Leicester funded a knot of pliant luminaries who prefaced their books with florid, obsequious epistles which praised their patron’s discrimination and wisdom. Contemporaries likened the Earl to Maecenas, who had persuaded Horace and Virgil to write in the interests of Augustus and the new imperial Rome. The patronage of the new Maecenas strayed beyond the narrow demands of official political and theological pleading and embraced cosmography, surgery and linguistics. Leicester was one of the patrons of Thomas Cooper, an Oxford academic whose Thesaurus Linguae Romanas was published in 1563, and proved a godsend to future generations of translators.
Cooper’s sound Anglicanism persuaded Elizabeth I to install him as Bishop of Lincoln. When he came down heavily on one of Leicester’s Puritan protégés, the Earl ordered him to desist, hinting that former favours would be withdrawn. Leicester was in turn unfairly rebuked by one of his Puritan polemicists for not using ‘your prosperity and high authority’ to defend Protestantism from insidious ‘Papists’.17 Aristocratic patrons were expected to do their bit in support of one orthodoxy or another. The long war of the godly books had begun and, for the next hundred and fifty years, sympathetic noblemen were courted by contending theologians keen to publish their sermons and diatribes.
A dedication to one, or better still, several peers added prestige to a book: Spenser’s Faerie Queene has sixteen and a blanket commendation to ‘all the gracious and beautiful ladies of the court’. One hopes they all read the epic. A dedication to an illustrious figure was the equivalent to a glowing review at a time when there were no critical journals and no doubt helped to boost sales. ‘Learning, wisdom, beauty, and all other ornaments of nobility . . . seek to approve themselves in thy sight, and get a further seal of felicity from the smiles of thy favour,’ declared Thomas Nashe in the dedication of his edition of Sir Philip Sidney’s 1591 poem Astrophel and Stella to his sister, the Countess of Pembroke. Her imprimatur carried some weight among the literati, for she was a writer herself, eager to preserve her brother’s reputation and assist authors who had been members of his intellectual circle.
In all, Lady Pembroke accepted twenty-five dedications by eighteen writers, a tally which reflected generosity of spirit rather than liberality.18 Tangible rewards for such dedications were meagre: Elizabethan playwrights commonly got two pounds, other authors one, while some patrons accepted dedications but forgot to make any payment at all.19 A more reliable form of sustenance for writers, scholars and musicians was service in aristocratic households as tutors. In the dedication of his First Book of Ayres of 1622 to the Earl and Countess of Bridgewater, John Attey said that its pieces had been composed ‘under your roof’ while he had been teaching music to their daughters.20
On a lower level, peripatetic troupes of musicians and actors were allowed to adopt the name of an aristocrat and received what amounted to passports which protected them from arrest as vagabonds. In 1595 a pair of musicians carried a warrant from Lord Dudley which allowed them to play ‘in all cities, towns and corporations’ and no doubt they called themselves ‘Lord Dudley’s Men’ to impress provincial audiences.21 However tenuous and indirect, a aristocratic connection was a highly desirable indicator of respectability and perhaps quality; during 1577 and 1578 the townsfolk of Nottingham were entertained by players and musicians who claimed attachment to six peers.
The English literary renaissance had been facilitated and often driven by an aristocracy which had immersed itself in the Renaissance. Recipients of its abundant patronage were sycophantic, as one would expect. Soured by experience, Dr Johnson later defined a patron as ‘a wretch who supports with insolence and is paid with flattery’. Nevertheless, there is no reason beyond cynicism to believe that all patrons were arrogant and that all dedicatory epistles were either insincere, or untruthful. If the numbers attending university and the Inns of Court are anything to go by, the Elizabethan and Jacobean nobility was on the whole better educated then its predecessors and, therefore, more appreciative of learning and the arts.
In 1578, one of Leicester’s most distinguished protégés, John Florio, praised his patron as ‘the only furtherer, maintainer and supporter of well disposed minds towards any kind of study’.22 Florio was an Italian Protestant refugee from the Inquisition, a consummate linguist and the first translator of Montaigne. He believed that Leicester’s goodwill had shielded him from spiteful critics, and, it went without saying, that the Earl’s generosity had allowed him to study and write without the burden of mundane and corrosive anxieties about money.
This pragmatic consideration is highly significant. Quite simply, lordly patrons purchased the time in which talented and imaginative men had the freedom to study, write, think and compose. A happy combination of the wealth of peerage, the intellectual and creative preoccupations of individual lords, and the wider feeling that an intimate association with learning added to a peer’s public reputation established a tradition of cultural noblesse oblige that would last for over three hundred years. Even more enduring was the honour which attached to the aristocratic patron. A poem was the equal of any tomb, as Shakespeare’s sonnet reminded patrons of literature:
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rime.
PART TWO
EQUILIBRIUM
1603–1815
9
I Honour the King as
Much as I Love
Parliament: The Road
to Civil War
Seventeenth-century Britain and Ireland were hosts to bitter political and religious animosities. They overlapped, proliferated and spawned a series of political crises which were resolved by civil wars. All these conflicts were fundamentally ideological. Men argued and fought over principles of government, equality before the law, individual liberty, where the boundary lay between obedience to the state and private conscience, and which Christian doctrines secured salvation. In Ireland, there were two related issues: whether the country should remain a dependency of England, and whether the Protestant minority should enjoy legal and political paramountcy over the Catholic majority.
At the root of all the controversies were the innovations of James I (1603–25) and his son Charles I (1625–49). They endeavoured to create an autocratic monarchy which dispensed with or neutralised the checks and balances that had been contrived to restrain their predecessors. Both believed in the Divine Right of Kings, Charles more passionately than his father, and each aspired to a Solomonic brand of kingship in which the all-wise monarch was a just and compassionate father of his people. The Church of England was seen by the Crown as a natural ally in this enterprise and its authority was reinforced: the Crown commanded the souls as well as the bodies of its subjects. From the start, this ambitious programme was hampered by a shortage of funds, and a monarchy on the edge of insolvency took enormous risks by embarking on policies which were bound to offend the political and religious sensibilities of its subjects.
The new monarchy advertised itself through art. Rubens depicted the apotheosis of James I on the ceiling of the Banqueting House in Whitehall as a demigod ascending into Heaven accompanied by Justice, Zeal, Religion, Honour and Victory. In La Roi à Chasse (now in the Louvre) Charles I’s court painter, Anthony van Dyck, portrayed the King with a horse which bows before him in the manner of beasts in conventional paintings of the Nativity. Onlookers could be forgiven for imagining the same reverence due to God was also due to his earthly representative. An anointed King was beyond mere custom and legal precedent. Charles’s leading minister, the first Earl of Strafford, insisted that ‘the King’s little finger should be heavier than the loins of the Law’. As for Parliament, Charles dismissed it in 1629 and for the next eleven years ruled by exclusive use of the royal prerogative.
What Charles’s critics called his ‘Eleven Years Tyranny’ alarmed and divided his subjects. To succeed in establishing royal absolutism, Charles needed a united and passive nation. This was never within his grasp. The aristocracy
and the rest of the landowning class were unwilling to forgo their ancient rights as partners in government. Parliament had long been integral to the governance of the kingdom and, whilst not representative in the modern sense, it represented the theory of government by consent.
Alienated peers revived old concepts of aristocratic resistance. The Puritan intellectual Robert, Lord Brooke argued for medieval and Aristotelian notions of nobility when he claimed that men of honour were repositories of civil virtue. They were framed for noble enterprises and it was their duty to challenge overbearing and unjust monarchs. Brooke took his chivalric romanticism to Quixotic lengths; as a Parliamentary commander at Kineton in 1642 he unsuccessfully challenged his Royalist opponent to single combat.1 Brooke’s circle included the Earls of Bedford and Essex, who shared his views on the political responsibilities of the nobility. They interpreted these as the restoration of the traditional balance of power between Crown and subjects and the defence of Protestantism at home and abroad.
Anxieties about the future security of Protestantism were the catalyst for the first of the crises which led to the outbreak of war. An Arminian (High Church) Anglican by conviction, Charles I had encouraged Archbishop Laud’s programme of infiltrating pseudo-Catholic rituals into the Church of England’s services. In 1638 the policy was extended to Presbyterian Scotland, where it provoked a rebellion. A majority of landowners rallied to defend the Kirk from the Antichrist in the shape of Laudian rites and virtually took over the country. The rebels raised an army and invaded northern England.
Charles’s efforts to repel them were a fiasco and the war simultaneously exposed his isolation and divisions within the nobility. At York in 1640 Lords Saye and Brooke refused to endorse the royal declaration against the Scottish rebels (with whom they and their fellow Puritans openly sympathised) and declared that to do so was contrary to ‘common liberty’. Other peers were sympathetic, alleging that demands to swear specific oaths to the King impugned their honour. In the meantime, Charles’s army disintegrated as mutinous and unpaid militiamen stripped churches of Laudian fittings, and he was compelled to stave off insolvency by calling Parliament, from which he vainly attempted to exclude Lords Brooke, Saye and Mandeville.
Parliament contained a formidable and ruthless opposition which, between 1640 and 1642, systematically dismantled the administrative apparatus of the royal ‘tyranny’. The Anglican Church took a hammering: Archbishop Laud was gaoled and all the bishops were expelled from the Lords, which reduced support for the King. Strafford was tried and beheaded and legislation was drafted to compel the Crown to consult Parliament at least every three years. During these proceedings, Charles had to make concessions to the Scots, whose forces withdrew homewards. They were soon needed to suppress the Irish insurrection of October 1641, in which Catholics massacred about three thousand Protestant settlers. Lurid reports of the atrocities circulated widely and generated anti-Catholic hysteria across England; the Protestant cause, wavering in Europe, now seemed in jeopardy at home.
Existing religious and political fault lines in England, Scotland and Ireland were being widened to the point where fracture seemed unavoidable and with it a war. Charles made it certain in the spring of 1642 when he obstructed Parliamentary efforts to secure control over the volunteer militia (England’s only army) and launched a military putsch in which he unsuccessfully tried to arrest five prominent opposition MPs and one peer. Charles then withdrew to Nottingham, where he raised his standard and proclaimed that he was fighting to save the Church and the Law from fanatics.
The aristocracy had been closely engaged at every stage of the escalation from political confrontation to war. The House of Lords had approved all the measures proposed by the Commons, although over thirty peers had absented themselves from the proceedings against Strafford. Others had been unnerved by the mobs of Londoners who demonstrated outside the Palace of Westminster during the winter and spring of 1641–2. Recalling these events, Sir Edward Hyde (the future Earl of Clarendon) dismissed the anti-royalist peers as ‘discontented and factious’ troublemakers driven by self-interest. There were no more than twenty anti-royalists, but they kept the initiative within the Lords. Revealingly, Clarendon says little about the activities and influence of royal supporters among the peers. There was no reason beyond blind loyalty why the peers should have backed the King, for, by asserting the rights of Parliament as an institution, the House of Lords was defending the rights of the aristocracy to a share in government. The peers were never entirely altruistic; as Clarendon observed, many were keen to abolish the prerogative courts of Star Chamber and Wards because they had suffered losses at their hands.
During 1641 Parliamentary opposition had coalesced around an alliance between activists in the Lords and Commons. The Earls of Warwick, Essex and Bedford, Viscounts Mandeville and Saye and others cooperated closely with the MPs Hampden, Pym (who owed his Tavistock seat to the patronage of the Earl of Bedford), Haselrig and Cromwell. All were Puritans and conservative, insofar as they were hostile to religious and constitutional novelties, particularly the notion of infallible kingship. They abhorred any idea of upsetting the social hierarchy; as Cromwell later observed: ‘a nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman were the ranks and orders of men whereby England has been known for hundreds of years’ and this order had to be preserved.2
The more recent past mesmerised Charles’s opponents, who repeatedly compared present strife with the glories of Elizabeth’s reign. This was now hallowed as a golden age of harmony between a revered monarch and her nobility and an overriding national resolve which had made England the scourge of Catholic Spain and the champion of Protestant Europe. This heroic vision was cherished by middle-aged and elderly landowners with selective memories and understandable prejudices against the uncharismatic James I and his headstrong son. As a rough rule, the younger generation dismissed this mirage of ‘Good Queen Bess’ and her happy times and tended to favour Charles I.3
According to Marxist analyses, seismic economic forces were also active in deciding men’s loyalties. Methodology and results depended on the premise that all landowners were an economic ‘class’, rather than a stratified social order defined by abstractions such as honour and status. Assuming the former, R. H. Tawney concluded that since the mid-sixteenth century the gentry had been prospering at the expense of the aristocracy. Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper demurred and claimed that in general the gentry were suffering hard times and were looking for royal patronage to bail them out. It was denied thanks to a corrupt court’s monopoly of offices, grants and pensions. This is hard to swallow, for it suggests that the ideologies of the Crown’s opponents were superficial and could have been neutralised by the redirection of patronage. The fortunes of the aristocracy were also going through a rough patch, concluded Professor Lawrence Stone, and they too needed the Crown’s assistance. Yet he provides abundant evidence to show that thanks to flexible and efficient land management and investment policies nearly all peers were keeping afloat and many were getting richer.
According to Stone, long-term cash flow crises eroded the respect and deference hitherto shown to the aristocracy, which underwent a ‘crisis of confidence’ immediately before and during the first phase of the civil war. This explained why a knot of peers colluded with the Commons in the campaign against absolutism and, in the process, allied themselves with the enemies of their clerical counterparts, the bishops, and the Crown.4 For Stone, this was an oblique assault on the general principle of hierarchy and its keystone, the monarchy, and, therefore, was contrary to the interests of the nobility. Perhaps so, but those lords opposed to Charles I would have answered that it was their historic duty to correct wayward monarchs. And they were confident that they would do so again.
Whatever their financial status, the aristocracy continued to expect slavish deference and the law gave them comfort. After a brawl in Dundee in 1606 in which John Scrimgeour, a knight’s son, assaulted a merchant who had refused to raise his hat to him, the Scottis
h Privy Council upheld his right to punish such insolence. ‘All cairlie [i.e. churlish] and inferior men ought [to] honour noblemen and ought to be compelled if they will not do it wilfully,’ declared the Earl of Angus.5 The rhetoric of flattery remained and, if anything, became more fulsome. Here is Sir John Suckling awaiting the arrival of the Duke of Newcastle in 1640: ‘I will as men do wait – my lord – your coming and in the meantime promise my good hours without the help of an astrologer, since I suddenly hope to see the noblest planet of our orb in conjunction with your lordship.’6
Quantifying the comparative incomes of the gentry and the aristocracy reveals the obvious: that for a variety of reasons (often temperamental) some families flourished and others floundered. As for flagging aristocratic confidence, Stone vividly describes the extravagant expenditure of the nobility on the often novel trappings of ‘magnificence’ such as houses, paintings, sculpture and jewellery. Conspicuous consumption on an unparalleled scale suggests a degree of self-assurance.
In terms of Stuart politics, the rapid expansion of the gentry and nobility after 1560 was more important. Between then and 1639 over 3,700 families received grants of arms and gentle status; most were successful lawyers and merchants and there was one playwright/impresario, William Shakespeare. Most of these arrivistes purchased rural property to give substance to their new rank and as security for their progeny.
Knighthoods proliferated among old and new gentry in the early years of James I’s reign, when the King discovered to his profit that status-conscious recipients would pay for the honour. In 1611 he began marketing a newly invented honour, baronetcies (which were hereditary knighthoods), initially to fund garrisons in Ireland. James was forever strapped for cash and his attitude to his subjects’ desire for status was refreshingly flippant. Unable to pronounce the name of a Scottish knight, he announced: ‘Prithee rise up and call thyself Sir what thou wilt.’
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