The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain

by Неизвестный

  Continuing the hunting metaphor, Cecil was to James, almost invariably, ‘my little beagle’.58 Thirty-five surviving letters from King to secretary open with the greeting, and in them James elaborated on the theme, praising his ‘little cankered beagle’, ‘my patient beagle’, the ‘King’s best beagle if he hunt well now in the hard ways’, ‘the little beagle that lies at home by the fire’.59 James loved to embarrass his councillors with epithets and nicknames: he also had a ‘fat Chancellor’, a ‘little, saucy Constable’, a ‘tall, black and cat-faced Keeper’, who together comprised a ‘trinity of knaves’.60 Cecil himself shifted moniker ‘from Beagle to Tom Derry, from Tom Derry to Parrot’:61 when he balked at being dubbed by the King ‘my little fool’, Worcester reminded him that he was also known as ‘a parrot-monger, a monkey-monger, and twenty other names’.62 Despite his annoyance, Cecil, like the good councillor he was, played along with his master’s name-games, dutifully referring to himself as James’s beagle, as when he protested to Sir Thomas Lake that the King’s ‘monkey loves him not better than his beagle, nor his Great Commissioner in Scotland more than his little Secretary’.63

  * * *

  While James was off hunting in the country, his Queen consolidated a much more cosmopolitan life. Anna took over Greenwich Palace and then Somerset House in the Strand, which she renovated and renamed as Denmark House. By about 1607, the royal couple were rarely in residence together. The King, wrote the courtier Anthony Weldon, ‘was ever best when furthest from his Queen’. Bishop Goodman, Anna’s chaplain, added that ‘The King of himself was a very chaste man, and there was little in the Queen to make him uxorious; yet they did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together.’64 Others targeted the distance between the couple for political ends: sometime after 1605, James took action against a libeller who had made ‘villainous speeches’ against him, the Queen and Prince Henry. Although from James’s letter on the subject, the exact accusations are unclear, it seems that the libeller was accusing Anna of having been unfaithful to her husband, perhaps suggesting that Henry was illegitimate. He also cast doubt on James’s ‘pedigree’, perhaps repeating the libel that the King was ‘Davy’s son’; and apparently also imagined that Henry would ‘renounce the kingdom of England’: as James said, if he did so, the prince would be Richard II, ‘successor to Henry VI [in fact, to Edward III], and not to me.’65

  Anna’s household at Denmark House quickly emerged as a court in its own right. It became something of a magnet for those not welcomed by the King, and it was popularly whispered that the Queen harboured Catholics and indeed, that she had converted to the Roman Church herself. While there is no doubt that Anna made little attempt to discourage such rumours, Catholic foreign ambassadors – who would surely have welcomed such a situation – were certain that the Queen was beyond their reach. ‘She is a Lutheran,’ concluded the Venetian envoy Nicolo Molin in 1606. ‘The King tried to make her a Protestant [i.e. an Anglican]; others a Catholic; to this she was and is much inclinded, hence the rumour that she is one. She likes enjoyment and is very fond of dancing and of fetes. She is intelligent and prudent; and knows the disorders of the government, in which she has no part, though many hold that as the King is most devoted to her she might play as large a role as she wished. But she is young and averse to trouble; she sees that those who govern desire to be left alone, and so she professes indifference. All she ever does is to beg a favour for someone. She is full of kindness for those who support her, but on the other hand she is terrible, proud, unendurable to those she dislikes.’66

  Although Anna had considerable personal freedom and her own court, she does not appear to have intervened so visibly against her husband in factional politics as she did in Scotland, and her support was not often sought. Where the Queen’s court came truly into its own was as an artistic salon, as Anna patronised playwrights and poets including Samuel Daniel, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Florio, with whom she studied Italian. Her tastes reached beyond the literary, to painters and designers such as Paul van Somer, Isaac Oliver, Constantino de’ Servi and Inigo Jones; the Dutch inventor Salomon de Caus who laid out her gardens at Greenwich and Somerset House; the lutenist John Dowland and ‘more than a good many’ French musicians. Anna and her ladies also famously took part in masques, the court entertainments most often identified with James’s regime in England. The allure of these elaborate, expensive pieces of theatre is by no means clear from their surviving scripts, suggesting that their appeal lay instead in the design of their sets and costumes, in their special effects, in their music and dancing, and in the novelty of having royalty and nobility performing on stage. Often filled with topical allusions, properly veiled in classical or foreign settings, they were much liked by the Queen – although apparently not by James, whose standard reaction to being presented with a masque was to yawn and have his glass refilled.67

  Indeed, James was strangely aloof from many of the phenomena that we now see as peculiarly Jacobean. England had entered the seventeenth century with immense promise. A new world was opening up for English adventurers and merchant venturers, with exciting and exotic new territories from Virginia to Goa. Modern science was being born through the insights of Francis Bacon and William Harvey, both of whom became personal servants of the King. English theatre was at its peak, with William Shakespeare one of James’s own acting troupe, the King’s Men; Inigo Jones brought the latest European taste to the King’s Banqueting House in Whitehall and to his masques at court. But James seemed unimpressed. He mocked colonial exploration, fell asleep during England’s most celebrated plays, and showed little interest in momentous scientific advances. Bacon dedicated his landmark work Novum Organum to James only to have the King quip that it was like God: ‘it passeth all understanding’.68 The King’s energies would be devoted elsewhere, to old-style religious and dynastic politicking. James was at heart a sixteenth-century King of Scots, ill-equipped to be a seventeenth-century King of England; a sovereign who gave his name to the Jacobean age, but who was never truly of it.

  Those searching for the true spirit of the age started to look to his heir. From the first, Henry was a popular figure with the English. When on 2 July 1603 he was invested with the Order of the Garter on the Feast of St George at Windsor, courtiers presented professed themselves impressed with his ‘quick, witty answers, princely carriage, and reverend performing his obeisance at the altar.’69 When the state entry into London was made in 1604, after a lengthy delay due to the persistent plague, Henry reacted courteously to the acclamations of the crowd, which he ‘saluted … with many a bend’, ‘smiling and overjoyed to the people’s eternal comfort’, a stark contrast to his father’s stiff bearing and gritted teeth.70 Making his home at Oatlands in Surrey, he soon demonstrated a particular love of horses – but, unlike his father, not of hunting: ‘when he goes to it,’ reported the French ambassador de la Boderie in October 1606, ‘it is rather for the pleasure of galloping than that which the dogs give him.’ Unlike his father also, Henry proved himself an avid sportsman, playing tennis, ‘another Scots diversion very like mall’, tossing the pike, leaping, vaulting and archery: ‘he is never idle’, concluded de la Boderie admiringly.71

  But his love of sports did not signal an immaturity. ‘None of his pleasures savour the least of a child,’ wrote the ambassador.72 Visitors remarked on his piety and good manners, again very unlike James: Henry even seems to have invented the ‘swear box’, ordering that boxes be put in all his residences, ‘causing all those who did swear in his hearing to pay money for the same, which were after duly given to the poor.’73 The French ambassador noted that, even at thirteen, Henry was always in company ‘with persons older than himself, as if he despised those of his own age.’ Perhaps because he spent time with adults and because of his serious mien, Henry was quickly seen as a threat to James’s control of state business. ‘He is already feared by those who have the management of affairs,’ wrote de la Boderie, ‘and specially the Earl of Sa
lisbury [Robert Cecil], who appears to be greatly apprehensive of the Prince’s ascendant’, while Henry, ‘on the other hand, shows little esteem of’ Salisbury.’74 Nothing could be further from the increasingly lame James, with his hunting and his minions. Those who lost patience with the King now started to look towards Henry – as the future.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Reformation and Combustion

  AS JAMES PASSED near Haddington as he travelled south in 1603, the ministers of the Synod of Lothian fell on their knees and prayed for the King. Among their supplications was for the relief of the good brethren of the ministry of England. The King assured them that ‘he would show favour to honest men, but not to Anabaptists’.1 James’s response to the Lothian ministers suggests that he did not have much idea what awaited him in England. Unlike the Kirk, the Church of England in its very foundation posited the supremacy of the state in ecclesiastical affairs; James probably saw this situation, with himself fully accepted both as King and as head of the Church, as a perfect polity. But the Church of England was by no means unified, and the hopes of many subordinate factions rested on James’s coming. David Calderwood reported that ‘The formalists, the Papists, and the sincere professors, had all their own hopes’ of the new King. ‘The sincerer sort of professors, were the strongest party in the country, looked for reformation of all the abuses and corruptions of that Church.’

  James had already been in contact with various ‘sincerer sort of professors’, writing to one Puritan minister that his brethren might ‘assure themselves, that how soon ever it shall please God lawfully to possess me with the crown of that kingdom wherein they are subjects, I shall not only maintain and continue in the profession of the Gospel there, but withall, not suffer or permit any other religion to be professed and avowed within the bounds of that kingdom’.2 But such assurances were not enough. Even before James had reached London, he was presented with the Millenary Petition, so named because it was supposedly subscribed by a thousand ministers, though in reality the numbers fell somewhat short. The Petition spelled out the cause of the English Puritans, who looked to James to rescue them from what had become an increasingly unhappy situation during the last few years of Elizabeth’s reign, when they were often subject to vindictive assaults by the ecclesiastical establishment.3 The Church of England, they argued vociferously, was still in vital need of proper reformation. Protesting that they were neither factious nor schismatic men, but James’s loyal subjects, they presented to him a list of points on which they felt the Church of England had fallen short of its stated Reformation. They wanted the Church to rid itself of what they believed to be residual Romish features – confirmation, the use of the sign of the cross in baptism, the use of the ring in marriage – and to improve worship by introducing shorter services and more edifying church music. Other grievances concerned the shoddy observance of the Sabbath, the corruption in ecclesiastical courts, the prevalence of sinecures and pluralities, and the generally low intellectual quality of the ministry. They also called for a conference to be held between the Puritans and the leading figures in the Anglican Church.

  James’s religious sympathies were elsewhere. On coming to England, he had asked to meet Richard Hooker whose work Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, a considered response to the English Puritans’ call for further Church reformation, he had much admired. When gently informed that Hooker had died in 1600, James expressed his sorrow. ‘I shall want the desired happiness of seeing and discoursing with that man, from whose books I have received such satisfaction. Indeed,’ he continued, ‘I have received more satisfaction in reading a leaf, or paragraph in Mr Hooker, though it were but about the fashion of churches, or church music, or the like, but especially of the sacraments, than I have had in the reading particular large treatises written but of one of the those subjects by others, though very learned men.’ In Hooker’s works, he observed, there was ‘no affected language, but a grave, comprehensive, clear manifestation of reason, and that backed with the authority of the Scripture, the Fathers and Schoolmen, and with all law both sacred and civil.’ While other comparable works would soon disappear from view, ‘doubtless there is in every page of Mr. Hooker’s book the picture of a divine soul, such pictures of truth and reason, and drawn in so sacred colours, that they shall never fade, but give an immortal memory to the author.’4

  James’s reaction to Hooker’s writings is telling. First, it indicates James’s preferred method of theological debate – he was less concerned to return ad fontes, to interrogate the earliest sources of a particular scriptural passage, than to read the scripture in association with its accumulated interpretations: of the Church Fathers, the Schoolmen, and of ecclesiastical and civil lawyers. In practice, this meant that James tended towards an intellectual conservatism, preferring to trust the accretions of debate from the entire Christian heritage over the potentially dangerous findings of radical scholarly excavation. Second, it shows his attraction to Hooker’s brand of Anglo-Catholicism. James was a firm Protestant, but he was no Calvinist and rejected Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. Instead, his personal preference was nearer to the school now dubbed ‘Arminian’, after its spiritual founder Jacobus Arminius, which looked to the primitive church from the first five centuries anno domini.5 The English Arminians believed, or hoped to prove, that the Reformed Church of England was directly descended from a primitive Christian church whose true light had been obscured for a millennium by the Church of Rome. However, while that Church had fallen into errors, it was still a channel through which truths and ceremonies were handed down. This meant that, while Puritans tended to dismiss the pre-Reformation Church out of hand, Arminians found much to study in it.6

  Hooker may have died, but James found plenty to please him in the top ranks of the Anglican Church. These men were scholars, intellectuals and writers: John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury; Richard Bancroft, then Bishop of London; Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Chichester; William Barlow, Dean of Chester; and Thomas Bilson, Bishop of Winchester. He felt the Anglican hierarchy to be properly deferential: there was no danger here of an Andrew Melvill or David Black spitting out his Presbyterian bile and publicly humiliating the King. James was in his element. He had his bishops, who accepted the divine right of kings while keeping watch over the Church. Every church service exalted the King, in abstract and in person; homilies punched home the duty of each subject to the King. The Church of England had rituals and ceremonies that to the Kirk would have smacked soundly of papism, but to James held a great allure. He always protested that he did not dislike Scottish ministers who held personal objections to the ceremonies of the Anglican Church. ‘No, I am so far from being contentious in these things (which for my own part I ever esteemed as indifferent), as I do equally love and honour the learned and grave men of either of these opinions. We all (God be praised) do agree in the grounds, and the bitterness of men upon such questions doth but trouble the peace of the Church and gives advantage and entry to the Papists by our division.’7

  James was secure enough in this new setting that he could allow room for another identifiable church party, sympathetic to continental Calvinism and better disposed to English Puritanism, whose leading figures were brothers George and Robert Abbot, and George Carleton. The fact that in time James would appoint George Abbot as Archbishop of Canterbury suggests something of his canny politicking in dealing with differences within the Church of England. After his years of juggling the Kirk and the nobility, he sensed that it was to his advantage not to let one church faction dominate utterly, even if he were personally predisposed to that side. At first the Puritans were cheered by the King’s attitude. James’s initial reaction to organised English Puritanism, in the form of the Millenary Petition, had been noncommittal but gracious – a stark contrast to the extremely hostile reactions from the universities at Oxford and Cambridge, Oxford in particular ensuring that the analogy between English Puritanism and Scottish Presbyterianism was made for the King’s b
enefit. In reality, there was a huge gulf between the Presbyterians in Scotland and the Puritans in England, but it suited those opposed to Puritanism to play on James’s prejudices – and his deeply held and sincere fears. But as James embarked on a series of conferences, both formal and informal, with the English bishops, he began to gravitate towards this unsympathetic understanding of English Puritanism. A summer campaign of Puritan petitions served only to strengthen his growing belief that the English Puritans possessed a suspiciously Presybterianlike love of argument over the tiniest details of ritual and doctrine.

  By October 1603, James was already worried enough to issue ‘a proclamation concerning such as seditiously seek reformation in church matters’, which effectively prohibited religious petitions. Ecclesiastical reform fell under the jurisdiction of the King, it asserted, and he was ‘persuaded’ that both the constitution and doctrine of the Church of England ‘is agreeable to God’s word, and near to the condition of the primitive church’. The proclamation condemned ‘some men’s spirits, whose heat tendeth rather to combustion than reformation’, through their use of ‘public invectives against the state ecclesiastical’, and the gathering of ‘subscriptions of multitudes of vulgar persons to supplications to be exhibited to us’. Instead, James desired ‘an orderly proceeding’ without ‘all unlawful and factious manner of proceeding’; he threatened punishment for offenders, claiming that ‘these reformers under pretended zeal affect novelty, and so confusion in all estates’.8 He instructed Archbishop Whitgift that those ministers who were using ‘new forms not prescribed by authority’ in their celebration of divine service, should be ‘severely repressed’.9

  The proclamation also demonstrated, however, that James was willing to entertain one of the ideas of the Millenary Petition: a conference between Anglicans and Puritans. It appealed to his notion of himself as an intellectual. He had already attempted to show off his scholarship to the English, some of whom were less than impressed. Sir John Harington relates the performance he endured when ordered to come for an intimate audience in James’s closet. After making his way through the Presence Chamber (where he saw ‘the lordly attendants, and bowed my knee to the Prince [Henry]’, he waited nearly an hour in an outer chamber before being led by a special messenger up a passage, ‘and so to a small room, where was good order of paper, ink, and pens, put on a board for the Prince’s [James’s] use’. James finally entered into the closet, and after some small talk about Harington’s family, started to question him ‘much of learning, and showed me his own’. The royal grilling, Harington remarked sardonically, reminded him of his examiner at Cambridge.10 In religious matters, too, James indulged his intellectual curiosity. He became not only an avid attender of the court sermons every Sunday and Tuesday but actively involved himself in the choosing of preachers for court, and texts for their sermons. Eyewitness accounts of James at dinner in England almost always include a preacher or two standing behind his chair while he ate, debating with him ‘concerning some point of controversy in philosophy’.11 John Hacket, describing mealtime with James as ‘a trial of wits’, sardonically cast the scene in terms of another of James’s hobbies: ‘Methought his hunting humour was not off so long as his courtiers, I mean the learned, stood about him at his board. He was ever in chase after some disputable doubts, which he would wind and turn about with the most stabbing objections that ever I heard. And was as pleasant and fellow-like in all those discourses as with his huntsmen in the field.’ As with his hunting companions, his learned interlocutors might expect to benefit from the experience in more material terms. ‘They that in many such genial and convivial conferences were ripe and weighty in their answers were indubiously designed to some place of credit and profit.’12