in front of witnesses.

  Yet, with her death, there would be an interregnum and the authority of the state officials, of the court, would cease. To prepare for that, Robert Cecil used a device that his father, Lord Burghley, had invented when Elizabeth had recovered from smallpox in 1562 to guard against this risk should it arise again. This device called for the Privy Council to reinforce itself with the great nobility, to be called the ‘Great Council’, and this drew on a tradition going back to the Middle Ages that allowed the Great Council to summon parliament in its own name in the absence or incapacity of the monarch.

  JOHN GUY: And, in fact, the actual course of events after Elizabeth’s death (if we now cut or scroll back to 3 o’clock in the morning of 24 March, when Elizabeth dies), what happens is that immediately, Cecil gets as many of the counsellors as he can together; and he sends for the Earl of Northumberland, he sends for the Earl of Shrewsbury. It is all done by 6 a.m.

  They were agreed on what had to be done, which was for James to succeed, and this succession was proclaimed at the gates of Whitehall and again in the City of London. A student at the Inns of Court at that time, John Manningham, wrote a very vivid account of how the people of London heard the proclamation in silence. He said there was no shouting, nothing happened, and he gave a very vivid sense of London existing in a sort of suspended animation. In the evening, an air of celebration broke out, of relief that it had all been achieved peaceably.

  Helen Hackett argued that Cecil’s plans were buoyed up by popular support for James. There were elegies published for Elizabeth’s death, but not that many. A lot of the poets wrote about how other poets were not writing, ‘but the ones that do appear say things like: “Eliza’s dead, that rends my heart in twain: and James proclaim’d, that makes me well again!” ’

  While London knew about the succession, no one had yet told James. Robert Carey wanted to be the first to do this. He slipped out of Whitehall after Cecil, who wanted to control the order of events, and ordered the gates to be barred so that no one could leave. Carey made it from London to James in three days.

  HELEN HACKETT: He had made plans, he had written letters and made plans well ahead. He rides at full tilt. He does have an accident on the way – he falls off his horse part of the way there and is kicked in the head by his horse – but continues and makes it to James at nightfall on 26 March, which is rather extraordinary.

  CLARE JACKSON: When the poor bleeding Carey arrives, James has already gone to bed, and he falls at his feet and acclaims him King of Scotland, England, Ireland and, somewhat euphemistically, France as well, the moment James has been waiting for. James later says: ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ And Carey says, ‘I would like to be a gentleman of the bed chamber.’ And James says, ‘That’s fine.’

  Before he came to England, James sent a book he had written, Basilikon Doron, an informal handbook of kingship and the king’s duties before God. It sold 16,000 copies at a time when the population of London was tiny. Many of the surviving copies are in good condition, suggesting that they were not read thoroughly, if at all.

  CLARE JACKSON: But actually, had people read it and engaged with it, if you like, it would have given quite a good indication of the type of monarchy that James intended to operate and practise. A lot of people see it as a kind of Jacobean equivalent of a coronation mug – people bought it more to cherish than to actually read.

  James made it clear that he did not want to arrive in London until after the funeral, which did not take place until 28 April. That was a huge procession and included even the most lowly members of the royal household, such as the maker of spice bags, the wine porters and the scullery maids. Thomas Dekker, the dramatist, described the hearse as like an island in an ocean of tears. Yet, as Clare Jackson added, James was in no hurry to reach London.

  CLARE JACKSON: He is a passionate hunter, this is the one thing that James is absolutely passionate about, and he once heard that every English gentleman kept his country park well stocked. And he intended to hunt his way down the A1, basically.

  James left his Scottish subjects, setting off from Edinburgh on 5 April and promising to return often, though, in fact, he returned only once. He suffered some hunting injuries but, more significantly, had someone hanged without trial on the way, which might have given his courtiers pause for thought.

  JOHN GUY: When he does get down to London, it isn’t that long before he issues proclamations without consulting parliament, and possibly without even consulting the Privy Council in a formal sense, that he should be King of Great Britain, that there should be an integrated coinage, that there should be a British flag …

  The coronation was on 25 July 1603. The plague was at its height, but James needed to get crowned because plots were hatching and some of the plotters were arguing that it was no treason to plot against an uncrowned king. Owing to the plague, the triumphal entry of James I was postponed until the following March, which meant that he progressed through London with all the assurance of a reigning monarch, rather than a monarch on his way to the crown.

  THE LANCASHIRE COTTON FAMINE

  In 1863, in the middle of the American Ci
vil War, President Lincoln wrote: ‘I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working men of Manchester, and in all Europe, are called to endure in this crisis. I cannot but regard your decisive utterances upon the question as an instance of sublime Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any age, or in any country.’ He was replying to a letter from Manchester citizens, who had urged him to fight the Confederates, abolish slavery and continue the blockade of the cotton trade that had closed mills in northern England, and left hundreds of thousands of workers unemployed. The blockade had led to what is called the ‘Lancashire Cotton Famine’, a defining episode in world trade and British social history.

  Cartoon from Punch, 1862, depicting Britannia banishing starvation by collecting private charity for unemployed mill workers.

  With Melvyn to discuss the Lancashire Cotton Famine were: Lawrence Goldman, professor of history at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, and senior research fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford; Emma Griffin, professor of history at the University of East Anglia; and David Brown, senior lecturer in American studies at the University of Manchester.

  By the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, the textile industry had become very important in Britain indeed. According to Lawrence Goldman, there were 2,500 cotton mills in Lancashire employing 430,000 hands and a majority of these were women. With related trades, it was estimated that 4 million people in England and Wales depended on the cotton trade for their livelihood. Manchester was the centre of this.