All posts tagged Peter H. Wilson

Seventeenth century reviews

Cavalier poetry

John Milton

John Dryden

Restoration comedies

Seventeenth century British history

The Thirty Years War

Art

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 9, 2023  •  Permalink
Posted in History, Literature, Poetry, Theatre
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 9, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/08/09/seventeenth-century-reviews/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 4. The Wars of Three Kingdoms

The wars of three kingdoms

I found Kishlansky’s account of the Wars of Three Kingdoms very persuasive, probably the best thing in this book. When you write history you have a choice of the level you want to pitch the narrative, the levels being something like:

  • superficial
  • good summary
  • summary with some detail
  • lots of detail
  • too much detail

As I explained in my review of Peter H. Wilson’s book about the Thirty Years War, Wilson definitely goes into ‘too much detail’, drowning the reader in specifics while failing to point out important turning points or patterns.

Kishlansky, by contrast, hits what, for me, was the perfect level of description, ‘incisive summary with some detail’.

As an example of really useful summary, take the way he tells us that, put simply, the first three years of the civil war in England (1642-5) consisted mostly of smallish regional armies engaging in small skirmishes or sieges of local centres.

Now I’ve read scores of accounts of the English civil war which give lengthy descriptions of each of these ‘skirmishes’ along with detail of the army groups involved, their leaders, maps and deployments, and so go on for hundreds of pages. At a stroke Kishlansky makes it clear that most of them didn’t, ultimately, matter.

What mattered were a handful of decisions or turning points, such as the king withdrawing his forces after the Battle Brentford in November 1642, the one moment when he had the chance to capture London. Kishlansky is very good on the three famous key battles which he does describe in compelling detail – Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby.

But above all, Kishlansky doesn’t lose sight of the fact that the fighting was almost a sideshow compared to the extremely complicated political manoeuvring which went on continuously from 1642 to 1649.

Like many accounts, he almost forgets the Royalist side altogether because the real action was the disagreements within the Parliamentary side, among the Roundheads. Kishlansky brings out how the Presbyterian party within Parliament rose to eminence on the back of their close connections with the invading Scots, lorded it over Parliament for a few years, but then themselves began to appear as an overbearing ‘enemy’ to the growing power of the Independents in Cromwell’s New Model Army, before they were eventually expelled from Parliament and some of them arrested.

Only a close reading of the series of events and the complex political negotiations which went on against a continuously changing backdrop can bring out the fast-moving complexity of the situation, and the tremendous pressures the key actors found themselves under.

This is why, although I’ve read about 40 books about the British civil wars, by far the best remains The King’s Peace (1955) and The King’s War (1958) by Dame Veronica Wedgwood. They are old, now, but they are the only ones I know of which simply describe the events in the order they happened; and as they do so, you realise what a relentless helter-skelter of crises it was.

Only Wedgwood’s books really convey the way the unstoppable torrent of events happening in three separate kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland) interacted and exacerbated each other, to create a continuous sense of political and military crisis, which got worse and worse, and how the fighting, the wars themselves, news of defeats and paranoia about attacks on London and conspiracies and fifth columnists, also contributed to the feverish political atmosphere of the times.

Just like the French Revolution, lofty ideals and principles may have been expressed by various parties, and political historians and left-wing sympathisers with the Levellers and the Diggers, like to dwell on these – but as soon as you look at what actually happened you realise all sides were struggling to react to events which were almost always beyond their control.

There are many ways of interpreting the character and achievements of Oliver Cromwell, but when you read Wedgwood’s thrilling and gripping accounts, you realise it’s easy to overlook the most elementary fact about him, which is that he was able to ride the wild tiger of events in a way no-one else could.

Timeline of the Wars of Three Kingdoms

1640

13 April – first meeting of the Short Parliament
5 May – Charles dissolves the Short Parliament
26 October – Charles forced to sign the Treaty of Ripon
3 November – First meeting of the Long Parliament
11 December – the Root and Branch Petition submitted to the Long Parliament

1641

July – the Long Parliament passes ‘An Act for the Regulating the Privie Councell and for taking away the Court commonly called the Star Chamber’
July – Charles returns to Scotland and accedes to all Covenanter demands
August – the Root and Branch Bill rejected by the Long Parliament
October – outbreak of the Irish Rebellion creating panic in London
1 December – The Grand Remonstrance is presented to the King
December – The Long Parliament passes the Bishops Exclusion Act

1642 until the outbreak of the war

4 January – Charles unsuccessfully attempts to personally arrest the Five Members (John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Sir Arthur Haselrig, and William Strode) on the floor of the House of Commons
January – on the orders of the Long Parliament, Sir John Hotham, 1st Baronet seizes the arsenal at Kingston upon Hull
5 February – the bishops of the Church of England are excluded from the House of Lords by the Bishops Exclusion Act
23 February – Henrietta Maria goes to the Netherlands with Princess Mary and the crown jewels
5 March – the Long Parliament passes the Militia Ordinance
15 March – the Long Parliament proclaims that ‘the People are bound by the Ordinance for the Militia, though it has not received the Royal Assent’
April – Sir John Hotham, 1st Baronet refuses the king entrance to Kingston upon Hull
2 June – The Nineteen Propositions rejected
May – The Irish rebellion ends
3 June – The great meeting on Heworth Moor outside York, summoned by Charles to gather support for his cause
July – Charles unsuccessfully besieges Hull
July – Parliament appoints the Committee of Safety

1642 – war begins

22 August -King Charles I raises his standard at Nottingham and the war commences
23 August – Battle of Southam, first sizeable encounter between Royalist & Parliamentarian forces.
19 September – Charles’s Wellington Declaration
23 September – Battle of Powick Bridge
29 September – The Yorkshire Treaty of Neutrality signed, but repudiated by Parliament 4 October
17 October – King Charles I passes through Birmingham, the towns folk seize the King’s carriages, containing the royal plate and furniture, which they convey for security to Warwick Castle, a parliamentary stronghold. The same day there was a skirmish at Kings Norton
23 October – Battle of Edgehill
1 November – Battle of Aylesbury
12 November, Battle of Brentford
13 November – Battle of Turnham Green
17 December – Declaration of Lex Talionis
1 December – Storming of Farnham Castle
Early December – Battle of Muster Green
22 December – Siege of Chichester begins
23 December – Bunbury Agreement designed to keep Cheshire neutral during the Civil War (failed)
27 December – Siege of Chichester ends

1643

19 January – Battle of Braddock Down
28 January – the Long Parliament sends commissioners to negotiate the Treaty of Oxford (unsuccessful)
19 March – Battle of Hopton Heath
30 March – Battle of Seacroft Moor
3 April – Battle of Camp Hill — a Royalist victory
8-21 April – Siege of Lichfield — a Royalist capture
25 April – Battle of Sourton Down — Parliamentarian victory
16 May – Battle of Stratton — Royalist victory
29–31 May – Siege of Worcester — Parliamentarians failed to capture
16 June – the Long Parliament passes the Licensing Order
18 June – Battle of Chalgrove Field — John Hampden, hero of resistance to Ship Money, mortally wounded during the battle and dies on Saturday evening of 24 June 1643
30 June – Battle of Adwalton Moor
1 July – first meeting of the Westminster Assembly
4 July – Battle of Burton Bridge
5 July – Battle of Lansdowne (or Lansdown) fought near Bath
13 July – Battle of Roundway Down fought near Devizes
20 July – Battle of Gainsborough
26 July – Storming of Bristol
17 August – the Church of Scotland ratifies the Solemn League and Covenant
2 September – Beginning of Siege of Hull (1643)
18 September – Battle of Aldbourne Chase
20 September – First Battle of Newbury
25 September – the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly ratify the Solemn League and Covenant. Under the terms of the deal with Scotland, the Committee of Safety is superseded by the Committee of Both Kingdoms
11 October – Battle of Winceby

1644

26 January – Battle of Nantwich
3 February – Siege of Newcastle, formal request to surrender to the Scots
29 March – Battle of Cheriton
28 May – Storming of Bolton and the Bolton Massacre
29 June – Battle of Cropredy Bridge
2 July – Battle of Marston Moor
13 September – Second Battle of Aberdeen
19 October – Siege of Newcastle ends with the storming of the city by Scottish soldiers
24 October – the Long Parliament passes the Ordinance of no quarter to the Irish
27 October – Second Battle of Newbury
23 November – first publication of Areopagitica by John Milton
4 November – the Long Parliament sends the Propositions of Uxbridge to the king at Oxford

1645

6 January – the Committee of Both Kingdoms orders the creation of the New Model Army
28 January – the Long Parliament appoints commissioners to meet with the king’s commissioners at Uxbridge
22 February – negotiations over the Treaty of Uxbridge end unsuccessfully
23 April – the Long Parliament passes the Self-denying Ordinance
9 May – Battle of Auldearn
30 May – Siege & sacking of Leicester
14 June – Battle of Naseby
2 July – Battle of Alford
10 July – Battle of Langport
15 August – Battle of Kilsyth
13 September – Battle of Philiphaugh
24 September – Battle of Rowton Heath
October – fear of Royalist attack in south Lincolnshire
Charles goes to Welbeck, Nottinghamshire
17 December – siege of Hereford ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison

1646

18 January – Siege of Dartmouth ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison
3 February – Siege of Chester ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison after 136 days
16 February – Battle of Torrington victory for the New Model Army
10 March – Ralph Hopton surrenders the Royalist army at Tresillian bridge in Cornwall
21 March – Battle of Stow-on-the-Wold the last pitched battle of the First Civil War is a victory for the New Model Army
13 April – Siege of Exeter ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison
5 May – Charles surrenders to a Scottish army at Southwell, Nottinghamshire
6 May, Newark falls to the Parliamentarians
24 June – Siege of Oxford ended with the surrender of Royalist garrison
22 July – Siege of Worcester ended with the surrender of Royalist garrison
27 July – after a 65-day siege, Wallingford Castle, the last English royalist stronghold, surrenders to Sir Thomas Fairfax
19 August – Royalist garrison of Raglan Castle surrendered (Wales)
9 October – the Long Parliament passes the Ordinance for the abolishing of Archbishops and Bishops in England and Wales and for settling their lands and possessions upon Trustees for the use of the Commonwealth

1647

13 March – Harlech Castle the last Royalist stronghold in Wales surrenders to the Parliamentary forces
29 May – General Council of the Army drew-up the Solemn Engagement
3 June – Cornet George Joyce (a junior officer in Fairfax’s horse) with a troop of New Model Army cavalry seizes the King from his Parliamentary guards at Holdenby House and place him in protective custody of the New Model Army
4–5 June – at a rendezvous on Kentford Heath near Newmarket the officers and men of the New Model Army give their assent to the Solemn Engagement
8 June – General Fairfax sends the Solemn Engagement to Parliament along with a letter explaining that the King was now in the custody of the Army negotiations would be conducted through New Model Army representatives
1 August – General Council of the Army offers the Heads of Proposals
31 August – Montrose escapes from the Highlands
October – An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right presented to the Army Council
28 October – Beginning of the Putney Debates which end on 11 November
26 December – a faction of Scottish Covenanters sign The Engagement with Charles I

The Second English Civil War, 1648

8 May – Battle of St. Fagans
16 May(?) – 11 July Siege of Pembroke
1 June – Battle of Maidstone
13 June–28 August – Siege of Colchester
17 August–19 August – Battle of Preston
19 August – Battle of Winwick Pass
28 August – On the evening of the surrender of Colchester, Royalists Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle are shot
15 September – Treaty of Newport
November – leaders in the army draft the Remonstrance of the Army
6 December – Pride’s Purge, when troops under Colonel Thomas Pride remove opponents of Oliver Cromwell from Parliament by force of arms resulting in the so-called ‘Rump Parliament’

1649

15 January – An Agreement of the People of England, and the places therewith incorporated, for a secure and present peace, upon grounds of common right, freedom and safety presented to the Rump Parliament Parliament
20 January – the trial of Charles I of England by the High Court of Justice begins
27 January – the death warrant of Charles I of England is signed
30 January – Charles I of England executed by beheading – the Rump Parliament passes an Act prohibiting the proclaiming any person to be King of England or Ireland, or the Dominions thereof
5 February – The eldest son of Charles I, Charles, Prince of Wales, proclaimed ‘king of Great Britain, France and Ireland’ by the Scottish Parliament at the Mercat Cross, Edinburgh
7 February – The Rump Parliament votes to abolish the English monarchy
9 February – publication of Eikon Basilike, allegedly by Charles himself
14 February – the Rump Parliament creates the English Council of State
February – Charles II proclaimed king of Great Britain, France and Ireland by Hugh, Viscount Montgomery and other Irish Royalists at Newtownards in Ulster
9 March – Engager Duke of Hamilton, Royalist Earl of Holland, and Royalist Lord Capel beheaded at Westminster
17 March – an Act abolishing the kingship is formally passed by the Rump Parliament
24 March – The capitulation of Pontefract Castle which, even after the death of Charles I, remained loyal to Charles II
1 May – AN AGREEMENT OF THE Free People of England. Tendered as a Peace-Offering to this distressed Nation, an extended version from the Leveller leaders, being ‘Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburne, Master William Walwyn, Master Thomas Prince (Leveller), and Master Richard Overton, Prisoners in the Tower of London, May the 1. 1649.’
October – first publication of Eikonoklastes by John Milton, a rebuttal of the pro-Charles Eikon Basilike

Third English Civil War, 1650

1 May – Treaty of Breda signed between Charles II and the Scottish Covenanters
23 June – Charles II signs the Solemn League and Covenant
3 September – Battle of Dunbar, Scotland
1 December – Battle of Hieton, Scotland (skirmish)

1651

1 January – Charles II crowned King of Scots at Scone, prepares an army to invade England
20 July – Battle of Inverkeithing
25 August – Battle of Wigan Lane (skirmish)
28 August – Battle of Upton (the start of the western encirclement of Worcester)
3 September – Battle of Worcester: complete defeat of Charles II’s Scottish army
3 September – start of the escape of Charles II
6 September – Charles II spends the day hiding in the Royal Oak in the woodlands surrounding Boscobel House
16 October – Charles II lands in Normandy, France, after successfully fleeing England

END OF THE CIVIL WARS IN ENGLAND

Causes of the British Civil Wars

Along with the causes of the First World War, the causes of the English Civil War or the Wars of Three Kingdoms are one of the most over-determined and over-explained events in British history.

In a previous blog post I’ve outlined the multiple economic, financial, legal and religious issues facing King Charles when he came to the throne in 1625 and which grew steadily worse through the late 1620s and 1630s.

Exponents of the Whig theory of history say that the war was inevitable because Charles’s medieval Divine Right theory of kingship had to be cleared out of the way to allow more modern liberal freedoms to develop, a historically inevitable process. On this view, this inevitable march of progress suffered a further temporary setback under the brief reign of the Catholic King James II, before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 forced him into exile, installed the solidly Protestant King William III in his place and ushered in a new era of characteristically English liberties and freedom, i.e. the two revolutions led to England having the most democratic and liberal political system in Europe.

Marxist historians (such as Christopher Hill) offer a similarly teleological interpretation i.e. the sense that the civil wars were inevitable, but from a Marxist point of view. For them, the civil war was caused by the historically inevitable rise of the bourgeoisie, that’s to say the backers of new companies and ventures, especially in Britain’s new colonies, the City merchants who backed the East India Company and the new commercial ventures in America and Africa. These were the most economically and socially dynamic parts of British society and so had to overthrow the shackles of the king’s medieval view of economics and finance (i.e. the king’s total control of monopolies and trade) in order to create a more modern legal and economic model framework for business and trade.

I read and was impressed by the inevitabilist model in my 20s and 30s, but since then I have come to side with the ‘revisionist’ accounts I read in the 1990s, the more modern view that the civil wars were a gigantic accident. That there was nothing inevitable about them. Our nearest European neighbours didn’t experience rebellions in the name of either constitutional freedom or of bourgeois businessmen struggling to make the world safe for capitalism.

In this view, Charles definitely faced huge problems in trying to manage highly polarised factions in three different kingdoms – but it could have been done. Look at some of Charles’s contemporaries:

  • The kings of Spain not only managed their own fractious nations but territories as remote as the Netherlands, parts of Italy and, of course, an entire empire in the New World.
  • The Holy Roman Emperor managed a complex array of kingdoms, including Austria, Bohemia and Hungary.

Although these rulers encountered severe problems during this exact period – Spain was eventually forced to concede the Netherlands their independence – in both of them the monarch not only triumphed but emerged stronger from civil conflicts.

Similarly, France experienced a civil war which is known as the Fronde between 1648 and 1653 and which was also sparked by the king raising deeply unpopular new taxes. And yet Louis XIV not only triumphed over his enemies, but led France to become the strongest power on continental Europe.

In other words, the mid-17th century was certainly a deeply turbulent era of history, and any ruler of the three British kingdoms certainly faced extremely difficult problems – but a better ruler than Charles might have been able to manage it. He would not have provoked the Scottish Presbyterians as he did and, once provoked, he would have managed a Scottish solution. Instead Charles refused to make any compromise and so turned disaffection into open, armed rebellion. A more able ruler would have managed his relationship with Parliament better so that when the Irish Rebellion broke out in 1641, he could have worked with Parliament to solve it (i.e. put it down by military force). Instead, Charles had created a great coalition of enemies in Parliament, across the country, and then in Scotland so that when the external crisis of the Irish rebellion his the political system, instead of uniting the English, it turned into the lever that broke them apart.

In the same way, after reading so many hundreds of accounts of it, I take the outbreak of the First World War not to have been at all inevitable. There were lots of forces tending towards it, but previous flare-ups between the European powers had been successfully de-escalated at specially convened peace conferences, and there was no intrinsic reason why the little local crisis caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand couldn’t have been managed the same way, too.

It was a particular sequence of individual miscalculations and mistakes – the Austrians taking so long to present their ultimatum to Serbia and then Germany giving Austria blank check support – which triggered the war, and these could have been avoided.

I think there is a good case for arguing that there is a sort of technological inevitability to history – that certain inventions follow logically from each other and that these change the economic basis of society and social arrangements. Some countries are self-evidently more technologically advanced than others, and the nature of these technological developments follows a certain logic. Possibly there is a certain ‘path’ which nations follow in the name of ‘development’.

But I don’t think this translates into political inevitability. These technological developments can happen under capitalist or communist, democratic or authoritarian regimes. And nations with very advanced cultures e.g. China or India, never made the technological breakthroughs which happened in the West.

So I think political changes certainly reflect broad social and economic changes, but the way they are shaped and, quite often, the specific trigger points which really decide things one way or the other, are highly contingent on key individuals. The German High Command, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mao – these individuals had enormous, seismic impacts on the flow of events and the world we live in today.

In my own time, the long-term decline of heavy industries in Britain and their offshoring to India and China and other developing countries might have been ‘inevitable’ following the logic of technological development which I’ve suggested. But wasn’t at all inevitable that this process would be managed by the hatchet-faced government of Margaret Thatcher – and her personality and her personal beliefs made all the difference. Compare and contrast the way the same kind of de-industrialisation was managed in Germany or France.

Back to the 17th century, there were certainly long-term economic, social, political and religious issues which faced any ruler of Britain. But Charles I, John Pym and Oliver Cromwell played decisive roles in the outbreak and development of the wars of three kingdoms which were shaped by their characters, abilities and decisions.

For example, there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about the way a small-time East Anglian squire named Oliver Cromwell would turn out to be a military strategist and a political operator of genius, and so be able to not only manage the complex religious, political and military forces unleashed by over ten years of war, but then to go on and maintain England as a republic for ten further long years.

But above all, we’d never even have heard of Cromwell if Charles, at a number of key moments, had been prepared to make concessions – he might have averted war, or shortened the war, or ended it before he drove his opponents into the corner of having to execute him. Imagine what would have happened if he and Archbishop Laud never made their ill-fated journey back to Scotland, been appalled at the ragged state of the Scots Kirk and hadn’t decided to impose ‘unity’ i.e. an English prayer book, on the Scots. Or if he’d had the sense to simply consult the Scottish Parliament and Assembly of the Kirk during its drafting. Or had simply been prepared to make concessions when riots broke out at its first use in Scottish churches. None of those events were fore-ordained, they stem from the decisions of one person.

But instead of this sensible, collegiate approach, Charles’s narrow-minded inflexibility meant he literally couldn’t conceive of consulting anyone else about his decisions, nor of making any kind of compromise when he was opposed. These very specific aspects of Charles’s character were in now way ‘inevitable’ but were entirely contingent.

So, in my opinion, above everything else, the wars of three kingdoms were the direct, personal fault of the arrogant, uncompromising but weak King Charles I.

More seventeenth century reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 28, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 28, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/28/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-4-wars-of-three-kingdoms/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 2. The reign of James I

The reign of James I

Queen Elizabeth I died aged 70 on 24 March 1603. She had resisted marrying a husband or bearing an heir throughout her reign and now died childless. King James VI of Scotland was chosen to inherit the crown of England, ascending the throne at the age of 37, having himself ascended the Scottish throne while still a child aged 13 months, after his mother, Mary Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate in his favour.

James had been brought up by four regents and umpteen guardians, and had survived the poisonous faction-fighting of the Scottish court for 20 years since coming of age.

Kidnapping Scottish kings was almost constitutional practice and James himself was abducted twice. (p.79)

Upon hearing he’d inherited the throne of England, James hastened south to Scotland’s rich, sunny neighbour and never went back. Unfortunately, he brought quite a few Scottish aristocrats and dependents with him, who he awarded key posts in his private council and chamber – although wisely continuing most Elizabethan officials in their posts.

The Scots incomers were unpopular not only with English officials whose jobs they took, but with the man in the street. An ordinance had to be passed against ‘swaggerers’, who were beating up Scots in the streets of London.

James wanted peace and unity, Beatifi Pacifici was his motto. He came in with a promise to make a clean sweep and a new start after the increasingly frozen and paralysed years at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. To this end:

Spain

James negotiated an end to the war with Spain, which had been rumbling on for 20 years, with the 1604 Treaty of London, and thereafter tried to curry favour with Spain, widely thought to be the most powerful Catholic power in Europe. He tried to arrange a Spanish marriage for his eldest son, Henry; and in 1618 he had the old Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh executed, after he’d led an abortive expedition against Spain in South America. This did nothing to impress the Spanish but upset many of James’s new subjects.

Religion

James was petitioned about reforming the Church of England before he’d even arrived in London. He called a conference in 1604 at Hampton Court to address religious issues, the most practical outcome of which was a new translation of the Bible into English, which was published in 1611 and became known as ‘the Authorised version’ or ‘the King James Bible’ (pp.72-3).

James managed to adjust and renew Elizabeth’s ‘middle way’ (between Catholicism on the conservative wing and Calvinism on the radical wing), not least by his wise appointment of the best theologians or churchmen for the job – the moderate George Abbott as archibishop of Canterbury, John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes as preachers.

But religion proved to be an intractable problem. The remaining Catholics (including some very influential families) and the fringe of extreme Puritan groups both hoped for greater toleration of their beliefs, and even within the established Church of England there was a broad range of opinion. It was impossible to please everyone and James found himself forced to reinforce the outline of the Elizabethan settlement.

There were Catholic plots from the start. The Pope had long ago established a parallel Catholic church hierarchy waiting to be imposed on England once the Protestant king was liquidated and powerful Catholic members of the aristocracy had risen up to place a Catholic claimant on the throne.

There were two minor Catholic plots within a year of James’s coronation and then the Gunpowder plot of November 1605 – a plan to blow up the king and all the members of the Houses of Parliament before imposing a Catholic regime – and even after the exemplary torture and punishment of the Guy Fawkes conspirators, other plots followed. Taking the long view, the country was still subject to Catholic scares and even hysterias, into the 1670s and 80s.

Royal finances

But the real problem of James’s reign was money. He spent money like an oligarch’s wife – he renovated the royal palaces, paid for his predecessor’s state funeral and his own coronation, then had to set up his wife (Queen Anne of Denmark) and his sons (Henry and Charles) with their own establishments.

And then James became notorious for having a succession of ‘favourites’, handsome young men who he lavished money and titles on. Most unpopular of all was George Villiers, raised from obscurity and showered with titles and responsibilities to become the most powerful man in the country, the Duke of Buckingham.

Kishlansky very casually mentions that Buckingham became James’s lover (p.98). The impact of this on the king, the court and his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, is not at all explored.

As James got deeper into debt, a succession of ministers and officials (notably the Earl of Salisbury, Lord Treasurer from 1608) were tasked with extracting more money from the country. Taxes and customs were increased, old forms of extraction revived, James sold monopolies of trade and discovered he could fine people if he offered them a knighthood and they refused to accept. James’s increasingly mercenary sale of titles, and his creation of a new rank in the peerage, the baronetcy, prompted widespread mockery, particularly in Jacobean plays.

James was used to the Scottish style of politics, to a face-to-face form of government, where you sized a man up and manipulated him accordingly (p.79). He struggled to understand or manage the infinitely more complex ways of English government, with its obstinate Parliament and maze of committees and officials.

His frequent exasperation explains the lengthy and sometimes angry lectures he was wont to give English officials and sometimes Parliament as a whole. Witness the failure of the so-called ‘Addled Parliament’ which met for just nine weeks in 1614 but refused to concede any of James’s schemes to raise money and so which he angrily dismissed.

Divine Right of Kings

James was a noted scholar and had written several books on the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, so he struggled to understand how the entire English ruling class claimed to agree with him about this but then presented him with a never-ending stream of precedents and liberties which had the practical effect of completely stymying and blocking his divine wishes.

Scotland

James hoped from day one that his old kingdom and his new one could be united. He was king of both and he wanted it to be, so it would happen, right? No. Once again the legal complexities of the situation escaped him but not the hordes of constitutional lawyers and advisers who explained why it couldn’t be done. Plus the visceral fear of many English aristocrats and officials that if the two countries were legally united, then the flow of Scots finding office in the south would turn into a flood.

Ireland

The advent of a Scottish king on the throne of England opened the way for the settlement of Ulster i.e. lots of poor Scots had wanted to emigrate to Ireland but been prevented when it was run by the English crown. James’s advent unlocked the floodgates. Thousands of emigrants settled along the coast of north-east Ireland then moved inland, settling land seized from the Irish owners.

Much of it had belonged to the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell who forfeited it when they absconded to the continent in 1607 in a bid to work with Spain to raise an army, invade Ireland, and restore the Irish aristocracy to the lands and powers it had enjoyed before the Elizabethan conquest.

The Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell

Their plan was never carried out for a number of reasons:

  • the Spanish government of King Philip III didn’t want to rock the boat, wanted to maintain the new peace with the new Stuart dynasty (established in 1604) in order to focus its energies on its long-running war with the Dutch Republic. In fact discussions had opened about marrying Prince Henry to a Spanish royal bride
  • Spain had recently [1598] gone bankrupt – again
  • the Spanish fleet had only just been destroyed by a Dutch fleet at the Battle of Gibraltar, 25 April 1607 and so wasn’t in a position to mount any kind of invasion

Instead the net result of what became known as ‘the Flight of the Earls’ was a watershed in Irish history. They set sail on a ship to France and thence to Spain but neither they, their heirs or any of their ninety or so followers ever returned. As such, the Flight of the Earls represented the moment when the ancient Gaelic aristocracy of Ulster went into permanent exile. And this opened the way for the settlement of Ulster by Presbyterian Scots – the Plantation of Ulster – and the creation of the Ulster problem which has bedevilled British politics for over a century (pp.70-71).

The Thirty Years War

In Kishlansky’s account the outbreak of war in the Holy Roman Empire in 1618 changed the tone of James’s rule. Having just read Peter H. Wilson’s vast account of the war, I found myself disagreeing with the way Kishlansky tells the story. He leaves facts out, his summary feels incomplete and a bit misleading.

In Wilson’s version, Protestant nobles in the Kingdom of Bohemia, worried by the pro-Catholic and anti-Protestant trend of recent policies of the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, raised a rebellion against him and sought allies among the Protestant leaders of the Empire’s scores of independent states. Ferdinand was titular King of Bohemia, but the rebels rejected his kingship and offered the crown to a solidly Protestant prince, the Count Palatine of the Rhine (i.e. ruler of the territory know as the Palatinate) Frederick V – not least because he was the leader of the Protestant Union, a military alliance founded by his father.

Frederick accepted, was crowned King of Bohemia in 1619, and led the military struggle against the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor – but he lost. The Bohemian army was crushed at the Battle of White Mountain just outside Prague on 8 November 1620. Frederick and his wife fled. Because he had only reigned for one calendar year he and his wife became known as the Winter King and the Winter Queen.

Following the Battle of White Mountain the Emperor’s Catholic army seized Prague, the Emperor was reinstated as King of Bohemia, and then his forces, along with a Spanish army led by the Marquis de Spinola, went on to seize the Palatinate, Frederick’s original territory, as well as engaging the Protestant states who had allied with the Bohemians. The Emperor took the opportunity of his victory to impose tough new pro-Catholic policies on all the conquered territory.

The Winter Queen

Why did this have an impact in faraway Britain? Because Frederick had been married to Elizabeth Stuart, James’s daughter, in 1613. The marriage took place in London, in the Palace of Whitehall, and was attended by a vast mob of British aristocracy. John Donne wrote a poem about it. Thus it was the British king’s daughter and son-in-law who were violently overthrown by a Catholic super-power and went into exile (in the Hague in the Dutch Netherlands).

From that point onwards King James, and then his successor, King Charles, were pestered by advisers and commentators and pamphlet writers begging the king to intervene, to send money or, preferably, an army.

Protestants of all stripes saw the war – which didn’t end with the capture of Prague but spread into a number of other Protestant states of the empire, and was destined to rumble on for generations – as an attack by the Catholic Habsburgs on all their Protestant subjects.

When you added in the resumption of the long war between Catholic Spain (also ruled by a branch of the Habsburg family) to suppress the rebels of the Protestant Dutch Netherlands, it wasn’t difficult to claim there was a vast Catholic conspiracy to defeat and exterminate Protestantism.

If you add in memories of the Gunpowder plot a generation earlier, or the attempt by the Irish Earls to persuade Spain to reconquer Ireland for Catholicism, you can begin to enter into the embattled, paranoid state of mind of many British Protestants – and to understand their growing frustration at the way James refused to become embroiled in the war, but tried to position himself as some kind of arbiter for peace (pp.102-3).

(A book like this, taking things from the British point of view, makes all this seem like a plausible strategy. Peter H. Wilson’s book, looking from the European perspective, emphasises how laughably grandiose, inept and ineffectual James’s peace initiatives appeared to the participants in the war. The Brits spent a lot of money on pompous embassies which achieved nothing.)

1621 Parliament

In 1621 James called a Parliament to provide funds for some kind of intervention in the Empire and, sure enough, member after member rose to pledge their lives and fortunes to the cause of restoring the king’s son-in-law to his rightful kingdom of the Palatinate. But Parliament and king could not agree on the best strategy. The subsidies Parliament voted James were inadequate to finance serious military operations in aid of Frederick, while MPs went on to inflame the situation by calling for a war – not in Germany – but aimed squarely against Spain. They went on to raise a petition demanding that Prince Charles marry a Protestant, and for enforcement of existing anti-Catholic laws.

James was scandalised and warned Parliament that intrusion into his royal prerogative would trigger punishment. This announcement scandalised Parliamentarians, who issued a statement protesting their rights, including freedom of speech. Egged on by the Duke of Buckingham, James ripped this protest out of the Parliamentary record book, dissolved Parliament and imprisoned five of its leaders.

The Spanish match

All this time negotiations with Spain for Charles to marry the Spanish Infanta Maria Anna dragged on, with the Spanish King (Philip IV) putting endless obstacles in the way.

Eventually, in 1623 Charles, Prince of Wales (aged 23) and the Duke of Buckingham (aged 31) set off on an epic journey to Spain, crossing the Channel, resting in Paris, then riding south to Spain. The Spanish king and his adviser, Duke Olivares, were astonished at their unannounced arrival, but proceeded to delay things even more.

Amazingly, six months of delay and obfuscation prevented Charles even meeting the intended bride more than a handful of times, while the Spanish negotiators put all kinds of barriers in his way, insisting that Charles convert to Catholicism and allow the bride to freely practice her religion, and lowering her dowry (in part to pay for the Spanish occupation of the Palatinate).

1624 Parliament

Eventually, Charles and Buckingham realised they were being played and left in high dudgeon, Buckingham especially, because members of the hyper-formal Spanish court made no effort to conceal their contempt for him, due to his originally humble background.

(Maria Anna eventually married the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand III, a much better choice.)

Charles and Buckingham returned to London determined to take revenge for this humiliation, and Charles persuaded his father to call another Parliament. This assembled and renewed its enthusiasm for war but, once again, didn’t vote nearly enough money to create a realistic military force. Buckingham was now sounding out the French about an alliance with them and a French princess for Charles to marry.

Death

James died on 25 March 1625. He had lavished a lot of education and hopes on his eldest son, Prince Henry, but Henry died in 1612 aged just 18, of typhoid, so the crown now passed to the next eldest son, Charles, who became King Charles I of England, Scotland and Ireland.

Summary

James became unpopular because of:

  • the crude and greedy Scots he brought with him to the English court
  • his rapacious, novel and sometimes legally dubious ways of raising money
  • his failure to settle the (insoluble) religious problem
  • his alleged pro-Catholicism and his sustained failure to support the Protestant, Bohemian cause in Europe
  • his angry confrontations with Parliament
  • his association with the deeply unpopular Duke of Buckingham

More seventeenth century reviews

Leave a comment
by Simon on August 25, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 25, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/25/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-2-james-i/

The supermarket of history

I have just read S.H. Steinberg’s History of the Thirty Years War. I came to it fresh from reading Peter H. Wilson’s 2010 book on the same subject, in which Wilson sets out to ‘overturn received opinion’ about many aspects of the conflict, lining up ‘traditional’ interpretations of the conflict in order to question and reinterpret them.

So I chuckled when I read in the opening sentences of the preface to Steinberg’s book that he also sets out to ‘reorientate and reinterpret’ the familiar story of the Thirty Years War.

Sometimes it seems like this is all historians ever do – overturn everything the previous generation thought. Is there any professional historian anywhere who isn’t a ‘revisionist’, I wonder?

Historians are like a succession of Oedipuses rebelling against their fathers, each successive generation producing dazzling new reorientations and reinterpretations of increasingly distant and remote events. If you buy a newish history on almost any subject, you can pretty much guarantee it will be a ‘revisionist’ account that sets out to ‘overturn established narratives’, ‘tell the untold story’, letting us hear previously ‘unheard voices’, and so on.

Since historians are society’s professional gatekeepers to the past, we readers kind of have to go along with the narratives they give us – but the more history you read, the more you realise that, in a sense, ‘history’ just consists of commentaries on the past which can be as varied and contradictory as newspaper and magazine commentaries on the present.

If you want a right-wing analysis of Covid or Brexit, read the Telegraph and the Spectator. If you want a woke interpretation, read the Guardian. If you want a tabloid version featuring loads of celebrities in bikinis, read the Mail, and so on.

Similarly, if you want a feminist slant on a historic event or figure, read Mary Beard or Lucy Worsley, a Marxist slant, read a Marxist historian like Eric Hobsbawm or E.P. Thompson, a black or an lgbt+ interpretation, read David Olusoga or gay historians. If you want a solidly right-wing view, read Niall Ferguson, if you want social history, then read the likes of David Kynaston, if you want history seen from particular regions read John Morrill on Cheshire or David Underdown on Somerset, and so on.

After a while, you realise that ‘history’ is a supermarket of opinions. Stuff definitely happened in the past, vast amounts of stuff – but which bits you choose to emphasise, how you choose to interpret it, and what you make it mean, are entirely down to the school of history and the historian you choose.

If you like the 18th century, you can choose to dwell on the rarefied heights of Enlightenment philosophy or on the bloody brutality of slavery, on society portrait painting or colonial wars, according to your taste and interests. Do you prefer Persil or Ariel?

As modern marketers like to say, it entirely depends on which values you identify with and therefore which brand reflects those values.

To equate the practice of history with some kind of search for ‘The Truth’ seems to me a ludicrous misunderstanding of history as an academic specialism and, in wider society, as a cultural practice (I mean the result of the efforts of a wide range of people from local historical societies and amateur historians and historical tours and TV and radio history programmes and so on).

Just like a good lawyer can take any set of ‘facts’ and twist them into a narrative which supports his client, so a good historian can argue any side when it comes to clashes of interpretations. Or, if they’re not quite so flexible as lawyers, you can certainly find the historian who will back up your view (feminist, Marxist, BAME, neo-liberal, neo-traditional).

And, quite obviously, the bigger the event or the longer the period, the larger the scope for multiple interpretations to be put forward for the same events. In other words, we the readers and viewers are free to enjoy a multiplicity of viewpoints. In one mood I can think about the First World War as a seismic event in international affairs, in another mode can focus on the transformation in women’s place in society as they were recruited into factories and change which led to the vote, in another mode read about the not-very-well-known role of the hundreds of thousands of Indian and African labourers who fought on the Allies’ side, and so on. You pays your money, you chooses your perspective.

And we mustn’t forget the role played in the production of ever-changing interpretations by the blunt fact that historians have to earn a living. A lawyer needs new cases, an advertising agency needs new clients, and historians need to produce new interpretations to justify their tenure at universities. They need to publish new papers and books and do new research to pass reviews, fulfil departmental targets, achieve organisational KPIs and so on.

Thus, there are simple bread-and-butter considerations which explain the need of historians to come up with new perspectives, or adapt emerging perspectives (BAME, feminism, LGBT+) to subjects and eras they haven’t previously been applied to.

I saw this up close as a would-be academic considering whether to do an English PhD in the 1980s. My girlfriend of the time did, and a couple of close friends. The advent of identity politics in the 1980s was a godsend to humanities professionals because it gave them a suite of new perspectives which could then be applied to the entire subject.

Thus, from a feminist point of view, all of world history needs to be re-researched, rethought and rewritten to ‘restore women’s voices’ and give ‘women’s points of view’ and so on – which is more than enough work to keep thousands of feminist scholars employed for the rest of their lives. My girlfriend of the day began a PhD giving a feminist interpretation of woman as muse figure in the poetry of Robert Graves and other contemporary poets.

Ditto black and post-colonial interpretations – for academics of this persuasion, mining this particular seam, all of world history needs to be reinterpreted from the point of view of black people, of the slave trade, of peoples oppressed by European colonialism, native Americans, aborigines, you name them, it will be a vast and potentially endless undertaking. And jobs. And careers.

Ditto LGBT+ interpretations.

Each new ‘school’, each new focus or emphasis means the same old ground can be raked over, but from an entirely new perspective, and that means academic papers, conferences, books and careers.

So thinking of History as some kind of pure and noble Search for Truth strikes me as a very naive view. History, whatever else its proponents may say it is, is a type of discourse which is 1. embedded in its cultural moment i.e. heavily affected by the cultural and political fashions and indeed demands of the day, and 2. driven by financial incentives i.e. the need of professional historians to justify their pay by coming up with a steady stream of ‘revisionist’ interpretations.

Like everything else in a consumer capitalist society, it is driven by the need for novelty.

Asking whether this or that version of history is ‘true’ is like asking whether a Range Rover or a Fiat Uno is ‘true’. They’re different ways of doing the same general thing (getting from A to B in the case of cars, informing yourself about the past, in the case of history), but which one you prefer is down to individual choice.

2 Comments
by Simon on August 22, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in History
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by Simon on August 22, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/22/the-supermarket-of-history/