A History of Britain, Volume 2

by Simon Schama

  But James Stuart was, when all was said and done, his mother’s son, and he was not about to spend the rest of his life as the doormat of Presbyterians. Unlike Mary, though, he would pave his road to sovereignty with arguments rather than adventures. His chosen tactics were more like Elizabeth’s: subtlety, pragmatism and flexibility. From the time of his majority in 1587, James, whose intelligence and taste for learning were already evident, began to restore the authority of the Crown over both the general assembly (an institution created to govern the Kirk while a Catholic queen was on the throne) and the perennially factious nobility. Without any kind of standing army, his appeal was necessarily that of a Solomonic adjudicator, and James knew how to make his authority work through gestures heavy with symbolic meaning. To celebrate his majority, he made sure to provide liberal entertainment for the notoriously feud-prone Scottish nobility at Market Cross in Edinburgh. When the wine had them sufficiently relaxed, James asked them to walk hand-in-hand down the High Street to the royal residence, Holyroodhouse, where parliament sometimes met. They went like lambs, and did so dressed in the more formal costumes that the king had encouraged for parliamentary sessions. He also knew when division, as well as unity, might work in his favour. By making some small concessions to the Kirk, James managed to split his Presbyterian enemies into those who were prepared to work with him and hard-line Calvinists such as Andrew Melville, for whom any royal interference in the Kirk was a presumptuous abomination. Once strengthened by a ‘royal party’ inside the Kirk, he began to make further moves, determining, for example, the timing of general assemblies. By reinventing the episcopacy to look much less grandiose than its English counterpart James even managed, for five years at any rate, to reinsert bishops into the Kirk. In 1591 he felt strong enough to mint a gold piece bearing a Hebrew inscription referring to his Maker, ‘Thee Alone Do I Fear’ – a premature gesture, since the very next year Melville managed to get the Scottish parliament to do away with the bishoprics, and James was forced to consent. There was never a time when James would feel completely relaxed about his personal safety. Although he banned Buchanan’s books, the old flogger continued to haunt his royal pupil, visiting his dreams as late as 1622 to inform James that ‘he would fall into ice and then into fire’ and that ‘he would endure frequent pain and die soon after’. Not only Buchanan but the Ruthvens haunted him. It had been a Ruthven who had pointed a pistol at him in utero; a Ruthven descendant had held him hostage in 1582; and as recently as 1600 another of the family, the Earl of Gowrie, had abducted him, tied him up and threatened his life again. No wonder James was always a little jumpy.

  For those who trade in thumbnail sketches of the British monarchy – blood-and-thunder Henry VIII, the Virgin Gloriana and the like – James I is bound to seem a baffling mixture of characteristics that have no business inhabiting the same personality: the hunt-mad scholar who would pursue Calvinist theologians and the stag with the same energetic determination; the slightly sloshed reveller, noisily demanding in the middle of an interminable masque and in his thick Scots accent to see the dancers, especially his queen ‘Annie’ (Anne of Denmark), who loved to perform in them; the long-winded, blustering master of disputation, battering preachers and parliamentarians over the head with his bibliography. But James’s dominant characteristics (not least his sexual preferences) resist glib classification. Drunk or sober, shallow or deep, gay or straight, there certainly was no other prince who felt so repeatedly compelled to theorize about his sovereignty and to do so on paper. James, of whom it was accurately said ‘he doth wondrously covet learned discourse’, published no fewer than ten treatises dealing with various matters he considered weighty, including the evils of witchcraft and tobacco. Two of them, the Basilikon Doron (the ‘Prince’s Gift’, written in 1598, but published in 1599, for his son Henry, and consisting for the most part, like its model, Charles V’s advice to Philip II, of practical advice on the conduct of kingship) and The True Law of Free Monarchies (published in 1598), appeared in the immediate period before his arrival in England. At least until they attempted to read them (for neither work, while succinct, could be fairly described as a page-turner), his new subjects must have been eager to see whether James’s books provided any clues to the character of their king, because between 13,000 and 16,000 copies were sold in the first few months after his accession.

  Both works have been misunderstood as the theoretical equivalent of a royal command to his subjects to begin practising their genuflections. It is certainly true James made no bones about the fact that his authority was based on appointment by God, to whom alone princes were ultimately and exclusively accountable. ‘For Kings sit in the throne of God and thence all judgement is derived’, as he would notoriously put it. This was the sort of utterance calculated to set parliamentary teeth on edge and persuade champions of the supremacy of common law, such as Sir Edwin Sandys, Nicholas Fuller and Sir Edward Coke, that James had been infected by despotic European attitudes to sovereignty and now needed a crash course of remedial instruction on just how things were in England.

  Coke and those who thought like him believed that the ‘ancient constitution of England’, its origins lost in the remote mists of time (like other fundamental customs such as the age of majority and the size of a jury) but already established by the time of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy, had been embodied in a common law that was prior to, and took precedence over, the person of any individual sovereign. Sovereignty was, and had always been, that of the indivisible king-in-parliament. Brutal conquests, such as that inflicted on England, might have temporarily set this aside, but the ‘ancient constitution’ embedded in the very marrow of Englishness was somehow preserved in custom, waiting its opportunity to assert itself again in, for example, Magna Carta. Going on about ‘memory’ to James (whose own memory was considered elephantine) did not, of course, help make the case, especially to someone who had been brought up in the very different and much more Romanized Scottish law tradition. And in his account of Scottish kingship James had already dealt briskly with the fable of primitive parliaments preceding the institution of monarchy. ‘Parliaments . . . were not installed before them (as many have foolishly imagined) but long after that monarchies were established were they created.’ None of this needs have been a serious issue, though, since in The True Law of Free Monarchies James had also taken pains to concede that the origins of a monarchy had little to do with the way it should govern in a ‘settled’ state, by which he obviously meant contemporary Scotland and England. As far as he was concerned, there was nothing at all contradictory about insisting on his contractual responsibility, first and foremost to God, his only superior, and accepting as a fact of life a ‘mixed’ and balanced monarchy, in which some matters of government were the exclusive prerogative of the king and many others were not. To ignore the ‘fundamental laws’ of a realm was precisely to cross the line between legitimate kingship and tyranny, to violate rather than respect the compact made with God. It was when responsible royal government degenerated into the tyranny of an arbitrary will that the king could be shown to have violated his contract with God as well as with his subjects. Although a ‘king is preferred by God above all other ranks and degrees of men . . . the higher that his seate is above theirs: the greater is his obligation to his maker . . . And the highest benche is the sliddriest to sit upon.’

  It would be misleading then to think of James arriving in England as completely impervious to the balance between king, lords and prelates, and Commons, which was endlessly touted as the peculiar genius of the nation’s polity. But equally there was no mistaking his determination to uphold his ‘regality and supreme prerogative’ against any kind of impertinences, real or imagined, by the Commons. For the moment, though, putting aside self-appointed tribunes like Coke (who was perfectly willing to accept a government appointment himself when the opportunity arose), relatively few of the governing class, much less the common people, were apprehensive that an alien despotism was about to tramp
le the liberties of England underfoot. They accepted the basic truism that order, both political and social, was the indispensable condition of the peace of the realm and that it was the office of the king and his councillors to provide it. They got much more upset about English wealth and offices being handed over on plates of gold to freebooters from Caledonia. James had actually been at pains to preserve the eminent Elizabethans on the Privy Council: the Lord High Admiral Howard of Effingham, hero of the Armada, and in particular the indispensable little hunchback Secretary of State, Robert Cecil, whom the king promoted to the earldom of Salisbury. Although six Scots had been appointed Privy Councillors, only two of them – Sir George Home (shortly to become the Earl of Dunbar) and Lord Kinloss – had any kind of high office. But because the king filled the more personal household staff of the Privy Chamber with Scottish friends and boyhood companions like the Duke of Lennox and the Earl of Mar (on whom he also showered lavish gifts and money), the impression was certainly given that access to the king could be gained only by way of these Scottish courtiers, especially the captain of the palace guard, Sir Thomas Erskine. More than one angry English suitor waiting for an audience with the king complained they had become ‘lousy’ sitting so long in Erskine’s watchful presence. The Venetian ambassador reported in May 1603 that ‘no Englishman, be his rank what it may, can enter the Presence Chamber without being summoned, whereas the Scottish lords have free entree of the privy chamber’. It was an exaggeration, but it was certainly a widely shared impression.

  A Scottophobic backlash was inevitable. The ending of Macbeth (c. 1605–6) falsified Scottish history the better to suggest that Malcolm Canmore had won the throne only with English help. Stage comedies, like Jonson’s Eastward hoe (1605) (for which he did a little time in the Tower with his co-authors George Chapman and John Marston), featured impecunious Scottish nobles freeloading at the expense of the English. In 1612 the sensational trial of the Scottish Lord Sanquhar for commissioning two assassins to shoot the English fencing master who had accidentally put out one of his eyes some years before produced a vitriolic outpouring of Scottophobic doggerel, not at all appeased by the conviction and hanging of Sanquhar as if he were a common felon.

  They beg our Lands, our Goods, our Lives

  They switch our Nobles and lye with their Wives

  They pinch our Gentry and send for our Benchers

  They stab our Sergeants and pistoll our Fencers.

  Leave off proud Scots thus to undo us

  Lest we make you as poor as when you came to us.

  Fights regularly broke out between Scots and English nobles at Croydon racetrack, and in the Inns of Court, where a Scot called Maxwell nearly started a riot by ripping out an Englishman’s earring along with most of his ear. For a time the London Scots stayed close to their little colonies in Holborn and Charing Cross, especially avoiding the back alleys near theatres where they might be pounced on by ‘swaggerers’, who made roughing up Scotsmen their speciality. In more respectable theatres of opinion the hostility was just as fierce. Despite Francis Bacon’s best propaganda, the king’s project for a formal treaty of union ran into a storm of parliamentary protest that exchanging English for ‘British’ nationality would be the end of English law and the ancient constitution; would confuse foreigners when the English were abroad; and would open the country to hordes of impoverished, unwashed and greedy immigrants (‘stinking’ and ‘lousy’ were the usual insults of choice). By 1607 the union treaty had died the death of a thousand cuts, although James, bewildered and angry at the rebuff, continued to style himself ‘King of Great Britain, France and Ireland’ and ordered (at public expense) a new ‘Imperial Diadem and Crown’ of sapphires, diamonds and rubies.

  How did the abortive union look from the other direction? A ban imposed by James on anti-English ballads, poems and pamphlets suggests (not surprisingly) that the affronted Scots gave as good as they got in the abuse department. But wounded feelings aside, Scotland – or rather, Lowland, Protestant Scotland – had little reason to feel disadvantaged by the ‘dual government’ set up by James as long as its religious independence remained unthreatened. In this last, crucial department the king moved, as was his wont, slowly and cannily, waiting until his deputy governors (the earls of Dunbar and Dunfermline) had demonstrated the benefits of cooperation thoroughly enough to large sections of the Scottish nobility. With his base of support secure, he felt strong enough to move directly against the most uncompromising Presbyterians. Bishops were reinstated in 1610, and the fulminating Andrew Melville, incarcerated in the Tower of London since 1607, was finally banished in 1611. In 1618 a general assembly at Perth agreed (with some serious contention) on practices that not long before would have been denounced as Catholic idolatry: kneeling at communion, the celebration of five holy days and the administration of the sacraments.

  James could get away with the ‘Five Articles’ of Perth, which, characteristically, he did not enforce very energetically, because the balance sheet of costs and benefits brought to Scotland by the union of crowns looked, from Edinburgh or Perth or Stirling, fairly positive. Once a ferocious border policing commission (manned by both Scots and English) was in place and had started to catch, convict and hang the gangs of rustlers and brigands who had made the Borders their choice territory, cross-frontier trade took off. Fishermen, cattle-drivers and linen-makers all did well. Duty-free English beer became so popular in Scotland that the council in Edinburgh had to lower the price of the home product to make it competitive. The sections of Scots society, especially in the more densely settled areas of Midlothian and Fife, that had had enough of the rampages of feuding lords – small lairds, town burgesses, lawyers – all had little enough to complain of from a government that managed to be both distant and attentive. As for the great lords, with James handing over land and offices in England, Ireland and Scotland just as fast as he could, they knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  But they were not all of Scotland. For as long as its histories had been written (starting with Tacitus), a profound division had been noticed between the lands south and north of the Forth and Tay: Lowland and Highland. In customs, language, faith and farming – everything that mattered – the two peoples were worlds apart. James himself made another distinction between the mainland Highlanders, who were ‘barbarous for the most part and yet mixed with some show of civility’, and the Hebridean islanders, who were ‘utterly barbarous without any sort or show of civility’. Should the savages not avail themselves of the blessings of godly civilization, it was obvious that they should be uprooted, driven out and, if necessary, killed off. Worst of all were the primitive clan leaders, scarcely better, the king and his officers of state thought, than cattle rustlers and brigands – like the MacGregors of the west, or the Gaelic chieftains of Ireland like Con O’Neill – who continued to mislead their followers into outlawry and plunder. James’s plans for the colonization of the Western Isles, begun before he came to England, involved leasing land to Lowland nobles who were expected to ‘develop’ them for pacification and profit, if necessary deporting populations and replacing them with more pliable immigrants. When those schemes failed to overcome local resistance he turned to the big stick, in 1608 mobilizing a pan-British armada, raised from English troops in Ireland and ordered to do what was necessary in Lewis and Kintyre to teach the obstreperous natives a lesson they would never forget. Most of the draconian brutalities later inflicted on the Highlanders and islanders by William III and the Hanoverians – including the banning of the plaid and the Gaelic language – were all anticipated, at least in theory, by the Scottish James VI.

  To their credit, James’s own Scottish councillors balked at a punitive onslaught on the islands, for they knew it would be ruinously expensive and ineffective, and would create a permanently disaffected population for the Spanish or French to exploit. At the same time, they brought round the Highland clan leaders by inviting them to a meeting on board a ship, ostensibly to hear a ser
mon, and then holding them hostage on the island of Mull until they had seen reason. The result was the Statutes of Icolmkill, by which the solution of ‘indirect empire’, which Britain would use again and again (from southern India to northern Nigeria), was first unveiled. Instead of direct proconsular rule in the manner of a Roman conquest, the local chieftains and magnates were co-opted into a decentralized system of government and awarded status and land in return for being responsible for the conduct and taxation of their own clansmen. Made cooperative, they were organized around allegiances to grandees – the Campbells, Mackenzies and Gordons among others – who undertook to keep their huge territories quiet. Just as would be the case in the tropical empires, the deal came with all kinds of ostensible commitments to moral reformation: the regulation of alcohol, the suppression of feuds and the removal of native children to the metropolitan mainland, where they would be intensively re-educated for their own good and that of their homeland. The laboratory for the British empire turned out to be the Hebrides, and it was (as it would so often be in the future) entirely the enterprise of the Scots.

  Now that the Highlands and islands were, for the time being, self-governing, James’s grand design of settling impoverished but hardy Protestant farmers from the overpopulated Lowlands among the ‘heathen’ Catholics of the mountains had to be rethought. And the solution was staring at everyone right across the North Channel in Ireland. There were already some Scots in northern and eastern Ireland, but after the rebel nobles Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnel, fled to Rome in 1607, their huge estates, forfeit to the Crown, suddenly became available for James and his government to play British emperor.