Civil War: The History of England Volume III (10 page)

All transactions under the aegis of the Crown – gratuities and perquisites, annuities and pensions – came at a price. Samuel Doves wrote that ‘on the 2nd of February last past, I had a hearing in the Court of Chancery and for that hearing, there stood one in the crier’s place; to whom being demanded, I gave him eight shillings . . . and two men more which kept the door would have eight shillings more, which I paid. And when I was without the door, two men stayed me and would have two shillings more, which I paid.’ You paid to have a stall in the marketplace; you paid for the right to sell or manufacture cloth. When a group of monopolists was granted the maintenance of the lighthouse at Dungeness, being rewarded with the tolls on all shipping that passed by, they provided only a single candle.

What’s the news abroad?
Quid novi?
‘It were a long story to tell all the passages of this business,’ John Chamberlain wrote, ‘which hath furnished Paul’s and this town very plentifully the whole week.’ ‘Paul’s’ was the middle aisle of the cathedral where gossips and men known as ‘newsmongers’ met to discuss all the latest rumours. It was customary for the lords and the gentry, the courtiers and the merchants, as well as men of all professions, to meet in the abbey at eleven and walk in the middle aisle till twelve; they met again after dinner, from three to six, when they discoursed on politics and business or passed on in low voices all the rumours and secrets of the town. A purveyor of court secrets was called ‘one of our new
principal verbs in Paul’s, and well acquainted with all occurrents’. So the busy aisle became known as the ‘ears’ brothel’ and its interior was filled with what a contemporary observer, John Earle, called ‘a strange humming or buzz mixed of walking, tongues and feet’.

It was said that one of the vices of England was the prattling of the ‘busie-body’, otherwise known as an ‘intelligencer’. Joseph Hall, in
Characters of Virtues and Vices
(1608), describes one such creature. ‘What every man ventures in Guiana voyage, and what they gained, he knows to a hair. Whether Holland will have peace he knows and on what conditions . . . If he see but two men talk and read a letter in the street he runs to them and asks if he may not be partner of that secret relation.’

So we might read that ‘the world is full of casting and touching Fabritio’s great affair’ or ‘at the worst, the world is of opinion, that if they should come to jostle, both of them are made of as brittle metal, the one as the other’. The world says this; the world thinks that. ‘Now-a-days what seems most improbable mostly comes soonest to pass.’ ‘There is a speech, of the king’s going to Royston.’ ‘It is current in every man’s mouth.’ ‘We were never at so low an ebb for matter of news, especially public, so that we are fain to set ourselves at work with the poorest entertainment . . .’ ‘There is some muttering of the change of officers . . . by which you may smell who looks and hopes to be lord chancellor.’ The watermen regaled their customers with the news; the humble citizen sitting in the barber’s chair heard the news. Some men made their living by sending manuscript newsletters into the country. Rumour could travel at a speed of 50 miles per night.

And so what news of court? The king travelled north in March 1617. He told his privy council in Scotland that ‘we have had these many years a great and natural longing to see our native soil and place of our birth and breeding’; he called it, charmingly, a ‘salmon-like instinct’. On his slow journey he was attended by many hundreds of courtiers who ate their way through the land like locusts before their arrival at Edinburgh in the middle of May. No one was sure how the visit was to be financed, and those on his route feared the worst. No English king had come this way for hundreds of years. When James reached the border he dismounted and lay on the ground between the two countries, proclaiming that in his own
person he symbolized the union between Scotland and England.

Many of his councillors and nobles had not wanted to accompany James to his erstwhile home. They took no interest in, and had no happy expectations of, Scotland. For them it was an uncouth and even savage land. The queen herself declined to go with her husband, pleading sickness. One English courtier, Sir Anthony Weldon, wrote that this foreign country ‘is too good for those that possess it, and too bad for others . . . there is a great store of fowl – as foul houses . . . foul linen, foul dishes and pots . . . The country, although it be mountainous, affords no monsters but women.’

The king brought with him candles and choristers as well as a pair of organs; he was intent upon making the Scottish Kirk conform to the worship of the Church of England, but he had only limited success. The Scottish ministers were wary of these ‘rags of popery’. ‘The organs are come before,’ said one calvinist divine, ‘and after comes the Mass.’ James also alienated many members of the Scottish parliament. In his speech at the opening of the session James expatiated on the virtues of his English kingdom; he told his compatriots that he had nothing ‘more at heart than to reduce your barbarity to the sweet civility of your neighbours’. The Scots had already learned from them how to drive in gay coaches, to drink healths and to take tobacco. This could not have been received warmly.

And what other news? In the summer of 1617 Sir Walter Raleigh, newly released from the Tower for the purpose, sailed to Guiana in search of gold. The king had expressly ordered him not to injure the Spanish in any way; he was still seeking the hand of the infanta for his son. When Raleigh eventually reached the mouth of the Orinoco he sent a lieutenant, Lawrence Keymis, up the river to determine the location of a fabled mine of gold. On his way, however, Keymis attacked the Spaniards who held San Thome and, after an inconsequential combat in which Raleigh s son was killed, he was eventually forced to return to the main fleet. There was now no possibility of reaching the mine and Raleigh made an ignominious return to England. Keymis killed himself on board ship. The wrath of the king was immense and, sometimes, the wrath of the king meant death. James believed that he had been deliberately deceived by Raleigh on the presence of gold and that the unlucky explorer had unjustifiably and unnecessarily earned for him the enmity of Spain.

The Spanish king of course made angry complaints, through the agency of his notorious ambassador, the count of Gondoman As a measure of conciliation or recompense, James sent Raleigh to the scaffold in the Old Palace Yard at Westminster. It was commonly believed that he had sacrificed him for the honour of the king of Spain. ‘Let us dispatch,’ Raleigh told his executioner. ‘At this hour my ague comes upon me. I would not have my enemies think I quaked from fear.’ On viewing the axe that was about to destroy him he is supposed to have said that ‘this is a sharp medicine, but it is a physician for all diseases and miseries’. As the executioner was poised to deliver the blow he called out, ‘Strike, man, strike!’ He never did have time to finish his
History of the World
which he had begun to compose in 1607 while held in the Tower. He had started at the Creation but at the time of his death had only reached the end of the second Macedonian War in 188
BC
.

What is the new news, smoking hot from London? In November 1617, the king issued a declaration to the people of Lancashire on the matter of Sunday sports and recreations; in the following year the
Book of Sports
was directed to the whole country. Archery and dancing were to be permitted, together with ‘leaping, vaulting or any other such harmless recreation’; the king also graciously allowed ‘May-games, Whitsun-ales and Morris-dances, and the setting up of May-poles’. Bear-baiting, bull-baiting and bowls, however, were forbidden. Clergy of the stricter sort were not favourably impressed by the pronouncement, which soon became known as ‘The Dancing Book’. It came close to ungodliness and idolatry. One clergyman, William Clough of Bramham, told his congregation that ‘the king of heaven doth bid you to keep his Sabbath and reverence his sanctuary. Now the king of England is a mortal man and he bids you break it. Choose whether [which] of them you will follow.’ Soon enough those of a puritan persuasion would become the principal opponents of royal policy.

Ben Jonson’s masque
Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue
was performed before the court at the beginning of 1618. It did not please everyone, and it was suggested that the playwright might like to return to his old trade of bricklaying. At the close of the performance, in the scene of dancing, the players began to lag. ‘Why don’t they dance?’ the king called out. ‘What did they make me come here for? Devil
take you all, dance!’ Whereupon Buckingham sprang up and, in the words of the chaplain of the Venetian embassy, ‘danced a number of high and very tiny capers with such grace and lightness that he made everyone love him’. James himself demonstrated ‘extraordinary signs of affection, touching his face’.

Yet Buckingham’s enemies, most notably the Howard family, were determined to supplant him. They introduced another handsome youth to court by the name of Monson. They groomed him for the role, dressed him up and washed his face every day with curdled milk to improve its smoothness. But the king did not take to this new suitor. The lord chamberlain took Monson to one side and informed him that James was not pleased with his importunacy and continual presence; he ordered him to stay away from the king and, if he knew what was best for him, to avoid the royal court.

Buckingham began to use one of the first sedan chairs ever to be seen in the country; the people were indignant, complaining that he was employing men to take the place of beasts. Yet he was still in the ascendant, at which high point he would remain for the rest of the reign.

8

A Bohemian tragedy

In April 1618 a little book, bearing the royal arms, was published. It was entitled
The Peacemaker
, and it extolled the virtues of James as a pacifier of all troubles and contentions. The ‘happy sanctuary’ of England had enjoyed fifteen years of peace since the time of the king’s accession, and so now ‘let it be celebrated with all joy and cheerfulness, and all sing –
Beati Pacifici
’.

Contention, however, was about to manifest itself in the distant land of Bohemia (now roughly equivalent to the Czech Republic) which was ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor Matthias. In the month after the book’s publication certain Protestant nobles of Bohemia stormed the imperial palace in Prague and threw the emperor’s deputies out of the windows; Matthias had tried to impose upon them the rule of Archduke Ferdinand, a fierce Catholic and a member of the Habsburg family. The Bohemian rebels were soon in charge of their country, posing a challenge to the catholic dynasty of the Habsburgs, which included Philip III of Spain.

The German calvinists of course took up their cause, thus posing a problem for the king of England. The head of the Calvinist interest was none other than James’s son-in-law, Frederick of the Palatinate. Yet James was also seeking the daughter of Philip III for his son. What was to be done? Was James to side with the Spanish Habsburgs against the Protestant party? Or was he to
encourage his son-in-law to maintain the Bohemian cause? He prevaricated by sending an arbiter, but none of the combatants was really willing to entertain his envoy. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, remarked that ‘the vanity of the present king of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be made by his means, so that his authority will be increased’. It did not quite work out like that.

In March 1619 Matthias died, and Archduke Ferdinand was elected as the new Holy Roman Emperor. The Bohemians took the opportunity of formally deposing him as their sovereign and invited Frederick to take his place. Frederick hesitated only for a moment. James complained that ‘he wrote to me, to know my mind if he should take that crown; but within three days after, and before I could return answer, he put it on’.

After Frederick had accepted their offer, he travelled to Prague in October in order to assume the throne. The Protestants of England were delighted. Here at last was the European champion they had needed. A great comet passed across the skies of Europe in the late autumn of 1618; its reddish hue and long tail were visible for seven weeks, and it became known as ‘the angry star’. It was of course considered to be providential, a token or warning of great change. Could it portend the final defeat of the Habsburgs and even the Antichrist of Rome?

James’s opinion was not entirely in keeping with that of his Protestant subjects. He was angered by what he considered to be Frederick’s rashness in accepting the crown of Bohemia; his son-in-law was in that sense an aggressor flouting the divine right of kings. ‘You are come in good time to England,’ he told Frederick’s envoy, ‘to spread these principles among my people, that my subjects may drive me away, and place another in my room.’ More significantly, he did not wish to drop the Spanish connection he had so carefully fashioned. And yet his daughter was now queen of Bohemia. Surely there was glory in that? It was the greatest dilemma of his reign, combining in deadly fashion his amity with Spain and his relationship with his fellow Protestants in Europe; he had tried to conciliate both forces, but now they threatened to tear him apart. So he prevaricated. The French ambassador reported that ‘his mind uses its powers only for a short time, but in the long run he is cowardly’.