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

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