The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain
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As the Commons began their usual parade of grievances, they came to impositions. This struck a nerve with James. Surely to debate impositions was de facto to question the King’s prerogative to levy them? He could not let this pass in silence, and on 21 May he came to the Lower House to put his case again. As one MP wrote, James ‘put us in mind of the long time we had spent in matters impertinent (being about 14 weeks)’, and then launched into ‘a long speech’ in which he informed members that, while they might discuss possible abuses in the collection of impositions, he would not tolerate general discussion of his power to exact them in the first place. But James clearly knew this was a sticking point, because he also offered a compromise. If they ceased to challenge any existing impositions, he would undertake not to levy any more without first obtaining the consent of Parliament. However, the Commons would have to take his word on this, because he refused to ‘bind himself or his posterity’.16
James could scarcely have devised a more tactless speech. According to John Chamberlain it ‘bred generally much discontent to see our monarchical power and royal prerogative strained so high and made so transcendent every way’, provoking ‘many bold passages’ in the Commons, ‘and amongst the rest a wish that this speech might never come to print’.17 (True to form, James ensured it did, placing it proudly in his 1617 Workes.) Members protested that they were not calling into question the King’s prerogative, merely needing to know its limitations; at the same time they asserted their privilege of free debate, and asked permission to continue their debate on impositions. Realising that he had stepped over some invisible line of parliamentary tolerance, James wisely backtracked, and allowed the Commons to debate impositions as they pleased. A four-day discussion followed in which the House came to the conclusion that, without the consent of Parliament, impositions must be illegal.
On 17 July Salisbury brought the Commons and the King to a tentative agreement, although there was some haggling over the exact sum: Parliament offered £180,000 and the King asked for £220,000, with a compromise of £200,000 agreed. James was oddly upbeat about the arrangement, even managing a lame joke: the Commons’ first offer of ‘nine score thousand pounds’ he hadn’t liked, he said, because nine was the number of the muses or the poets, and they were always beggars. Eleven would be good because that was the number of Apostles when Judas was away. He’d be happy enough with ten score, since there were ten commandments.18 Once this was settled Parliament moved on to present their grievances in a document so long that James allegedly quipped he could use it as a tapestry: on reading it, he made a few odd concessions, but on those issues he considered to be matters of personal principle – those of prerogative and the Church – he was not able to waver. This was the state of affairs when Parliament was prorogued on 23 July.19
When the Parliament reconvened for its fifth session on 16 October, relations between King and Commons quickly disintegrated. Each put pressure on the terms of Salisbury’s ‘Great Contract’, and it crumbled away, leaving the Lord Treasurer still pushing for finance, without any bargaining chips and without the King, who had disappeared again to Royston. Even when Salisbury did manage to revive part of the Contract negotiations, James would not bite. News of the Commons’ actions upset him and increased his intransigence. Sir Thomas Lake wrote to the Lord Treasurer to let him know that ‘His Highness wisheth your lordship to call to mind that he hath now had patience with this assembly these seven years, and from them received more disgraces, censures and ignominies than ever prince did endure. He followeth your lordship’s advices in having patience, hoping for better issue. He cannot have asinine patience, he is not made of that mettle that is ever to be held in suspense and to receive nothing but stripes, neither doth he conceive that your lordships are so insensible of those indignities that you can advise any longer endurance.’20 James met with representatives on 31 October at Whitehall, but to little effect, and the Parliament limped on through November. He ignored Salisbury’s pleas for him to come to London to consult on parliamentary matters late in the month. For James, the travel and the inevitably difficult meeting with his Council held no allure. As far as he was concerned, the only matters to be decided concerned how and when to dissolve the Parliament, and how to punish that ‘lewd fellow’ who in a speech had compared him to King Joram, the evil King of the Jews. ‘Ye see,’ he wrote to his Lord Treasurer, ‘there is no more trust to be laid upon this rotten reed of Egypt.’21 James suggested that the subsidy question should be put to the vote, and the Commons threatened with dissolution; when this was averted, on 29 November James ordered Parliament to be adjourned until 6 December. On that day the Lord Chancellor informed the members that, since Christmas was approaching, the King’s pleasure was that they should ‘go to their houses and keep hospitality … and not lie in London or Westminster’.22 The following day, James stormed to his Privy Council that ‘we are sure no house save the house of Hell could have found so many [complaints] as they have already done’.23 While the members were still holidaying in the country, James dissolved Parliament on 31 December 1610.
Salisbury felt completely undermined by his sovereign, and told him so. ‘You will please so to dispose of me or suffer me to be treated as you shall think may best agree with your service; for when I resolved to serve your Majesty as I have done (in a time of want, of practice, and in a place of envy) I searched my heart and found it well resolved to suffer for such a master all the incidents to such a condition.’24 James pretended to be surprised and wounded. ‘My little beagle,’ he wrote as familiarly as ever, ‘I wonder what should make you to conceit so the alteration or diminishing of my favour towards you … I am sure I never gave you any such occasion, and all that know me do know that I never use to change my affection from any man except the cause be printed on his forehead. It is true that I have found that by the perturbations of your mind, ye have broken forth in more passionate and strange discourses these two last sessions of Parliament than ever ye were wont to do; wherein for pity of your great burden I forbore to admonish you … But ye may be sure if ever I had found any ground of jealousy of your faith and honesty, I would never have concealed it from you.’ Still, James could not resist a further dig at the Treasurer: ‘Your greatest error hath been that ye ever expected to draw honey out of gall, being a little blinded with the self-love of your own counsel in holding together of this parliament, whereof all men were despaired (as I have oft told you) but yourself alone.’25 Salisbury’s reply, although larded with the requisite compliments, was unusually direct: ‘I am not a little grieved at my hard fortune when I look back at that rock whereupon I ran, if your Majesty’s mislike of my passion and indiscreet freedom to so great a King had wrought also upon your Majesty any such alteration as might have kept you from observing likewise how far I was, notwithstanding my errors, from failing in the least duties which I owe your Majesty.’26
Something vital had been lost between James and Salisbury: amongst his senior councillors, the King now turned to Suffolk, Northampton, Worcester or Shrewsbury for advice. As for the little beagle, the 1610 Parliament left him broken. ‘I have seen this Parliament to an end,’ he wrote to Sir Thomas Lake, ‘whereof the many vexations have so overtaken one another as I know not to what to resemble them so well as to the plagues of Job.’27 The plagues led to a further decline in the Lord Treasurer’s health, and serious illnesses (‘a continual ague, or, as some will have it, a double tertain, with a great pain in his head and much sweating’) afflicted him during the winter of 1611–12. Despite the cooling in their political relations, James visited him frequently in February of 1612 (Anna was said to visit every other day) and was concerned enough to give personal instructions to Salisbury’s physicians, and to command ‘all men for four days to forbear to speak to his Lordship upon any business’.28 By March, he seemed to have rallied slightly, but in the following month Salisbury gave up his attempts to govern. He died at Marlborough on 24 May 1612, returning from taking the supposedly restorative water
s at Bath. Public reaction was remarkably vicious, with a plethora of libels and verses simultaneously ridiculing the man and celebrating his death. Many played on his small stature and hunched back: ‘Here lies great Salisbury though little of stature, | A monster of mischief, ambitious of nature’; ‘At Hatfield near Hertford, there is a coffin, | A heart-griping harpy, of shape like a dolphin.’29 Northampton spoke of the demise of ‘the little man for which so many rejoice and so few do as much as seem to be sorry’.30 John Chamberlain concurred: ‘I never knew so great a man so soon and so generally censured.’31
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While James’s reputation was increasingly tarnished, his son and heir was coming into his own. On Twelfth Night 1610, an entertainment known as the ‘Barriers’ effectively marked the start of his public career. This spectacle, staged in the Whitehall Banqueting House by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, drew on Arthurian themes and lauded England’s warlike kings, culminating in the figure of Chivalry being stirred from sleep in her cave to hail Prince Henry. This was followed by the ‘barriers’ proper, fifty-six ‘challenges’ with various ‘shows and devices’ that lasted until dawn. Henry, it was recorded, rose to the occasion with panache, performing ‘to the great wonder of the beholders’, and parrying thirty pushes of the pike, and 360 sword strokes, ‘which is scarce credible in one so young in years, enough to assure the world, that Great Britain’s brave Henry aspired to immortality’.32
On 4 June 1610, his status was enhanced as he was created Earl of Chester and Prince of Wales, in great state. From that point on, he held court at St James’s Palace – a court that often appeared more popular than the King’s own, much to James’s chagrin: ‘Will he bury me alive?,’ he was reported to have exclaimed. At St James’s, Henry built up significant collections of art, antiquities and books, as well as a winter house and a deer park. A gentleman travelling with the Landgrave of Hesse marvelled at Henry’s collection of ostriches, American chickens, pheasants, rabbits, turtle doves, ‘a large eagle-owl’ (Buhu), parrots, and ‘a rare Indian bird called an emu that can devour burning coals’.33 Henry’s intellectual and scientific interests were wide ranging: he asked Ottaviano Lotti, the Duke of Tuscany’s agent in London, to obtain for him the plans for Michelangelo’s staircase in the Laurenziana Library, Galileo’s latest book, a new magnet from Elba, and the recipe for cement that joined terracotta piping so that it could carry water.34 Henry was also an avid reader of news of foreign affairs. Even as early as 1607, Salisbury had encouraged this by forwarding ambassadorial despatches to him: ‘I have sent to you with the last dispatch from Ireland, the reading whereof will every day prove more proper to the Prince of Bretany than Aristotle or Cicero.’35
To his father, Henry was a valuable bargaining chip in the European royal marriage game. Throughout the years when he was absorbed in challenging the Roman Church in print, James was in regular negotiations with Catholic princes to further the fortunes of his own family. As the eldest, Henry was the first of James’s three surviving children to go on the market. In 1604, when the Constable of Castile visited the English court, Queen Anna was vocal in her support for a proposal that he should marry the Infanta Anne, eldest daughter of Philip III of Spain and heiress to the Spanish throne; negotiations were quickly scuppered when Philip insisted on a precondition that Henry be sent to Spain to be educated as a Roman Catholic, and attempts to revive the proposal foundered in 1605 and again in 1607. For Elizabeth, James had looked initially to France, but the assassination of Henri IV in 1610 spelled the end of his hopes there. James turned his attention fleetingly to other European princes in Germany and Sweden – even the widowed King of Spain. In April 1611, a suggestion came that Elizabeth should marry the Prince of Piedmont, the eldest son of the Duke of Savoy, on the condition that Henry marry the Duke’s eldest daughter, but James would not bite. Two more possible wives for Henry were paraded – a Savoyard princess, and the eldest daughter of the Regent of France – but Henry remained noncommittal.
The Prince of Wales had his own ideas about who he and his sister should marry. From the age of ten, Henry had been in correspondence with his first cousin Frederic Ulric, son of the Duke of Brunswick; in the summer of 1611 he petitioned his father to allow Frederic Ulric to marry Elizabeth. James refused this, as he did a simultaneous bid from Otto, Landgrave of Hesse, who visited England for the purpose. Finally, in the summer of 1611 James entered negotiations with the family of Frederick V, Count Palatine of the Rhine, who ruled from Heidelberg. It seemed a good match: the Count Palatine was the most senior secular prince in Germany, and one of four entitled to elect the Holy Roman Emperor; in time Frederick would become the titular head of a Protestant union in the area. His mother was Louisa Juliana, the daughter of the Low Countries hero William of Orange, ‘the Taciturn’. Henry liked the idea, it was rumoured, since he harboured secret plans to accompany his sister to Germany, and there to find a wife for himself.
In May 1612, a deputation from the Palatinate came to London to agree the contract for the marriage between their Elector and Princess Elizabeth. James offered a dowry of £40,000 and an allowance; Frederick would give his bride £1,500 per annum, and provide for her retinue of thirty-six men and thirteen women. If she were widowed, Elizabeth would receive an income of £10,000 and be able to live where she chose. The marriage of the couple’s children would be subject to the advice and consent of the King of Great Britain. The only sticking point in the negotiations was Queen Anna, who made no attempt to hide her disdain for the match, which she thought to be beneath her daughter’s dignity. She teased Elizabeth that she would be known as ‘Goody [goodwife] Palsgrave’.36
Frederick arrived in England on Friday 16 October. Two days later he was received at the Banqueting House in Whitehall where he was embraced by James, kissed the Queen’s hand, and saluted Henry. Elizabeth, demurely, had not looked ‘with so much as a corner of an eye towards him’. As the Elector made to kiss the hem of her gown, she made a deep curtsey, and ‘with her hand staying him from that humblest reverence, gave him at his rising a fair advantage (which he took) of kissing her’.37 James pronounced himself pleased with the Elector’s ‘good and discreet carriage’, and even Anna, who was still ‘not willing to the match’, began to come round to the idea. Over the next few weeks, Frederick avoided the usual young men’s pastimes of hunting, hawking and tennis, and spent much of his time in Elizabeth’s Whitehall apartments, seeming to ‘take delight in nothing but her company and conversation’.38
On Thursday 29 October, Prince Henry was noticeably absent from a banquet at London’s Guildhall in honour of the Palsgrave, and two days later a scheduled play was cancelled; it was said he was suffering from a fever. This was not surprising. From the beginning of 1612, Prince Henry had been noted to be pale. He attempted to deal with this by forcing his body to the limit, riding hard, playing tennis ‘for the space of three or four hours’ in his shirt ‘as though his body had been of brass’, and swimming in the Thames at Richmond; he would ‘also delight many times to walk late at night by the river’s side in moonlight to hear the trumpets sound an echo, which many suspected, because the dew then falling did him small good’. By the autumn, keeping to his gruelling routine, Henry was visibly weaker with ‘dead, sunk eyes’, and had started to suffer from a ‘continual headache, laziness and indisposition increasing (which notwithstanding … he strove mightily to conceal), whereas oft before, he used to rise early to the morning to walk the fields, he did lie abed almost every morning until nine of the clock, complaining of his laziness, and many mornings before his rising, ask the grooms of his Bedchamber, “How do I look this morning?” … which they, fearing no danger, would put off with one jest or another’.39
Henry’s condition quickly worsened at the end of October. He was afflicted by ‘a great looseness, his belly opening twenty-five times’; physicians attempted to heal him, first with the usual bleedings, purgatives and enemas, before, in desperation, turning to pearl, the bone of a stag’s heart, un
icorn’s horn, and a poultice of ‘warm cocks and pigeons newly killed’. The gravity of the situation was publicly guessed at when neither the King nor the Queen attended Bishop Andrewes’ court sermon on 5 November, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, and by the prayers the Bishop offered up for the Prince. In time, Henry’s sight faded and he could not endure the candlelight in his chamber. It was claimed that his last words before descending into delirium were for Elizabeth: ‘Where is my dear sister?’ Elizabeth had tried to visit him, but was not allowed into the chamber since it was feared the Prince’s illness was contagious.40 Henry died at around eight in the evening of 6 November 1612.41 As with virtually every royal death of the period – and especially the unexpected, early deaths – rumours of foul play swirled. John Chamberlain wrote that it was ‘verily thought that the disease was no other than the ordinary ague that had reigned and raged all over England since the latter end of summer’, and that Henry had been killed by bad medical practice – he pointed the finger at James’s own physician, Mayerne.42 Latter-day experts have suggested enteric fever, typhoid fever or porphyria,43 but at the time poison was the most popular explanation – and more than one commentator pointed the finger directly at James, jealous of his son’s own popularity. Francis Osborne claimed that ‘King James was by fear led into this extreme: finding his son Henry not only averse to any popish match, but saluted by the Puritans as one prefigured in the Apocalypse for Rome’s destruction’. Osborne was informed by Primrose, Henry’s ‘foster-brother’ that James ‘did dread’ his son to the point that ‘he would not deny anything he plainly desired’. He tells of how the King’s jester Archy once taunted James that he ‘did look upon Henry rather as a terror than a comfort to the King’. Although James upbraided Archy for his insolence, those present did not fail to notice that the jester’s words had reduced the King to tears.44