Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

by Peter Ackroyd

  This was of course a perilous matter. It would test once more the king’s good faith. By marrying a Catholic princess, also, Charles might alienate the very ‘patriots’ whom he had previously courted. The king therefore decided to prorogue parliament before news of the French demands became known. It had not been an unproductive assembly; it had passed thirty-five public Acts and thirty-eight private. The private Acts alone are evidence that the members were representing local demands and grievances on a significantly increased scale. But parliament had achieved more than that. With its impeachment of the lord treasurer, and its active collaboration with Charles and Buckingham, it had proved itself to be an indispensable limb of the body politic.

  Preparations for war with Spain were begun. The Spanish ambassador noted ‘the great joy and exultation of all the cobblers and zealous bigots of the town’. Cobblers were well known for their radical Protestant sympathies. The English ‘mice’, as they were called, were ready to take on the Habsburg ‘cats’. On the departure of the Spanish legation from London the citizens cried out: ‘All the devils in hell go with you, and for those that stay behind let Tyburn take them!’ London and the suburbs were now the venue for newly recruited soldiers, all of them waiting for the happy beat of the drums.

  A defensive league was formed with the seven United Provinces; envoys were sent to the kings of Sweden and Denmark with proposals for a holy crusade against the Catholic powers. This served further to excite the martial enthusiasm of the populace. The more realistic of the king’s councillors doubted that the Palatinate could be fully recovered, or Spain defeated, but they hoped at least to assert English power and subdue Spanish pretensions. In the summer of 1624 a play by Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess, was staged at the Globe where its satire of Gondomar and the Spanish clique at the English court was an unprecedented success; crowds besieged the theatre for nine days, while the laughter and general hubbub could be heard on the other side of the Thames. ‘Sir, your plot’s discovered!’ one of Gondomar’s aides bursts in to tell him. The ambassador asks him which of the 20,958 plots he means. He explains his methods.

  With pleasant subtlety and bewitching courtship …

  To many a soul I have let in mortal poison

  Whose cheeks have cracked with laughter to receive it;

  I could so roll my pills in sugared syllables

  And strew such kindly mirth o’er all my mischiefs,

  They took their bane in way of recreation.

  Thus spoke the erstwhile Spanish ambassador on the stage.

  An Anglo-French league was now likely but by no means certain. The French still insisted in principle that penal measures against English Catholics be lifted, and that they should be allowed to practise their religion in peace. Both the king and his son, however, had promised the last parliament that no articles in favour of the Catholics would ever be entertained. It was considered that, in the last resort, it would be better to go to war without the aid of the French than to force a crisis between Crown and parliament.

  All the flexible skills of diplomacy had now to be deployed. An English envoy at the court of Louis XIII suggested to James that the French demands were made for ‘their own honour’ only, and that ‘it will always be in your majesty’s power to put the same in execution according to your own pleasure’. It was a policy of hypocrisy and prevarication but none the worse for that. Buckingham was equally sanguine. He was so intent upon martial glory in any Protestant crusade that he urged the king to accept the French terms. James was not willing to concede so much, but he was prepared to write a private letter to Louis in which he promised that his Catholic subjects ‘shall enjoy all the liberty and freedom which concerns the secret exercise of their religion which was granted by the treaty of marriage made with Spain’. It was not quite enough. The French insisted upon their original demands, with the enthusiastic support of Buckingham. The king finally yielded, with the proviso that he should sign a letter and not a contractual engagement. It was vital now that parliament should not intervene; a promised summons in the late autumn was therefore postponed until the following year.

  On 12 December 1624, the marriage articles were signed; the king’s hands were so crippled with gout that he was obliged to apply a stamp rather than a signature. To this document Charles appended a secret engagement to the effect that ‘I will promise to all the Roman Catholic subjects of the Crown of Great Britain the utmost of liberty and franchise in everything regarding their religion…’ Twelve days later the courts were forbidden to prosecute recusants under the penal laws; all Catholics in confinement for their faith were then released from the prisons of England.

  In this month the king wrote a plaintive letter to Buckingham.

  I cannot content myself without sending you this billet, praying God that I may have a joyful and comfortable meeting with you, and that we may make at this Christmas a new marriage, ever to be kept hereafter; for, God so love me, as I desire only to live in this world for your sake, and that I had rather live banished in any part of the earth with you, than live a sorrowful widow life without you, and so God bless you, my sweet child and wife, and grant that you may ever be a comfort to your dad and husband

  James R.

  It was the last letter that Buckingham would ever receive from the king.

  * * *

  The time of war was approaching. Ernest, count of Mansfeld, the principal German ally of Frederick, came to England in search of troops; the soldiers of the previous summer, in their gay feathers and buff jerkins, had been volunteers. Now the county officials had to conscript local men for service and, naturally enough, they preferred to choose those for whom they had the least use. Some of the conscripts preferred radical action to avoid being pressed for service. One hanged himself for fear, while another ran into the Thames and drowned; one cut off all the fingers of his right hand, while another put out one of his eyes with salt. An observer wrote that ‘such a rabble of raw and poor rascals have not lightly been seen, and they go so unwillingly that they must rather be driven than led’.

  It had been said that an Englishman could not fight without his ‘three Bs’, namely bed, beef and beer. All three were, on this occasion, in pitifully short supply. Dover had no such commodities in large quantity, and only a few vessels had arrived to transport the men. Their eventual destination was, in any event, not at all clear. James had wished the men to land in France, thus implicating Louis XIII in the war against Spain and the empire; Louis refused them the possibility. So Mansfeld, at the end of January, was obliged to sail for Flushing and begin a march through Holland; his men were to go to the aid of the Dutch fortress city of Breda, then under siege by the Spanish.

  Yet the English troops were ill-trained and ill-equipped; they had few provisions, and soon enough a hard frost descended on them, provoking contagious sickness. ‘All day long,’ one of their commanders, Lord Cromwell, wrote, ‘we go about for victuals and bury our dead.’ By the end of March a force of 12,000 was reduced to 3,000 armed men. Yet the folly was not blamed so much upon Mansfeld as upon Buckingham, whose military enthusiasm did not include attention to the details of policy or planning. The disaster did not bode well for the conduct of a more general war that the king would not live to see.

  James had recovered from the gout that had afflicted him at the beginning of the year. Yet on 5 March 1625 he was attacked by what was known as a tertian ague, of which the symptoms were chills, fever and profuse sweating. He feared the worst but refused to accept the advice of his physicians. Instead he relied upon a posset drink recommended by Buckingham’s mother, which seemed to do no good. It was whispered that, at the urging of her son, she had in fact poisoned him; she fell on her knees at the king’s bedside and asked for justice against these accusations. ‘Poisoned me?’ the king asked fearfully. At which point, he swooned.

  The end was now very near. On 25 March he suffered a stroke that affected his face and jaw. It was reported that his tongue had become so enlarged that he
could not make himself understood. He was also beset by bouts of dysentery that left him drenched in his own filth. Two days later he left this life. With the great lords and prelates of the realm about him, according to a later memorial, ‘without pangs or convulsions at all, dormivit Salomon, Solomon slept’. Unlike his mother and his son, James I died lying in his bed rather than kneeling on the scaffold. The surgeons, on opening the body, found no evidence of poison. In a letter of the time, by the Reverend Joseph Meade, it was reported that all of his vital organs were sound ‘as also his head which was very full of brains; but his blood was wonderfully tainted with melancholy’.

  His death was not greeted with much dismay or sorrow among the people. His foreign policy had been an utter failure, and his relations with parliament were at best acrimonious. His finances were in disrepair, and the sexual scandals of his reign were common knowledge. The day of his funeral was marred by foul weather so that any bystanders were greeted with muffled coaches and flaming torches. His passing was greeted, perhaps, with relief. The new king might prosecute the Protestant cause with more vigour and determination. Sir John Eliot wrote that ‘a new spirit of life possessed all men’.

  There was an alternative vision of the late king’s rule. At his funeral service in Westminster Abbey, on 7 May, the bishop of Lincoln, John Williams, preached a sermon in which he praised James’s direction of religion. The King James Bible is lasting evidence of his achievement. The bishop also remarked upon the fact that ‘manufactures at home are daily invented, trading abroad exceedingly multiplied, the borders of Scotland peaceably governed…’ In the reign of James, too, the English people had reached out to Virginia and New England; the merchants had visited the ports of Africa, Asia and America. Certainly, the central achievement had been that of peace, the one condition that the king sedulously strove to maintain. A courtier, Sir Anthony Weldon, left a less than flattering account of the king as indecisive, hesitant and cowardly; it was he who reported the opinion that James was ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’. Yet he appended to his description the more favourable comment that ‘he lived in peace, died in peace, and left all his kingdoms in a peaceable condition’. This would not be the epitaph of his son.

  10

  An interlude

  At the beginning of 1625, while his father was still incapacitated by gout, Charles had organized what the Venetian ambassador called ‘a splendid masque, with much machinery, and most beautiful scenery’; the prince and his companions danced for four hours after midnight, perhaps in anticipation of the regal splendours to come.

  The masque was the great ceremonial occasion of the court, performed once or twice each year, that came to define Stuart kingship. A group of the nobility advanced upon an especially designed stage, their ornate and artificial dress perfectly consonant with the elaborate scenery all around them. Gold was a token of perfection, white was the colour of faith and blue represented the infinite heavens; shame was crimson while lust was scarlet. The colours which took most wonderfully to candlelight were white, carnation and sea-water green. Oil lamps and candles of white wax were used to impart brilliance to the scene. The old Banqueting House had in fact been destroyed by fire in 1619 when ‘oiled paper’ and other combustibles used in the entertainment were ignited.

  Inigo Jones was the sole deviser and designer of the court masques, and he brought to his practice all the refinements of his art. The discipline and formality of his architecture prevailed in his stagecraft; he was particularly adept at contriving the mechanical devices or ‘machines’ that were the wonder of the age. ‘If mathematicians had lost proportion,’ it was said of one of his productions, ‘there they might have found it.’ He wished to create harmonies in spectacle just as in his architecture he evoked the harmonies of stone.

  The texts of the masques were generally composed by Ben Jonson who chose to deploy moral statements and sentiments within euphonious and carefully crafted verse. The two men were not natural collaborators, however, and Jonson soon wearied of a form in which visual display took precedence over sense. He wrote in one poem, ‘An Expostulation with Inigo Jones’:

  O shows! Shows! Mighty shows!

  The eloquence of masques! What need of prose

  Or verse, or sense t’express immortal you?

  You are the spectacles of State!

  Inigo Jones himself admitted that the masques were ‘nothing else but pictures with light and motion’.

  The stage itself was designed to create the illusion of an infinite perspective, moving from the reality of the king and assembled court into an idealized world where everything had its place and proportion. These perspective stages were a wholly new thing in England, introducing novel principles of symmetry and order. The power of art represented the art of power. The masque was conducted in a formal space in which the laws of nature could be chastened and subdued by the king himself, who sat on the line of perspective from which everything could be perfectly seen. Only in his presence could the seasons miraculously change, or trees walk, or flowers be transformed into human beings.

  It was the perfect complement to the doctrine of the divine right of kings that James had professed early in his reign. He sat in the centre of the especially constructed auditorium so that the eyes of the audience were as much upon his regality as upon the performance itself. James had already written in his instruction manual to his elder son, Basilikon Doron, that a king ‘is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures all the people do gazingly behold’. Inigo Jones himself wrote that ‘in heroic virtue is figured the king’s majesty, who therein transcends as far common men as they are above beasts’.

  The stage had three habitations. At the highest level was a metaphysical world populated by divine or allegorical figures; below this was the world of the court, in which the monarch was the emblem of order and authority; beneath these two worlds lay ordinary reality which, with its emblems of Vice and Disorder as well as various ‘low’ figures, provided the material for the ‘anti-masque’. The anti-masques represented mutability and inconstancy; they embodied the threat of chaos that was wonderfully removed from the world of the idealized court. The king defeated all those who threatened or abused him. As Sir William Davenant wrote in his masque Salmacida Spolia:

  All that are harsh, all that are rude,

  Are by your harmony subdu’d;

  Yet so into obedience wrought,

  As if not forc’d to it, but taught.

  The scene might suddenly change. A palace might become a bower, where fairy spirits tread upon trolls and other wicked things; Oberon may appear in a chariot, drawn by two white bears, before ascending into the air; a statue might breathe and walk; a feather of silk may become a cloud of smoke, surrounded by several circles of light in continual motion. A scene might be set in a courtyard or in a dungeon, in a bedchamber or in a desert. All was framed by a proscenium arch, the direct forebear of the modern theatrical space. That is why the English drama favoured interiors.

  A courtier and diplomat, Dudley Carleton, noted of an early production in 1605 that ‘there was a great engine at the lower end of the room, which had motion, and in it were the images of sea-horses with other terrible fishes, which were ridden by Moors … at the further end was a great shell in the form of a scallop, wherein were four seats; on the lowest sat the queen with my lady Bedford; on the rest were placed the ladies … their apparel was rich, but too light and courtesan-like for such great ones’. James never took part in the masques, but his wife and children delighted in them; they rehearsed their parts for as long as two months, emphasizing the importance that they placed upon them.

  The speaking roles were performed by professional players while the music and song were provided by court musicians; the dancers and masquers, among them members of the royal family itself, remained mute. At the end of the proceedings they advanced into the dancing space, before the king, and invited members of the especially invited audience to dance with them. The concord of mus
ic therefore concluded a display in which the virtues of reason, order and good governance are all conjoined.

  The dancers of the masque thus celebrate the restoration of an ideal order, a magical ritual designed to emphasize the Stuart vision of kingship and continuity. The masques therefore became known as ‘court hieroglyphics’. It is not unimportant that foreign ambassadors were an integral part of the audience, since the masque was also a form of mystical diplomacy. It was meant to convey, by the expense of the production, the wealth and liberality of the sovereign; the more money spent, the more the glory and the more the praise. In 1618 James spent the unparalleled sum of £4,000 on one production. The fourteen ladies of another masque needed, for their costumes, 780 yards of silk. Yet the masques appealed to appetites other than sight. A lavish banquet, complete with orchestra, often preceded or accompanied the performance.

  It was an age of music. In the years between 1587 and 1630 over ninety collections of madrigals, airs and songs were published. Madrigals were compositions for several voices without music, and airs were solo songs accompanied by instruments; the madrigal was the most artificial, and therefore considered the most delightful. Catches were sung by gentlemen in their taverns, by weavers at their looms and by tinkers in their workshops. A man who could not take part in a madrigal, or play the lute, was considered to be unfinished. Lutes and citherns were available in barbers’ shops for the diversion of waiting customers. Music books were customarily brought to the table after supper was ended.