by Неизвестный
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There had been considerable anxiety among the English Privy Council that James would have his own ideas about who should counsel him – or more pointedly, that they find themselves replaced by his Scottish favourites. So there was great relief when it became apparent that for the most part the new King was happy to keep Elizabeth’s counsellors about him. Among these, unsurprisingly, Cecil was an early confidant. The French ambassador reported in May 1603 that the Secretary ‘begins to grow great with the king, staying alone with him shut up in the cabinet [James’s personal closet] for three or four hours together.’24 James elected to retain all the other thirteen of Elizabeth’s Privy Councillors, promoting several men who had supported his cause over the last years, including Henry Howard, who now became Earl of Northampton, and Essex’s ally Mountjoy, who became Earl of Devonshire. But James did add five Scots to the Council: Lennox and Mar, two long-standing allies; James Elphinstoun, the Scottish Secretary; Sir George Home, who was later to become Earl of Dunbar; and Edward Bruce, who became Lord Kinloss. In practice the influence of these five men in England was negligible. Mar and Elphinstone never lived outside Scotland; Lennox was a familiar and high-ranking presence in court, but without real power; Kinloss, the only Scot to be given high office in 1603 (as Master of the Rolls), died shortly afterwards. Only Dunbar would rise, becoming in turn chief adviser for Scottish affairs, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Master of the Wardrobe.25
Despite their relative absence from the top government posts, the Scots made their presence felt in other ways. For James’s accession to the English throne produced an important shift in the style of government. Reduced to its most basic components, political influence could be measured by access to the physical presence – and therefore to the ear – of the sovereign. Under Henry VIII, the most intimate space in the royal household was the Privy Chamber, and within the Privy Chamber, there had been the even more private Privy Lodgings centring on the King’s Bedchamber. When Elizabeth came to the throne, the fact that the sovereign was now a woman, who had to be surrounded at certain times by other women rather than by her councillors, had meant that the Privy Lodgings, where she spent much of her time, were divided from the Privy Chamber by a Withdrawing Chamber; as a result the Privy Lodgings lost much of their explicitly political tone, and the Privy Chamber became more formal, but also politically influential. With James’s accession to the throne, however, there came to the English court what has been dubbed ‘the revival of the entourage’. Under the new King, it was not the Privy Chamber, but the Bedchamber and the men it contained, that became the focus of attention. The Bedchamber controlled the more intimate aspects of serving the King, while the Privy Chamber became a more formal, ceremonial space. Whereas attempts were made to keep the Privy Chamber roughly half Scots and half English, the Bedchamber was comprised almost entirely of Scottish courtiers, with the sole exception of Sir Philip Herbert. Lennox was Steward of the Household; Sir George Home, Master of the Wardrobe; John Murray, Keeper of the Privy Purse; and Sir Thomas Erskine, a cousin of Mar, Captain of the Guard. This last appointment was particularly resented, since the post had been confiscated from the popular English courtier Sir Walter Ralegh.26
It was the absolute dominance of Scots in James’s immediate household that particularly galled English commentators like Gervase Holies, who wrote of James bringing with him ‘a crew of necessitous and hungry Scots’ and filling ‘every corner of the Court with these beggarly bluecaps’, referring to the blue woollen bonnets that the Scots were traditionally reputed to wear.27 His kinsman Sir John Holies complained in 1610 that ‘the Scottish monopolize his princely person, standing like mountains betwixt the beams of his grace and us’, urging that the Bedchamber should be ‘shared as well to those of our nation as to them’.28 The exclusion from the Bedchamber had serious administrative implications. Since the household ordinances stated that ‘no person of what condition soever do at any time presume or be admitted to come to us in our Bedchamber, but such as … are … sworn of it, without our special licence, except the Princes of Our Blood’,29 some of James’s leading government officials were effectively excluded from the regular access to the King that was constantly enjoyed by his Bedchamber staff Even Secretaries of State would be granted audiences in the (outer) Privy Chamber or Withdrawing Chamber, with the King emerging from his (inner) Bedchamber for the purpose. In the words of the Venetian agent in May 1603, ‘No Englishmen, be his rank what it may, can enter the Presence Chamber without being summoned, whereas the Scottish lords have free entrée of the Privy Chamber, and more especially at the toilette.’30
When James made the journey south to London upon his accession in 1603, expectations had been high for his performance as sovereign. ‘Our virtuous King makes our hopes to swell; his actions suitable to the time and his natural disposition,’ enthused Thomas Wilson, a Cecil protégé, in June. But it was soon discovered that James’s ‘natural disposition’ led him away from what many regarded as his kingly duties. ‘Sometimes he comes to Council,’ Wilson reported, ‘but most time he spends in fields and parks and chases, chasing away idleness by violent exercise and early rising, wherein the sun seldom prevents him.’31 Or as the Venetian ambassador Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli put it: ‘the King, in spite of all the heroic virtues ascribed to him when he left Scotland and inculcated by him in his books, seems to have sunk into a lethargy of pleasures, and will not take heed of matters of state. He remits everything to the Council, and spends his time in the house alone, or in the country at the chase.’32
James did not believe himself to be negligent in his style of government. Indeed, he was continuing very much in the way he had for the past two decades in Scotland. But the English had become accustomed, over some forty-five years, to a very different sovereign. Elizabeth had made herself central to decision-making on virtually every level, playing her counsellors and courtiers off against each other as though they were suitors for her affections, while demonstrating an almost pathological tendency towards procrastination. This meant that, no matter how annoying her counsellors may have found her, Elizabeth was always present, always the centre of their attention. But the new King was more often away from court altogether, in the country with his horses and his hounds.
Hunting had been a passion for James since his adolescence. Recommending a range of sports to his son Henry in his Basilikon Doron, it was hunting to which he gave special praise, deeming it ‘martial’ and ‘noble’, ‘specially with running hounds, which is the most honorable and noblest sort thereof’, although he acknowledged that he might well be considered ‘a partial praiser of this sport’.33 Not that James was necessarily an adept huntsman: the Lancashire gentleman Nicholas Assheton reported in his journal one afternoon of royal hunting during the August 1617 progress, during which James ‘went and shot at a stag, and missed. Then my Lord Compton had lodged two brace. The King shot again, and brake the thigh-bone.’34 It seems that such a patchy performance was not unusual. To indulge his passion, James established small hunting lodges at Newmarket and Royston within months of his accession to the English throne. These lodges were not far from London, but far enough for him to be notably absent from the mechanics of government. For whereas Elizabeth on her lengthy summer processes had been followed, albeit with reluctance, by her entire court including the Privy Council, James took off for the fields with only what one observer contemptuously dismissed as ‘his hunting crew’ in tow;35 a crew the Venetian ambassador described as ‘a few persons only, and those always the same, people of low degree, as is usual in that exercise’.36 It has been calculated that throughout his entire reign in England, James spent about half his time either at his hunting lodges or on progress, and when at the lodges, his household comprised only one or two clerks, the Guard, the Privy Chamber, and, of course, the Bedchamber.37 This was not the English way, as the Venetian ambassador noted: James was ‘more inclined to live retired with eight or ten of his favourites than openly, as is the cust
om of the country and the desire of the people’.38
When challenged, James cited his health as the reason for hunting – it allowed him to escape both the unhealthy environs of London, and the sedentary life it entailed. Two days after the Christmas festivities finished at court in 1605, for example, James took off for Royston. He wrote to his Privy Council to tell them ‘that it is the only means to maintain his health, which being the health and welfare of us all, he desires them to undertake the charge and burden of affairs, and foresee that he be not interrupted nor troubled with too much business’.39 The new Venetian ambassador Nicolo Molin elaborated how James had explained that, after having been nearly three weeks in London, he found ‘this sedentary life’ very prejudicial to his health. In Scotland, he had been able to spend much time in the country, ‘and in hard exercise’; the forced repose down south ‘robs him of his appetite and breeds melancholy and a thousand other ills’. Since his health was paramount, he informed the Council, he would come to London ‘but seldom’, spending most of the time hunting in the country. According to Molin, James went on to conclude ‘by announcing that he will approve all their resolutions. In this way the King has virtually given full and absolute authority to the Council, and has begun to put his plan in practice, for many who went to him with petitions and grievances have been told to go to the Council, for they are fully authorized to deal with all business public and private.’40 ‘I shall never take longer vacancy from them,’ he told Cecil to assure his Council, ‘for the necessary maintenance of my health, than other kings will consume upon their physical diets and going to their whores.’41
James may have imagined that he had struck a perfect trade-off: the Privy Council would be given a free hand, and he would be allowed to regain his health. But in practice, things did not work out so simply. As the Earl of Worcester, one of the four councillors who made up James’s inner sanctum of government, reported in May 1605, James had been ‘very ill’ with a heavy cold since coming to the country, thanks to ‘the sharpness of the air and wind’. Indeed, everyday the King went hunting ‘he taketh a new cold; for, being hot with riding a long chase, he sitteth in the open air and drinketh, which cannot but continue, if not increase, a new cold’. If his health did not bother him, then his subjects did. Worcester reported how James had been out hunting near Thetford, but ‘was driven out of the field with press of company, which came to see him’. The King, he wrote, ‘took no great delight’ in the intrusion, and ‘came home, and played at cards’. Sir William Woodhouse, a local dignitary, was ordered to devise a proclamation ‘that none shall presume to come to him on hunting days, but those that come to see him, or prefer petitions, shall do it going forth, or coming home’.42
More importantly, it soon became apparent that the Council was not confident of its power to bypass the King and was forced constantly to attempt to win the King’s attention while he was on hunting trips – no mean feat. Worcester, attending the hunting crew at Royston in December 1604, complained to his fellow councillor Shrewsbury that
I think I have not had two hours of twenty-four of rest but Sundays, for in the morning we are on horseback by eight, and so continue in full career from the death of one hare to another, until four at night; by that time I find at my lodging sometimes one, most commonly two packets of letters, all which must be answered before I sleep, for here is none of the Council but myself, no, not a Clerk of the Council nor Privy Signet, so that an ordinary warrant for post horse must pass my own hand, my own secretary being sick at London.43
James’s absences thus caused huge problems for his principal councillors, especially since he often refused point blank to deal with any official paperwork. It was not long before even Cecil was lamenting the change of regime from that of Elizabeth, which took on a retrospective halcyon glow: ‘I wish I waited now in her presence-chamber, with ease at my food, and rest in my bed. I am pushed from the shore of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a court will bear me.’44
While the Privy Council encountered administrative problems with the King’s absences, James’s hunting became increasingly notorious among the wider public. An early sign of this occurred in December 1604 when one of James’s ‘special hounds’, Jowler, went missing. When he mysteriously reappeared among the other hounds the following day, Jowler was sporting a paper around his neck. The paper read, ‘Good Mr Jowler, we pray you speak to the King (for he hears you everyday, and so doth he not us) that it will please His Majesty to go back to London, for else the country will be undone; all our provision is spent already, and we are not able to entertain him longer.’ James took the ingenious petition ‘for a jest’, but before long the tone of public complaint soured.45 The Venetian ambassador Molin recorded how James’s trips were ‘the cause of indescribable ill-humour among the King’s subjects, who in their needs and troubles find themselves cut off from their natural sovereign, and forced to go before the Council, which is full of rivalry and discord, and frequently is guided more by personal interest than by justice and duty’.46 By May 1606, the people were making their feelings felt more forcibly. ‘The people desire to see their sovereign,’ wrote another Venetian envoy, Zorzi Giustinian. ‘The discontent has reached such a pitch that the other day there was affixed to the door of the Privy Council a general complaint of the King, alleging that his excessive kindness leaves his subjects a prey to the cupidity of his ministers.’ While the complaint was only what the ambassador called ‘a paternal warning not to give his subjects further cause for acting so that he should have to complain of them’, James read it ‘with some annoyance’.47
While those at court condemned his absence, those near him in the country mourned his presence. The royal trampling of local farmers’ fields was a constant source of contention. One Thetford farmer, ‘highly offended at the liberty his Majesty took in riding over his corn, in the transport of his passion threatened to bring an action of trespass against the King’, a threat that led to a permanent withdrawal of royal favour from the town.48 Samuel Calvert was grateful when the weather denied the King ‘his common exercise’ and therefore ‘somewhat the ordinary complaints of poor country farmers to endure continual wrong, by the hunting spoils, and misgovernment of the unruly train’.49 The Venetian ambassador Molin noted that ‘whenever he goes a-hunting the crops are mostly ruined’.50 Even Godfrey Goodman, chaplain to Queen Anna, singled out hunting as an evil in a 1616 sermon, identifying the damage done to the poor tenants of farmland: ‘the highways cannot always contain them, but over the hedges and ditches [they go]; here begins the cry and the curse of the poor tenant, who sits at a hard rent, and sees his corn spoiled’.51
In December 1604, these murmurings reached the King in a more formal complaint. Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, wrote to Cecil charging James with neglecting his duties, undue extravagance and an overliberal use of various royal privileges. At length, he came to the subject of the King’s hunting: ‘as one that honoureth, and loveth his most excellent Majesty with all my heart, I wish less wasting of the treasure of the realm, and more moderation in the lawful exercise of hunting both that poor men’s corn may be less spoiled and other [of] his Majesty’s subjects more spared’,52 While carefully admitting that hunting was technically ‘lawful’, Hutton gave voice to the complaint of James’s people that their crops were being ruined by the King and his entourage galloping across their fields. When James read Hutton’s letter, Worcester recorded, ‘He was merry at the first but when he came to the wasting of the treasure and the immoderate exercise of hunting began to alter countenance and said it was the foolishest letter that ever he read.’53 Knowing in advance what the King’s reaction would be, Cecil had already drafted a firm response: ‘For your last point in your letter concerning hunting,’ he wrote to Hutton, ‘this shall be my conclusion: that it was a praise in the good Emperor Trajan to be disposed to such manlike and active recreations; so ought it to be a joy to us to behold our King of so able a constitution, promising so long life, a
nd blessed with so plentiful a posterity, as hath freed our minds from all those fears which had besieged this potent monarchy, for lack of public declaration of his lineal and lawful succession to the same, whilst it pleased God to continue to the fullness of days our late sovereign of famous memory’.54 James praised Cecil for this response: ‘I am thoroughly pleased with your answer,’ he wrote, ‘and specially concerning my hunting ye have answered it according to my heart’s desire, for a scornful, answerless answer became best such a senseless proposition.’55
Complaints about James’s hunting were almost always complaints about James’s style of government – or, more pertinently, his failure to govern effectively because of his physical absence from court. At the same time, with what became a characteristic perverse delight in accentuating those traits that most annoyed those around him, James adopted hunting as the overarching metaphor for his activities. In March 1605, he defined his kingly activities as the hunting of ‘witches, prophets, puritans, dead cats and hares’. Time was measured by the successfully tracked quarry: James signed off, ‘so going to bed, after the death of six hares, a pair of fowls, and a heron’.56 His new favourites were those who distinguished themselves at the hunt, not at court or in government. It was no accident that Sir Philip Herbert, the first Englishman to be admitted to the Bedchamber, was remarked, in the historian Clarendon’s words, for ‘his skill, and indefatigable industry in hunting’, and that he ‘pretended to no other qualifications than to understand horses and dogs very well’.57