by Will Durant
He was so unfriendly to water that he resented having to use it for washing. He drank to excess and allowed some court festivities to end in a general and bisexual intoxication. Extravagance in dress and entertainment prevailed at his court even beyond Elizabethan precedent. Masques had been favored by Elizabeth; but now, when Ben Jonson wrote the lines and Inigo Jones designed the costumes and scenery, and the roles were played by gorgeous lords and ladies swathed in the revenues of the kingdom, the fabulous, fantastic art reached its apogee. The court became gayer than ever, and more corrupt. “I do think,” says a lady in one of Jonson’s plays, “if nobody should love me but my poor husband, I should e’en hang myself.”15 Courtiers accepted substantial “gifts” to use their influence in getting charters, patents, monopolies, or offices for applicants; Baron Montagu paid £20,000 for appointment as Lord Treasurer;16 one tender soul, we are told on not the best authority, grew sick and died when he learned how much his friends had paid to have him made recorder.17
James took all such matters in his stride, and did not trouble himself too laboriously with government. He left administration to a Privy Council of six Englishmen and six Scots, headed by Robert Cecil, whom he made Earl of Salisbury in 1605. Cecil had every advantage of heredity except health. He was crippled with a humped back and made a lamentable appearance to the world; but he had all his father’s acumen in the selection and ordering of men, and a silent tenacity and crafty courtesy that outwitted domestic rivals and foreign courts. When “my little beagle” died (1612), James fell under the sway of handsome young Robert Carr, made him Earl of Somerset, and allowed him to supersede, in policy and administration, such older and far more accomplished men as Francis Bacon and Edward Coke.
Coke was the embodiment and the watchdog of the law. He rose to fame by his tenacious prosecution of Essex in 1600, Raleigh in 1603, the Gunpowder Plotters in 1605. In 1610 he issued a historic opinion:
It appears in our books that in many cases the common law will control [override] acts of Parliament, and sometimes adjudge them to be utterly void. For when an act of Parliament is against common right and reason … or impossible to be performed, the common law will control it and adjudge such an act to be void.18
Parliament may not have relished this, but James made Coke chief justice of the King’s Bench (1613), and a member of the Privy Council. From being the King’s man he became the King’s gadfly, condemning inquisitions into private opinions, upholding parliamentary freedom of speech, and puncturing the royal absolutism with sharp reminders that kings are the servants of the law. In 1616 Bacon, his rival, brought charges of malfeasance against him. Coke was dismissed, but he was returned to Parliament; continuing to lead the resistance to the King, he was sent to the Tower (1621), but was soon released. He died impenitent (1634), obstinately faithful to the letter and rigor of the law, and leaving behind him four volumes of Institutes that still stand as a pillar and monument of English jurisprudence.I
Meanwhile James had been carrying on with Parliament the debate that in his son’s reign would eventuate in civil war and regicide. He did not merely assume all the powers that Henry VIII and Elizabeth had wielded over their cowed or grumbling legislators; he formulated his claims as divine imperatives. To the Parliament of 1609 he announced:
The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth. For kings are not only God’s lieutenants on earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God Himself are called gods…. Kings are justly called gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power on earth; for if you will consider the attributes of God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king. God hath power to create or destroy, make or unmake at His pleasure, to give life or send death, to judge all and be judged nor accountable to none … And the like power have kings; they make and unmake their subjects, they have power of raising and casting down, of life and death; judges over all their subjects and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only. They have power to … make of their subjects like men at the chess—a pawn to take a bishop or a knight—and to cry up or down any of their subjects, as they do their money.20
This was quite a step backward, for medieval political theory had regularly made the king a delegate of the sovereign people; only the popes had professed to be the viceroys of God. To put the best philosophical front on this claim we must assume that the popes, as the final heads of authority in the Middle Ages, had believed the individualistic impulses of men to be so powerful that social order could be maintained only by inculcating in the people a traditional reverence for ecclesiastical authority, and for the popes as the voice and vicars of God. The weakening or destruction of papal authority by the Reformation had left the political powers primarily or ultimately responsible for social order; and they too judged that a purely human authority would be too challengeable to restrain effectively, or economically, the antisocial proclivities of men. Hence the doctrine of the divine right of kings grew side by side with the development of nationalism and the reduction of papal power. The Lutheran princes of Germany, having assumed the spiritual powers of the old Church in their realms, felt justified in transferring to themselves the divine aura which almost all rulers before 1789 considered indispensable to moral authority and social peace. James made the mistake of expressing this assumption too clearly, and in the most extreme form.
Parliament might have yielded (with private smiles) some theoretical acceptance of this royal absolutism if, as in Elizabeth’s heyday, its members had been great landowners largely indebted to the Tudors for their title deeds. But the House of Commons now included among its 467 members many representatives of the rising mercantile classes—who could not stomach a limitless royal power over their money—and many Puritans who repudiated the claim of the King to rule their religion. The House defined its rights in bold disregard of James’s divinity. It declared itself the sole judge in contested elections to its membership. It demanded freedom of speech and security from arrest during its sessions; without these, it argued, Parliament would be meaningless. It proposed to legislate on matters religious, and denied the authority of the king to decide such issues without parliamentary consent; the Anglican bishops, however, claimed for their Convocation the right to rule in ecclesiastical affairs, subject only to the approval of the king. The Speaker of the Commons informed James that the king could not institute any law, but could only ratify or reject the laws that Parliament had passed. “Our privileges and liberties,” declared the Commons (June 1604), “are our rights and due inheritance, no less than our very lands and goods … They cannot be withheld from us … but with apparent wrong to the whole state of the realm.”21
So the lines were drawn for that historic struggle between the “prerogative” of the king and the “privilege” of Parliament—which, after a hundred victories and defeats, would create the democracy of England.
III. THE GUNPOWDER PLOT: 1605
Above the economic and political strife, but deeply rooted in it, the religious warfare raged. Half the pamphlets that bruised the air were blasts of Puritans against Anglican bishops and ritual, of Anglicans against Puritan rigor and intransigence, or of both against Catholic plots to restore England to papal obedience. James underrated the intensity of these hatreds. He dreamed of an entente demi-cordiale between Puritans and Anglicans, and for that purpose called their leaders to a conference at Hampton Court (January 14, 1604). He presided like another Constantine, and astonished both parties by his theological learning and his debating skill, but he insisted on “one doctrine and one discipline, one religion in substance and ceremony,”22 and declared episcopacy indispensable. The Bishop of London thought the King divinely inspired, “the like of whom had not been seen since the time of Christ”;23 but the Puritans complained that James had acted like a partisan rather than a judge; and nothing came of the conference except the unexpectedly historic decision to make a new translation of the Bible. The Convocation of 1604 issued canons requiring conformity
of all clergymen to Anglican worship; those refusing to comply were dismissed, and several were imprisoned; many resigned; some migrated to Holland or America.
James disgraced himself by having two Unitarians burned for doubting the divinity of Christ despite the proofs which he offered them (1612), but he distinguished himself by never thereafter allowing an execution for religious dissent; these were the last men to die for heresy in England. Slowly, as secular rule improved, the idea that religious toleration was compatible with public morals and national unity was making headway against the almost universal conviction that social order required a faith and a Church which were unchallengeable. In 1614 Leonard Busher’s Religious Peace argued that religious persecution intensified dissent, compelled hypocrisy, and injured trade; and he reminded James that “Jews, Christians, and Turks are tolerated in Constantinople and yet are peaceable.”24 However, Busher thought that persons whose religion was “tainted with treason”—probably meaning such Catholics as put the pope above the king—should be forbidden to hold assemblies or to live within ten miles of London.
For the most part James was a tolerant dogmatist. He offended the Puritans by permitting—encouraging—Sunday sports, provided one had first attended Anglican services. He was inclined to relax the laws against Catholics. Over the heads of Robert Cecil and the Council he suspended the recusancy laws; he allowed priests to enter the country and say Mass in private homes. He dreamed, in his loose and philosophic way, of reconciling Catholic and Protestant Christendom.25 But when Catholics multiplied in this sunshine and the Puritans denounced his lenience, he allowed the Elizabethan anti-Catholic laws to be renewed, extended, and enforced (1604). To send anyone abroad to a Catholic college or seminary was made punishable by a fine of one hundred pounds. All Catholic missionaries were banished, all Catholic teaching prohibited. Persons neglecting Anglican services were fined twenty pounds per month; any default in paying such fines involved forfeiture of property, real and personal; all the cattle on the delinquent’s lands, all his furniture and wearing apparel, were to be seized for the Crown.26
Some half-crazed Catholics thought there was now no remedy but assassination. Robert Catesby had seen his father suffer imprisonment for recusancy under Elizabeth; he had joined in Essex’ rebellion against the Queen; it was he who now conceived the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Westminster Palace while the King, the royal family, the Lords, and the Commons were assembled there for the opening of Parliament. He brought into the conspiracy Thomas Winter, Thomas Percy, John Wright, and Guy Fawkes. The five men swore one another to secrecy and sealed their oaths by taking the Sacrament from a Jesuit missionary, John Gerard. They engaged a house adjacent to the palace; sixteen hours a day they labored to dig a tunnel from one cellar to the other; they succeeded and placed thirty casks of gunpowder directly under the meeting chamber of the House of Lords. Repeated postponements of Parliament kept the project in precarious abeyance; through a year and a half the conspirators had to feed the fires of their wrath. At times they doubted the morality of an enterprise in which many innocent persons would perish with those whom the Catholics thought mercilessly guilty. To reassure them, Catesby asked Henry Garnett, provincial of the Jesuits in England, whether in war it was permissible to share in actions that would bring death to innocent noncombatants; Garnett answered that divines of all faiths agreed in the affirmative, but warned Catesby that any plot against the lives of governmental officials would only bring greater suffering to English Catholics. The provincial conveyed his suspicions to the Pope and the general of the Jesuits; they bade him keep aloof from all political intrigues and discourage all attempts against the state.27 To another Jesuit, Oswald Greenway, Catesby in confession revealed the plot, which now included measures for a general rising of Catholics in England. Greenway reported the plot to Garnett. The two Jesuits hesitated between betraying the conspirators to the government and remaining silent; they chose to keep silent, but to do all in their power to dissuade the conspirators.
Catesby sought to quiet the qualms of his associates by arranging that on the morning of the appointed day friendly members of Parliament should receive urgent messages to call them away from Westminster. A minor figure in the plot warned his friend Lord Monteagle several days before the session was to begin. Mounteagle laid the matter before Cecil, who told the King. Their agents entered the cellars, found Fawkes there and the explosives in due place. Fawkes was arrested (November 4, 1605); he confessed his intentions to blow up Parliament the next day, but, despite extreme torture, refused to name his accomplices. These, however, revealed themselves by taking up arms and attempting flight. They were pursued and gave battle; Catesby, Percy, and Wright were mortally wounded, and several subalterns were hunted and secured. When the prisoners were tried they freely acknowledged the conspiracy, but no threat or torment could induce them to implicate the Jesuit priests. Fawkes and three others were drawn on hurdles from the Tower to Parliament House and were there executed (January 27, 1606). England still celebrates November 5 as Guy Fawkes Day, with bonfires and fireworks and the carrying of “guys,” or effigies, through the streets.
Gerard and Greenway escaped to the Continent, but Garnett was captured, and with him another Jesuit, Oldcorne. In the Tower these two found means of what they supposed to be secret conversation, but spies reported their words. Separately accused of these conferences, Garnett denied them, Oldcorne admitted them; Garnett confessed that he had lied. Breaking down, he conceded that he had had knowledge of the plot; but as this had come to him from Greenway, and Greenway had received it under the seal of confession, he had not felt free to reveal it; however, he had done all in his power to discourage it. He was pronounced guilty, not of the plot but of concealing it. For six weeks the King delayed signing the death warrant. Garnett, falsely informed that Greenway was in the Tower, sent him a letter; it was intercepted; asked if he had communicated with Greenway, he denied it; confronted with the letter, he argued that equivocation was permitted to a person to save his life. On May 3, 1606, he was hanged, drawn, and quartered.28
Parliament felt justified in intensifying the statutes against Catholics (1606). They were barred from the practice of medicine or law, and from serving as executors or guardians; they were forbidden to travel more than five miles from their houses; and a new oath was demanded of them which not only denied the power of the popes to depose secular rulers, but branded the assertion of that power as impious, heretical, and damnable.29 Pope Paul V forbade the taking of this oath; a majority of English Catholics obeyed him; a large minority accepted it. In 1606 six priests were executed for refusing it and for saying Mass; between 1607 and 1618 sixteen more were put to death.30 The prisons held several hundred priests, several thousand Catholic laymen. Despite these terrors, Jesuits continued to enter England; there were at least 68 there in 1615, 284 in 1623.31 Some Jesuits found their way into Scotland; one of them, John Ogilvie, was put to death there in 1615, after having his legs crushed in torture by “the boots,” and being kept awake for eight consecutive days and nights by the insertion of pins into his flesh.32 All the sins of the old Church were visited upon her by the new certainties and powers.
IV. THE JACOBEAN STAGE
The English ecstasy continued in literature as well as in religion. To the age of James I belong the better half of Shakespeare’s plays, much of Chapman, most of Jonson, Webster, Middleton, Dekker, Marston, some of Massinger, all of Beaumont and Fletcher; in poetry Donne, in prose Burton and, noblest of all, the King James version of the Bible: these are glories enough for any reign. The King had a taste for drama; in one Christmas season fourteen plays were acted at his court. The Globe theater was burned to the ground in 1613 by the firing of two cannons in a production of Henry VIII, but it was soon rebuilt, and by 1631 there were seventeen theaters in or near London.
George Chapman was five years older than Shakespeare and outlived him by eighteen, spanning three reigns (1559–1634). He took his time maturing; by 1598 he had success
fully completed Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and had published seven books of The Iliad; but his translation of Homer was not finished till 1615, and his best plays came between 1607 and 1613. He opened a new field to English drama by taking a theme from recent French history in his Bussy d’Ambois (1607?)—five acts of blusterous oratory rarely redeemed with magic of phrase, but rising to corrosive power in a page where Bussy and his enemy exchange ironic compliments as indigestible as truth. Chapman never recovered from his education; his much Greek and more Latin sat stiflingly upon his muse, and to read his plays is now a labor of lore, hardly of love. Nor do we thrill as Keats did “on first looking into Chapman’s Homer.” There is a sturdy vigor in these heptameters that here and there lifts them above Pope’s generally better version, but the music of poetry dies in translation; the leaping hexameters of the original carry us on with swifter melody than the measured, fettered feet of rhyming verse. No long English poem in rhyme has escaped the somnolence of a barcarolle. Chapman changed to “heroic couplets”—ten-syllable lines in rhyming pairs—for his rendering of The Odyssey, with similar lulling power. King James must have slept, under these massive blankets, beyond Homer’s casual nods, for he neglected to pay the three hundred pounds which the late Prince Henry had promised Chapman when the translation should be complete; but the Earl of Somerset rescued the aging poet from poverty.