The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
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CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Strange Pageantries
JAMES’S FIRM IDEAS on the nature of kingship guaranteed that he would soon have another opponent to place alongside the Scottish Kirk, the English Parliament and the Roman Catholic Church. As far as he was concerned, the King was the lawmaker of his country. Law was an expression of a king’s divine right: kings made the law, and kings could alter it at their pleasure. ‘Kings are properly judges,’ he was to pronounce, ‘and judgement properly belongs to them from God, for kings sit in the throne of God and thence all judgement is derived.’ All other judges were simply the King’s deputies, and the King could sit in judgement in any court of the land. Sadly, this world view was not shared by the English Common Law, and it was not long after his accession before James found himself strangely in battle with a legal system that he believed to be his own.
Technical though they may sound, the fights over the law were perhaps the most acrimonious and bloody of James’s encounters with English custom. The first conflict arose over prohibition, the ancient writ whereby Common Law judges exercised substantial influence over the ecclesiastical courts; the serving of the writ of prohibition brought to a halt proceedings in any Church court until the judges were satisfied that the matter being tried did indeed fall within the jurisdiction of the court. This had long been a bone of contention for the Church, and in 1605 the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft, raised the matter with the King. His argument, designed to appeal to James, was that all judicial authority began in the Crown and flowed down in two great streams, temporal jurisdiction to the Common Law courts and spiritual jurisdiction to the Church courts. This model gave the Crown precedence, and meant that if any dispute arose as to jurisdiction, the Crown, in the form of the King, might intervene. But Bancroft had a formidable opponent, the Lord Chief Justice Sir Edward Coke, a remarkable legal theorist and historian, and stalwart champion of the Common Law courts. Coke argued that the writ of prohibition belonged to the Common Law, and could be altered only by Parliament, not by the King. Once again, royal prerogative was pitched against parliamentary privilege.1
In 1607, a Puritan lawyer named Nicholas Fuller raised the matter again, when he sought a writ of prohibition against the Court of High Commission, doing so in such a hostile and vocal manner that the High Commission summoned him before them. James, recognising the importance of the challenge, saw Fuller as a test case, and wrote to Salisbury: ‘I pray you, forget not Fuller’s matter that the ecclesiastical Commission may not be suffered to sink, besides the evil deserts of the villain; for this far I dare prophesy unto you, that whensoever the ecclesiastical dignity together with the King’s government thereof shall be turned in contempt and begin to evanish [sic] in this kingdom, the kings thereof shall not long prosper in their government, and the monarchy shall fall in ruin, which I pray God I may not live to see.’2 The judges at first considered defending Fuller by a writ of prohibition, but, perhaps sensing how much this would antagonise the King, decided to let the High Commission deal with him. James was still unsure of the efficacy of this, saying that if the judges denied it, both they and Fuller should be called before the Privy Council for censure, in his presence.3 The incident made him only the more resolute to prevent the judges from being able to issue prohibitions at will.4
In 1608 and 1609 James called more of his formal conferences to debate the matter, but this time he had no real grasp of the subject; he soon became bored, boredom turned into irritation, and irritation into anger. In his Reports, Sir Edward Coke recalled one conference at which he informed the King that he could not judge cases ‘in his own person’ but they had to be ‘determined and adjudged in some court of justice’. James replied ‘that he thought the Law was founded upon reason, and that he and others had reason, as well as the judges’. ‘True it was,’ Coke answered, ‘that God had endowed his Majesty with excellent science and great endowments of nature; but his Majesty was not learned in the Laws of his Realm of England, and causes which concern the life, or inheritance, or goods, or fortunes, of his subjects; they are not to be decided by natural reason, but by the artificial reason and judgement of Law, which Law is an act that requires long study and experience, before that a man can attain to the cognizance of it.’ The Law, he continued ‘was the golden metewand [measuring rod] and measure to try the causes of the subjects; and which protected his Majesty in safety and peace’. James, he recalled, was ‘greatly offended’ with this answer, pointing out that this would mean that he was ‘under the Law, which was Treason to affirm’. Coke capped the argument by quoting a legal authority: ‘To which I said, that Bracton saith Quod Rex non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo & lege [that the King should not be under man but under God and the law’.5
Another, suspiciously similar, account of a conference in November 1608, casts Coke in a different light. In this version, Coke informed the King that the arguments of the assembled bishops were irrelevant, since only judges could expound the law. The supreme judge was the King, retorted James, and it was for him to judge between rival jurisdictions, although he would defend the Common Law. On the contrary, replied Coke, the Common Law defended the King. This stung James. Coke’s words were those of a traitor, he shouted. The King protected the Law, not the Law the King, for the King was protected by none save God. Even the regular line-up of councillors, churchmen and lawyers were shocked by the ferocity of the King’s anger: ‘His Majesty fell into that high indignation as the like was never known in him, looking and speaking fiercely with bended fist, offering to strike him, which the Lord Coke perceiving fell flat on all fours, humbly beseeching his Majesty to take compassion on him and to pardon him if he through zeal had gone beyond his duty and allegiance.’ Whatever the true nature of the encounter between Coke and the King, James’s passionate opposition did not cease a steady flow of prohibitions challenging the authority of the ecclesiastical courts through 1609, much to his frustration.
The royal prerogative was also tested in an area where James was more vulnerable: that of his finances. The pecuniary miseries of the court in 1590s Scotland were soon recreated in 1600s England, and once again James’s lavish expenditure was singled out for blame. As early as 1605, he had recognised the precariousness of his financial situation. ‘I cannot but be sensible of that needless and unreasonable profusion of expenses whereof ye wrote me in your last,’ he replied to a letter from Salisbury in October. ‘When I consider the extremity of my state my only hap and hope that upholds me is in my good servants that will sweat and labour for my relief … otherwise I could rather have wished with Job never to have been than that the glorious sunshine of my entry should be so soon overcasten with the dark clouds of irreparable misery. I have promised and I will perform it that there shall be no default in me … my apprehension of this strait (howsoever I disguise it outwardly) hath done me more harm already than ye would be glad of.’6
Those who attended the more splendid court functions might well have had reason to doubt the sincerity of James’s promises. Sir John Harington provided a ‘poor account of rich doings’ at the court, when Anna’s brother King Christian visited from Denmark in 1606.7 From the moment Christian was welcomed by James, Henry and a huge retinue at Gravesend on 18 July, until his departure on 1 August, there was ‘no lack of good living: shows, sights and banquetings, from morn to eve’.8 Although one contemporary pamphlet marvelled at the ‘good carriage and peaceful modesty’ of the Danish King, whom one might expect to have taken ‘great delight in drink’, it seems that the pamphleteer protesteth too much.9 Harington wrote, ‘I have been well nigh overwhelmed with carousal [carousing] and sports of all kinds. The sports began each day in such manner and such sort, as well nigh persuaded me of Mahomet’s paradise. We had women, and indeed wine too, of such plenty, as would have astonished each sober beholder. Our feasts were magnificent, and the two royal guests did most lovingly embrace each other at table.’ But there was a down-side to this international cosiness. ‘I think t
he Dane hath strangely wrought on our good English nobles; for those, whom I never could get to taste good liquor, now follow the fashion, and wallow in beastly delights. The ladies abandon their sobriety, and are seen to roll about in intoxication.’
At one feast, the intoxication went too far. Salisbury planned an after-dinner entertainment, which would represent Solomon’s Temple – in a gesture to James, the self-styled Solomon – and the coming of the Queen of Sheba. ‘But alas!’ wrote Harington, ‘as all earthly things do fail to poor mortals in enjoyment, so did prove our presentment hereof.’ He detailed the fiasco in loving detail. ‘The lady who did play the Queen [of Sheba]’s part, did carry most precious gifts to both their majesties, but, forgetting the steps arising to the canopy, overset her caskets into his Danish majesty’s lap, and fell at his feet, though I rather think it was in his face. Much was the hurry and confusion; cloths and napkins were at hand, to make all clean. His Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba; but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and laid on a bed of state, which was not a little defiled with the presents of the Queen which had been bestowed on his garments; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverage, cakes, spices, and other good matters. The entertainment and show went forward, and most of the presenters went backward, or fell down; wine did so occupy their upper chambers.’ These were indeed ‘strange pageantries’. But despite his jocular tone, Harington’s reaction was one of disgust, and a reinvigorated nostalgia for the days of the Virgin Queen. ‘I ne’er did see such lack of good order, discretion, and sobriety, as I have now done.’ In Harington’s view, ‘the gunpowder fright is got out of all our heads, and we are going on, hereabouts, as if the devil was contriving every man should blow up himself, by wild riot, excess, and devastation of time and temperance … I wish I was at home.’10
Although James’s first Lord Treasurer, Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, contrived to raise regular Crown revenues (not deriving from parliamentary subsidy) from £247,000 in 1603 to £366,000 five years later, he was forced to work against the King’s increasingly profligate expenditure. Throughout his reign, James displayed or feigned a remarkable ignorance about finance. Even if money were successfully raised to clear his debts, he would spend it – but not on the debts. When the question of James’s expenditure was raised by his Council, he would claim that he was completely helpless in the matter. If only he could be free of ‘this eating canker of want’, then he would be as happy ‘as any king or monarch that ever was since the birth of Christ’. Inverting his well-worn metaphor of king as physician, he cast himself as ‘a poor patient’ and his councillors as physicians: he promised to keep ‘as strait a diet as ye can in honour and reason prescribe unto me’ and to use ‘such remedies and antidotes as ye are apply to my disease’ – an analogy that would have amused or alarmed anyone who knew of James’s customary contempt for the advice of physicians.11
In April 1608, the Earl of Dorset dropped dead at the Council table, and was replaced as Lord Treasurer by Salisbury, adding another role to his already bulging portfolio of government posts. By now, James’s outgoings stood at £544,000, an annual deficit of £178,000; often turning to creditors for advances, his personal debts were £597,337.12 Knowing James as he did, Salisbury recognised that royal expenditure was unlikely to drop, so he should focus on increasing incoming revenue. By selling off £426,151 of Crown lands, he managed to pay off most of James’s immediate debts. But in the longer term, Salisbury turned to a more controversial source: impositions. Impositions were customs duties levied by the Crown, over and above the normal schedule of rates authorised by Parliament. Unsurprisingly, they were hugely unpopular with merchants who in 1606 had brought a test case when one John Bate, a merchant trading in currants from the Levant, refused to pay the impositions on his goods. The case went to the Court of the Exchequer which ruled that, since foreign commerce was regulated by prerogative, and impositions were part of that regulation of foreign commerce, the King could indeed levy impositions without recourse to Parliament. Exploiting that ruling, Salisbury speedily placed impositions on overseas trading that he calculated would bring in some £60,000 per annum. These efforts notwithstanding, by 1610 the annual deficit had reached £130,000 per annum, and James’s expenditure for the year was projected at some £600,000. There was no alternative but to recall Parliament, and to ask them to authorise a subsidy, a one-off tax on the propertied classes.13 But by now, this was a dangerous road to take. The Commons were already chafing about the King’s insistence on prerogative, his attack on the Common Law, and the new impositions.
The fourth session of James’s first Parliament opened on 9 February 1610 and, six days later, Salisbury first presented the King’s case, which he elaborated over the course of the following weeks. The Parliament had been called for two reasons – first, to authorise the creation of Prince Henry as Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, and second, ‘to demand some supply of treasure’. The first, a popular move, was clearly a sweetener for the second. A quick fix was not enough. Instead of a simple subsidy, the Crown needed a consistent source of revenue. Salisbury acknowledged that the need for a subsidy called Parliament into existence, and this subsidy provided Parliament with the chance to importune for grievances: Salisbury could hardly expect the Commons to give up their only hold on the King. Instead, he proposed what became known as ‘the Great Contract’. The Commons would grant a permanent annual revenue of £200,000 ‘for the maintenance of the King, the Queen, the Prince, the Duke [of York, Charles], and Lady Elizabeth’ in return for which James would abandon certain of his more controversial rights, including wardship and purveyance; he would exempt English shires from jurisdiction of the Council of Wales; and he would protect those who purchased crown lands against any losses brought by technical flaws in their titles – all matters of pressing concern to the Lower House.14
On 21 March 1610, James addressed Lords and Commons in a two-hour speech in which, he said, he made them a present ‘a fair and a crystal mirror’ through which ‘you may see the heart of your King’. He started with a further iteration of his familiar philosophy of monarchy: that ‘kings are justly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth’. ‘The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth,’ he pronounced, ‘for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.’ After all, ‘in the Scriptures kings are called gods, and so their powers after a certain relation compared to the divine power. Kings are also compared to fathers of families, for the king is truly parens patriae, the politic father of his people. And lastly, kings are compared to the head of this microcosm of the body of man.’
The analogy was quite proper, James continued, warming to his theme. Kings were justly called gods because they exercised a ‘resemblance of divine power upon earth’. Just as God had certain powers, so did kings: ‘they make and unmake their subjects; they have the power of raising, and casting down; of life, and of death, judges over all their subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only. They have power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the chess – a pawn to take a bishop or a knight – and cry up or down any of their subjects, as they do their money. And to the king is due both the affection of the soul and the service of the body of his subjects.’ However, the King had a duty to use this power in the right way, in the way ‘ordained by God, ad aedificationem, non ad destructionem [for constructive, not destructive ends]’ just as it would be ‘a foolish father that would disinherit or destroy his children without a cause, or leave off the careful education of them’ or ‘an idle head that would in place of physic so poison or phlebotomise the body as might breed a dangerous distemper or destruction thereof’, a return to his persona of physician to the body politic.
Moving to the question of Common Law, James outlined its flaws in three areas that
needed to be redressed: the language in which it was expressed (medieval ‘Law French’); its reliance on reports rather than grounds or maxims, when reports were often no more than opinions of the judge or reporter; and its inclusion of contradictory laws, precedents and reports. These, he said, he wanted remedied by ‘some golden law or act of Parliament’. He knew that they would want to hear his opinion concerning prohibitions: ‘I am not ignorant that I have been thought to be an enemy to all prohibitions, and an utter stayer to them.’ To the contrary, he did not oppose prohibitions in general, but when he saw courts not observe their own limits, but ‘the swelling and overflowing of prohibitions in a far greater abundance than ever before, every court striving to bring in most moulture [toll money paid to a mill owner] to their own mill, by multitudes of causes’, then he wanted to restrict each court to its own bounds. This need for restraint made him think of the Commons – and to deliver them a lecture on the manner in which grievances should be selected, pruned and presented, rather than ‘all thrust up in a sack together, rather like pasquils, than any lawful complaints’.
Finally, he admitted that he would not have called Parliament without ‘great cause’. To see how great his wants were, they just had to see what he had bestowed so liberally amongst them. ‘It may be thought,’ he continued, ‘I have given much amongst Scottish men. Indeed if I had not been liberal in rewarding some of my old servants of that nation, ye could never have had reason to expect my thankfulness towards any of you that are more lately become my subjects, if I had been ingrate to the old. And yet ye will find, that I have dealt twice as much amongst Englishmen as I have done to Scottish men.’ James put his case for a subsidy. His expenses since coming to the throne had been massive, but ‘that Christmas and open tide’, when he had to extend his prodigality, ‘is ended’. Moreover, unlike other ‘barren’ princes, he had provided the realm with ‘a fruitful progency and the creation of this gentleman’, pointing to Henry, standing close by him. He asked the Commons to follow his advice: ‘the greatest neglect of my words that can be is to let it lie dead and not follow my advice.’15