After Elizabeth

by Leanda de Lisle

  Just how close had England come to civil war in 1603? James’s accession looks so smooth in retrospect, but at the time people commented often on the providential character of James’s peaceful inheritance. As Dekker recalled in his Wonderful Year:

  Who did expect but ruin, blood, and death,

  To share our kingdom, and divide our breath?

  James had gained widespread support by promising wealth, titles and office to key figures, offering the hope of toleration to Catholics and of reform to Puritans while also reassuring conservatives that he would maintain the Established Church—in short, being all things to all men. But his achievement owed almost as much to luck as to political talent. Despite all his promises, James was not loved in England and he was fortunate that Elizabeth died when she did. Two years earlier and Essex might have taken the crown from under him, or accepted him with conditions, while Cecil might have used his political cunning to back a different candidate. Any later and Spain, France and the Vatican would have chosen an English candidate on whom they could all agree. Arbella’s name was high on the list, and Anthony Rivers had heard gossip that some courtiers were plotting to marry her to a Seymour and so unite the lines of Margaret and Mary Tudor. A son from such a marriage would have had a powerful claim—but as it was, Elizabeth’s death caught James’s opponents by surprise. In Europe on the morning of James’s accession, 24 March 1603, the Spanish were still discussing what candidate they should support. In England Ralegh was not even at court. When he returned the day after her death, he faced a fait accompli.

  Subsequent plans to overthrow James were exposed at a very early stage and the fate of the Main and Bye plotters offered a warning to other malcontents, while James’s peace efforts worked to ensure that Spain was no longer prepared to offer financial or military help to overthrow him. Only a small group of Catholic extremists was prepared to risk one last, desperate attempt to overthrow him, and after the dud that was the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 both he and Cecil were secure.

  Sir John Harington was confident enough of a welcome at court to return for the Christmas celebrations. This year they were held at Hampton Court instead of Whitehall and Anna’s passion for the arts had already made itself felt. Thirty plays were planned, including several works by William Shakespeare. The playwright had never been greatly favored by Elizabeth. He was, after all, the author of Richard II, the play that Essex had used to stir public feeling against her. Now any association with Essex was a positive advantage and his company had been promoted on 19 May from the Lord Chamberlain’s Players to the King’s Players.

  Among the plays performed by the King’s Players were A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Ben Jonson’s controversial Sejanus, His Fall. It painted a horrifying picture of Tiberian Rome, where men lived in terror of informers, arbitrary justice and the executioner. Any resemblance to the present age was entirely deliberate. There was even an allusion to Ralegh’s trial in the character of Silius, who attacks his prosecutor for failing to supply proof of his treason. Meanwhile, courtiers were still talking of “matters yet hidden” behind the plots and Cecil was complaining anxiously to Shrewsbury about some undefined “base and viperous” accusation circulating against him.30 None of this, however, troubled Anna. She and her ladies requested many private showings of plays as well as keeping busy with arrangements for the forthcoming masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, in which the Queen was to perform as Pallas Athene and the Ladies Bedford and Rich were to be Vesta and Venus.

  In the past masques had been a predominantly male form of courtly display and the younger and most handsome of James’s favored courtiers set the standard on 1 January 1604 with the Masque of the Chinese Magician. Heaven was re-created at the lower end of the hall at Hampton Court, where torchbearers and other lights revealed the masquers. They were dressed as Indian and Chinese knights in red satin robes embroidered with gold and bordered with silver lace. Anna was determined that her masque was to be still more dramatic and Harington learned that she had given Lady Suffolk and Lady Walsingham warrants to take Elizabeth’s best apparel out of the Tower to be cut up and rearranged as costumes. She was clearly unconcerned that they were regarded as state treasure or that they held something of the iconic status of the queen who had once worn them. She had her own costume cut to the knee, prompting Dudley Carleton to joke that she must have done so in order that “we might see a woman had both feet and legs which I never knew before.”

  The eventual cost of The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses was estimated to be between £2,000 and £3,000, but Anna believed she could well afford it. James had granted her a jointure larger than any Queen of England had ever had before. While Anna set about highlighting the status of her personal court, James was occupied chiefly with entertaining all the visiting ambassadors. There were at least seven at Hampton Court and the kitchens were overhauled to ensure that the elaborate banquets held in their honor never failed to impress. The French and Spanish ambassadors quarreled endlessly over matters of precedence, but happily for James and Anna they also vied to give the best gifts. The Queen of France, Marie de Médicis, sent Anna a cabinet, “very cunningly wrought, and inlaid all over with musk and ambergris, which maketh a sweet savour; and in every box was a different present of jewels and flowers, for head tiring,” while the Queen of Spain had sent a mulberry-colored satin gown, ornamented with gilded cut leather.31

  Cecil had been given the task of preparing for the coming Parliament. The most important matter on the agenda was James’s plans for Union between the kingdoms, but Cecil’s lobbying was coming up against a brick wall and he confided in Shrewsbury that “whosoever is absent [from Parliament] I will protest they do it purposely because they say no to the Union.”32 It must have seemed extraordinary to Harington that Cecil was still on the Privy Council. His hopes that James would bring sweeping changes to the Council had been disappointed, but now at last he was to meet the King he had backed as Elizabeth’s heir. He described his audience in detail in a letter to his friend Sir Amias Paulett. He had at first been taken to kneel before the King in the Presence Chamber along with many others, but he was soon taken on one side and asked to wait in a room nearby. He was then escorted to another small room, this time furnished with a table that was covered with James’s papers, ink and pens. James himself came in shortly afterward.

  The King was in a jovial mood and he asked Harington if he was a cousin to Lord Harington of Exton, whose wife had the care of the Princess Elizabeth. Harington acknowledged that he was and James added that he had heard a great deal about Harington’s learning. He proceeded to show off his own, quoting “profound sentences from Aristotle, and such like writers, which I had never read and which some are bold enough to say,” Harington observed acidly, “others do not understand.” James then cross-questioned Harington until, he confessed to Paulett, he began to feel that he was up before his old examiner at Cambridge. When at last this interrogation concluded James asked Harington what he thought “pure wit was made of; and whom did it best become? Whether a King should not be the best clerk in his own country; and if this land did not entertain good opinion of his learning and wisdom?” Harington took the hint and assured James that everyone admired his knowledge and wisdom. Given the opportunity, however, he would have concurred with Scaramelli, who had observed in the summer that the fact James believed that he knew more than anyone else rendered him incapable of conversation. But James did, at least, give Harington an insight into what he thought of the English court.

  It was clear, for example, that James was shocked by the prevalence of smoking. The habit had become fashionable after Ralegh’s discovery of Virginia and courtiers lavished as much as £300 or £400 a year on it. James was ahead of his time in recognizing smoking as unhealthy, and he warned Harington that tobacco “would, by its use, infuse ill qualities on the brain, and that no learned man ought to taste it, and [he] wished it forbidden.” He was already planning a treatise on the subject, A Counter-blast to Tobacco, which
would be published anonymously a few months later. He may well have been writing it at the table in the little room in which they stood. 59

  Another cause for alarm, in James’s eyes, was the slack attitude the English had toward the threat from witchcraft. Although in later years he would become more questioning about how widespread witchcraft actually was, his experience of the Berwick witches and their efforts to kill him in the year of his marriage remained fresh in his mind. He had noted that while women were strangled and burned regularly as witches in Scotland, in England the death penalty was invoked in cases of witchcraft only if murder was proven—and that was very rare. James pressed Harington hard for his opinion, “touching the power of Satan in the matter of witchcraft,” and asked him gravely if he knew why it was that the Devil so often worked in old women. Harington confessed to Sir Amias Paulett that at this point he could not resist “a scurvy jest” and replied that “we were taught hereof in scripture where it is told, that the Devil walketh in dry places.” James enjoyed Harington’s jokes, filthy though they were, but he was also in deadly earnest about the need to address the problem of witchcraft: he would see to it in the spring Parliament that its practice was made a capital offense.

  The only moment that made Harington nervous, however, was when James brought up the subject of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and the role of Sir William Davison, the man who had delivered her death warrant. Courtiers remained uncertain whether James might yet seek revenge against individuals connected with her fate. Harington tried to change the subject back to witchcraft, only to have James tell him that his mother’s death had been foreseen in Scotland in visions of “a bloody head dancing in the air.” James claimed that he knew a great deal about the gift of foresight and that he had a sure way to discover the future. He did not own any magic mirrors but he listed a number of relevant books, warning Harington that he should not read them because an ordinary man was not as spiritually strong as a king and they might have a corrupting effect. Harington reassured James that he feared that the power of Satan had already wrought too much damage on his body for him to risk courting “his friendship, for my souls hurt.” At this the conversation turned at last to James’s favorite subject: religion.

  Harington accepted that the issue of toleration for Catholics was a dead letter. James had announced to an Irish delegation in August that “he would rather fight in blood to the knees than give toleration of religion,” 60 and therefore Harington gave the subject of Catholicism a wide berth.33 This was not hard to do, as the religious topic of the moment was the conference on the English Church that was to be held at Hampton Court only a week or two later. James intended to thrash out a middle ground between those who wanted the English Protestant Church to stay as it was and the radical reforms demanded by the more extreme Puritans. Anything that smacked of Presbyterianism was to be ruled out and the extremists who represented such views expelled or repressed.

  Harington hoped to witness the conference and James, aware that Harington was bound to write about it, asked, “I pray you, do me justice in your reports,” adding the warning that “in good season, I will not fail to add to your understanding, in such points as I may find you lack amendment.” Elizabeth’s godson “made courtesy hereat, and withdrew down the passage, and out at the gate, amidst the many varlets and lordly servants who stood around.”34 He promised Paulett that he would tell him more when they were alone at his house in Somerset: “I must press to silence hereon, as otherwise all is undone.”

  The previous December, 1602, Harington had complained that England had been left to rack and ruin by an old Queen who lived “shut up in her chamber.” His Tract on the Succession predicted that after Elizabeth’s death the English would turn their backs on the recent past, embracing “a man of spirit and learning, of able body, of understanding mind”—one good Stuart who would “set all in order.” 35 Within weeks of Elizabeth’s death, however, Harington had performed a volte-face. As James journeyed south from Scotland, Harington bemoaned that he had “lost the best and fairest love that ever shepherd knew, even my gracious Queen,” and he condemned James for hanging a man without trial. His later writings painted a beguiling portrait of his godmother’s charm, intelligence and toughness of character. In retrospect he found that even her faults “did seem great marks of surprising endowments.” Beside such a paragon, James would always be found wanting—and not only by Harington.

  The glorification of Elizabeth’s memory became a popular means of criticizing her successor. The Jacobean bishop Godfrey Goodman recalled how after only a few years the public began to express their hatred for the “Scottish government” by celebrating the date of Elizabeth’s coronation with more enthusiasm than that of James. Her neglect of the English Church came to be overlooked and her pursuit of peace with Spain forgotten: she was now seen as a Protestant amazon, contrasted with James, the effeminate seeker of conciliation and compromise. Even the rottenness of the Elizabethan state was wiped from history by the national amnesia. In 1623, two years before James died, a paper was found in the hand of the statue of Queen Elizabeth at Westminster bewailing the state of England and looking for redress, just as the petitions of 1603 had once looked to James to end the corruption of Elizabethan public life. Matters had come full circle—and there they have stayed. Elizabeth is still remembered as the Gloriana celebrated on her accession day, while the young king who came south in 1603 is largely forgotten. Instead James remains fixed in the public imagination as the grotesque described by the sacked Jacobean official Sir Anthony Weldon in his Character of King James. Weldon’s witty descriptions of a king who wore stiletto-proof doublets, slobbered at the mouth and walked about fiddling with his codpiece have come to define one of the most intellectually brilliant men ever to sit on the English throne.

  Where did it all go so wrong for James? It was perhaps inevitable that someone who had raised the hopes of opposing groups before his accession would create disappointment when the time came for decisions. The first to feel betrayed were those who had hoped James would introduce toleration of religion for Catholics, among them Sir John Harington. The Hampton Court conference left many Puritans feeling equally let down. In the months leading up to the conference James had begun to associate English Puritans with Scots Presbyterians. In part this was the work of conservative bishops blackening their names, but the Puritans had also damaged their own cause. When James announced his intention to hold the conference in August he unleashed frantic lobbying for the abolition of episcopacy, wedding rings and even crucifixes. By the end of October the extreme views expressed had forced him to issue a proclamation against those who “seditiously seek reformation in church matters” and made him all the more determined to stamp out radicals. Harington, who attended the Hampton Court conference, observed that in dealing with the Puritan leaders James often “rather used upbraidings than arguments; and told the petitioners that they wanted to strip Christ again and away with their snivellings.”36

  James was, in fact, to introduce substantial reforms to the Church of England. He fulfilled promises to support a full preaching ministry and to clamp down on the publication of popish books. He also sponsored a new catechism and translation of the Bible—the now much-loved King James version. He showed far more care for the Church than Elizabeth ever had, but it was still much less than many Puritans had hoped for. When Archbishop Whitgift died shortly after the conference ended, the Northamptonshire Puritan Lewis Pickering composed a bitter elegy accusing Whitgift of being “masked impiety, cunning hypocrisy, Prelates pope, Jesuits hope.”37 Pickering had been the first courtier to see James after he had the official notice of Elizabeth’s death in Scotland and he had left Edinburgh with James’s assurances of support ringing in his ears. Someone pinned a copy of his elegy to Whitgift’s coffin at his funeral and he was punished with a long term of imprisonment.

  Meanwhile, Pickering’s fellow Puritan, Sir Oliver Cromwell, was similarly disappointed in many of his political
objectives. Negotiations over possible reforms of wardship and purveyance ground to a halt in May 1604 and Cecil was to remain Master of the Wards as well as Secretary of State until his death in 1612. He was in addition raised to the title of Earl of Salisbury in 1605 and made Lord Treasurer in 1608. The corruption in public life with which Cecil was so associated continued and even worsened while the grandeur of Elizabeth’s court declined into decadence.

  Harington wrote a memorable description of the entertainment of the King of Denmark at Theobalds in 1606 where he had seen “the ladies . . . roll about in intoxication” and the men excel each other in “wild riot, excess, and devastation of time and temperance.”38 It was a long way from the prayers at James’s coronation that “the glorious dignity of his royal court, may brightly shine . . . far and wide in the eyes of all men.” And James’s personal behavior further diminished his prestige. In the months before he was crowned he had already revealed many of the flaws by which he is remembered: his incontinence with money, his intemperate attraction to young men, his arrogance and lack of charm or dignity. Above all, ordinary people complained that they missed “that generous affability that their good queen did afford them,” and Harington came to concur. “We did all love [the Queen], for she said she loved us,” he recalled, and James’s Privy Councilor, the Earl of Suffolk, acknowledged: “These things are no more the same.”39 One of Scaramelli’s successors as Venetian ambassador recalled that the consequence of the King’s failure to “caress the people” was that James was “despised and almost hated.”40 There was never any national cult of King James and attempts to turn the figure of Arthur from a chivalric symbol to one of British Union failed. The Parliament of 1604 made it clear that they would not exchange the ancient name of England for Britain and the attitude remained the one expressed in the Doleman book on the succession: there was no possible advantage to England in it.