A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  The English faced this new situation with an unfortunately vague set of constitutional principles and precedents. All agreed that sovereigns could not, under any normal circumstances, levy taxes or make or alter laws without the consent of Parliaments. Everybody also agreed that this rule might be infringed in an emergency, but not upon precisely what constituted an emergency. There was likewise universal agreement that any legitimate government had to rest upon ‘divine right’, in other words to enjoy the approval of the one true God, and that realms were effectively families, of which kings were the head. What was not clear, or accepted, was whether that familial model meant that subjects had the relationship to their monarch of a wife, who was expected to counsel or admonish her husband, or of children, who had a right to expect good treatment in response to good behaviour, but were not expected to offer useful advice. Nor was the notion of divine right ultimately any better defined, because it begged the question of how much obedience was owed to an ungodly ruler. It was a problem repeatedly faced in different parts of post-Reformation Europe, as populations found themselves under a sovereign with a different kind of religion, and no generally accepted answer to it existed.

  Under Elizabeth, the threat of the succession of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, had caused some leading English politicians to draw up contingency plans in the case of Elizabeth’s sudden death, whereby the next monarch would essentially be chosen by Parliament. Once Mary was dead and a Protestant succession ensured, however, leading ministers, churchmen and judges began instead to cry up the power of the Crown against opponents such as Catholics and Puritans. The reign of Elizabeth itself, therefore, provided examples both for those who wished to emphasize the descending power of the monarchy, and its ultimate power over all subjects, and its ascending power, as an institution ultimately responsible and accountable to the people it governed (or at least the elite among them). Both views of government had, however, been built into English politics since time immemorial, one or the other predominating at particular moments or among particular groups. In practice there had been no serious clash between them under the Tudors because rulers and ruled had usually managed to make a working relationship in practice.

  Things were different under the Stuarts, because James I’s status as King of Scots, and the need to reform the royal finances, immediately raised serious constitutional issues. James’s very succession to the throne was itself in contravention of parliamentary law, because (thanks to Henry VIII) a statute had been passed excluding the Scottish royal family from it, and never repealed. In confronting such problems, the king had the wrong personality. He needed to play down issues of principle, concentrate on common interests and practical needs, respect customary rules and patterns, and keep himself aloof from political wrangling as far as possible. Instead, being an intellectual and a keen debater, he drew the attention of his Parliaments to the constitutional implications of practical issues and broke through customary procedures that he found restrictive. He cried up his own powers in a way which he probably intended as a debating position but which many of his subjects mistook for dogmatic assertions, and he tried to contribute directly and personally to discussion.

  As a result, matters that were difficult in themselves, such as English resentment of the number of Scots who held posts at court and the failure of Parliaments to find a workable solution to the Crown’s financial problems, became caught up in questions of high constitutional principle. As early as 1604, the House of Commons attempted to force James to define what powers he thought that he had over the national religion, and was prevented only because the Lords refused to cooperate. In 1612 the king dissolved a Parliament in fury, believing that he could no longer work with it, something that no Tudor had ever done. Two years later he called another, and this immediately ran into trouble over the favouring of Scots at court and the royal increase in customs dues. Both James and the Commons rapidly deployed their two ultimate weapons against each other. The MPs refused to vote taxes unless the king responded to their grievances, and the king dissolved the whole Parliament before it had passed a single law, earning it the shameful nickname of the ‘Addled Parliament’. This really was a new, and frightening, political world. The next Parliament, in 1621, revived the medieval tactic of impeachment, whereby royal ministers were formally accused of misgovernment by the Members and put on trial. After 1610, James had a chronic dislike of English Parliaments.

  None the less, recourse to them never completely broke down during his reign. He respected the most important conventional limits to royal power, never imprisoning a subject without trial and never imposing entirely new taxation without parliamentary consent. When in 1607 a clergyman called John Cowell wrote that the king’s authority was superior to any law, James explicitly disowned him. In 1610 the Commons challenged his right to create new kinds of crime by royal proclamation, whereupon he consulted his judges about the issue and accepted their verdict that the MPs were correct. He may have experienced problems with his Parliaments on a scale not known to any English monarch since the Middle Ages, but they always remained within bounds that allowed for the making of better relations given only time and a normal amount of good luck. As it happened, James was to be given neither: instead, in the last seven years of his reign, he was to be caught up in a crisis which intensified every tension already present in English political and religious life: and its point of origin lay on the far side of Europe.

  As part of James’s unconventionality as a king, he had a personal dislike of war, and indeed he set a record in both his realms for reigning at such length without ever waging one. Instead he wanted to win glory by becoming the peace-maker of Europe, and this was reflected in the marriages that he sought for his children. His daughter Elizabeth was wedded to the most dynamic and ambitious Protestant prince in Germany, Frederick, the Elector Palatine. This tied his family and his kingdoms to the cause of international Protestantism, and was popular among his subjects. Much more controversially, he tried to marry off his sons, successively, to a Spanish princess, so balancing his daughter’s union with a link to the greatest Catholic power on earth. In that manner, he hoped to draw together the two great contending branches of Western Christianity, and reduce tension, and the potential for bloodshed, between them. In this, as in so many other respects, James looks more admirable through modern eyes than those of his subjects, many of whom reacted in horror at the prospect of a Spanish queen. Reluctance on the part of Spain doomed the project, but developments abroad brought all his well-intentioned diplomacy an even worse result. In 1618 his son-in-law Frederick accepted the throne of Bohemia, offered to him by its Protestants who had risen in rebellion against their hereditary king, an aggressive Catholic who was also heir to the various lands of Austria and to the title of Holy Roman Emperor. Frederick was thereby presenting himself as the hero of Protestant Europe. The Emperor responded by calling in help from his relative, the King of Spain, and the combined Catholic forces drove Frederick out of Bohemia.

  None of this should have been a problem for the English, as Bohemia was far too remote to make any intervention there credible, and Frederick’s title to it was very doubtful. What changed everything was that the Spanish swung west, to attack Frederick’s hereditary lands in Germany and to renew their former war against the Dutch. The Emperor launched his own soldiers against other Protestant German states. What had been a squabble on the eastern side of Europe had turned by 1621 into a major European war, in which the lines were drawn between Protestant and Catholic. James was inevitably pulled in, both as the leading Protestant monarch and as Frederick’s father-in-law. Had he been a natural war-monger, he would have faced an almost impossible situation, because the heartland of Frederick’s realm, the Palatinate, lay in the central Rhine Valley, hundreds of miles from the sea; and England had never been capable of launching military expeditions deep into Europe. James dealt with this by pursuing a consistent and logical policy: to persuade the Spanish to stop their attack on Fre
derick’s lands, by offering them friendship in return, while threatening war if they refused. This involved preparing to fight, by sending soldiers to the Palatinate and warships to the Mediterranean, and calling a Parliament and asking it for funds, while negotiating with Spain. As a strategy, it was too complex and ingenious, and it backfired. The Spanish encouraged James to believe that they would make a deal with him, while Parliament grew suspicious, with reason, that they would vote huge sums for a war that would then not happen, leaving the king to pocket the proceeds. As a result James and the House of Commons fell out again, and he dissolved the Parliament, leaving the Spanish free to call off any agreement with him and complete the conquest of the Palatinate in 1622.

  Being thus unable to make war, the Stuarts next attempted to use diplomacy once more. In 1623 James’s son and heir, Charles, and his favourite, Buckingham, went to Spain in person to negotiate a marriage between Charles and a Spanish princess which would bring about the return of the Palatinate to Frederick. Once again the Spanish turned English ineptitude to their advantage, forcing their own terms upon their unexpected guests. Charles returned to England without a bride or the Palatinate, but with a promise to emancipate English Catholics, which was completely politically unacceptable to most of his father’s subjects. He promptly repudiated the agreement and he and Buckingham henceforth became ardent proponents of a war with Spain to regain the Palatinate. The result was the Parliament of 1624, the most successful for almost twenty years because the majority of its members united with Charles and Buckingham to force this war upon the king, voting almost £300,000 to launch a naval expedition. Once more, however, James did not declare war, trying to escape it instead by getting others to fight it for him. He used the money from Parliament to send soldiers to assist the Dutch and German opponents of Spain, while trying to enlist the aid of the only power in Western Europe which possessed an army large enough to tip the balance of power against the Spanish – France. James’s hope was that the traditional French rivalry with Spain would count for more than the common Catholicism of both monarchies. Once more he employed a marriage alliance as his means, asking for the hand of the French king’s sister, Henrietta Maria, for his son Charles. Once again his diplomacy failed in its object. The marriage was actually agreed, but on terms that did not commit the French government to an alliance against Spain but did commit the English to suspending the persecution of Roman Catholics. At this critical moment, in March 1625, James suddenly expired. He had been in poor health for years, but would probably have survived this latest illness had his physicians not employed such a drastic set of remedies; they effectively tortured the king to death.

  This ought to have made the situation much easier, because the new monarch, Charles I, was eager to launch a proper war against Spain, using seaborne strikes in the Elizabethan manner. His first Parliament was, however, made confused and suspicious by the evaporation of all the money voted by the last one, and by the imminent arrival of a Catholic queen, accompanied by a relaxation of the penal laws against English Catholics. Nor did Charles want to launch his attack on the Spanish before the French were committed to help him. At the same time, he made his father’s former favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, supreme both in the court and in the royal counsels, to an extent that James himself had never done. The result was that the Parliament was dissolved without supplying money. Seeking to gain popularity and foreign allies by a military coup, the government raised funds by levying a compulsory loan from its people, and sent an expedition to sack the most important Spanish port, Cadiz. This had actually been done under Elizabeth, but since then Cadiz had been strengthened and England’s commanders had become less experienced and gifted. The result was a humiliating repulse.

  In the next year, 1626, Charles called a second Parliament, to get money for a further effort. The Commons responded with a straight offer; that funds would be voted if Buckingham, who was now generally blamed for the regime’s failures, left public life. To Charles, both parts of the deal were unacceptable: he would not abandon Buckingham, and the sum offered by the Commons covered only a third of the cost of another expedition. Without French help, there was no prospect of making headway against the Spanish, and the French had delivered their princess to England without any accompanying military alliance. Charles’s strategy now switched to putting pressure on France to make one, by using the single means that he possessed to do so. The French Wars of Religion had left the nation divided between a Catholic majority and a tolerated and armed Protestant minority. In the late 1620s, much of the latter rebelled again to protect their privileges, especially at the important seaport of La Rochelle. By sending aid to the rebels, and renewing the persecution of English Catholics, Charles and Buckingham hoped to win new popularity as champions of Protestantism at home and abroad, and also force the French to fight Spain, by showing how much trouble England could make if they did not. To raise the cash for such an expedition, the government resorted to a new kind of forced loan, levied nationwide and systematically in the manner of a war tax. It provoked much unpopularity and some outright opposition, but was effective, raising over £250,000. This was enough to raise an army to save La Rochelle, which Buckingham himself led in 1627. The expeditionary force was, however, poorly organized and inadequately equipped, and the money proved insufficient for its needs; it returned, having failed in its objective and suffered terrible losses.

  The government had now added £1 million to its existing debts, despite dangerously large sales of Crown land which had, effectively, completed the dispersal of the real estate of the medieval English monarchy. It was also at war with both Spain and France, the two strongest powers in Western Europe, and without any means to fight either. The royal army was left unpaid and billeted upon civilians across southern England, while seventy-seven prominent men who had refused to pay the forced loan were jailed without a formal process of law. The king had to call a third Parliament in 1628, and this time the Commons proposed a different deal: war taxes in return for a ban on forced loans, billeting of soldiers, and imprisonments without trial. Once again, however, the accounting of the MPs was out, as the £280,000 they offered was too little for an effective war effort. Moreover, the ‘Petition of Right’ in which the Commons embodied their requests made the novel constitutional claim that certain rights, enjoyed by the subject, were as integral to the English state as the powers of the Crown. It was the culmination of those anxious attempts to protect the people and define and so limit the king which had commenced almost as soon as the Stuarts took over England. When the House of Lords sided with the Commons, Charles had either to agree or give up his war, and so gave in with notable bad grace, provoking fervent displays of popular rejoicing and of support for the actions of the two Houses.

  Buckingham now prepared to lead a new expedition to rescue La Rochelle, but was stabbed to death by one of his officers, who blamed him both for personal grievances and for the misbehaviour of the royal government. The expeditionary force was thrown into complete disarray, and La Rochelle surrendered to the French royal army, depriving Charles of his lever on the French government and wasting the taxes just voted by Parliament. Both his foreign policy and his war effort were in ruins, and he gave up, seeking henceforth to buy peace with both France and Spain by giving up disputed colonial claims in the Americas. These treaties were completed by 1630, leaving England safe from attack and from bankruptcy, but with none of the king’s war aims accomplished after a total expenditure of almost £2 million.

  The peace-making process should have extended to the king’s relations with Parliament, especially as he could recall the successful one of 1628 in the next year without the need to ask it for new taxes. Relations between the royal government and its critics had, however, been seriously embittered. Charles felt betrayed by the Commons because they had consistently failed to vote enough money for his wars while trying to interfere with the way in which he ruled; less directly but still potently, he blamed them for the murder o
f his beloved friend Buckingham. Many MPs had found the new king’s regime to combine incompetence with high-handedness, a mixture designed to alienate most people. Two flashpoints remained as the wars wound down, and they were to prove fatal. One was the issue that had been left over from James’s reign: that the Crown was only surviving financially in normal conditions by levying increased dues on foreign trade which no Parliament had recognized as legal. The other was new: that Charles had shown an undoubted, and unprecedented, partiality for the so-called Arminian faction in the Church of England, promoting them from the moment of his accession to a dominant position by 1629. Some of the churchmen in that faction had repaid the king for his support by preaching in favour of his more controversial measures, such as the forced loan. People who already disliked the Arminians because their ceremonious style of religion seemed too Catholic could now resent them as apparent supporters of arbitrary government as well. When his leading critics in the Commons tried to force through resolutions condemning the government for both its religious and its financial policies, and suggesting that the royal ministers had committed treason against the nation, Charles threw the Parliament out. He did so with a declaration that no further Parliaments would be called for a relatively long period.

  The chronic difficulties in Charles’s first three Parliaments had introduced a language of crisis into English political life. Revisionist historians have proved that there were not in practice two opposed parties, representing the followers and critics of the government. The problem is, as post-revisionists have demonstrated, that political rhetoric tended increasingly to assume that there were. Since 1600 a whole set of new vehicles for political information had become important, reflecting a growing public appetite for news and debate: the printed newspaper had appeared, and newsletters, verse satires, libels and pamphlets had become common. The mass lobbying of MPs, with the publication of petitions to them, had begun. In the face of this growing need to give an account of itself and argue down criticism, the government of Charles had responded by trying to raise the Crown above debate, and ceased trying to explain itself at all. Both the regime and its critics wanted Parliament to work harmoniously, and were increasingly angered and frustrated by the fact that it seemed to be failing repeatedly to do so. Neither the king nor the opponents of his policies had the ability to understand and manage each other. Both wanted to agree upon a set of workable guidelines for national politics, but found that no guidelines seemed to work any longer.