Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (52 page)

To resist union, therefore, James concluded, was not simply impolitic but impious: it was to put asunder kingdoms that God Himself had joined together. But the English Parliament, impolitically and impiously, decided to look the gift horse of union in the mouth. Partly their decision was governed by straightforward anti-Scottish xenophobia. But more fundamental causes were involved as well. These centred on James’s apparently innocuous wish to rename the Anglo-Scottish kingdom ‘Britain’.

A new name meant a new kingdom. It would, one MP said, be like a freshly conquered territory in the New World. There would be no laws and no customs and James, by his own rules in
The Trew Law of Free Monarchies
, would be free to set himself up as an absolute, supra-national emperor of Great Britain. The English Parliament, in contrast, would be left as a mere provincial assembly. It was not an enticing prospect for MPs, who saw themselves as the Great Council of the realm.

James’s reaction to their opposition was to try to enact the union symbolically, using his own powers under the royal prerogative. By proclamation he assumed the title of king of Great Britain. He restyled the royal coat of arms, with the lion of England balanced by the unicorn of Scotland, and he insisted on a British flag, known as the Jack after the Latin form of the name James, again by proclamation. But not content with symbols, James also practised a kind of union by stealth. The English political elite had prevented him from establishing an evenly balanced Anglo-Scots council. But a king could do what he liked with his own court. So, in revenge, James filled his bedchamber, the inner ring of his court, almost exclusively with Scots. It was a pleasure, since James took a more than fatherly interest in braw Scots lads with well-turned legs and firm buttocks. But it also suited him politically since it compelled proud Englishmen to sue his Scots favourites for patronage and to bribe them as well.

But James’s policy of union by stealth had a fatal flaw. He had inherited a substantial debt from Elizabeth. He had a large family to maintain, and he wanted to continue pouring money, and, to his eyes, his new-found wealth, on his favourites and his pleasures. For all this, the crown’s so-called ‘ordinary income’ from land and custom duties was hopelessly inadequate. There was no choice but to ask Parliament to vote money. The English Parliament, however, saw no reason why taxpayers’ money – their money – should end up in the pockets of Scots favourites, and they said so rather crudely. How, asked one MP, could the cistern of the treasury ever be filled up if money continued to ‘flow thence by private Cocks’? ‘Cocks’ meant taps and, well, what it means now …

So James’s project for British union remained an unfulfilled dream, while his relations with Parliament, which he thought he could master, turned into a disaster. The king was forced to fall back on his scriptural argument about the divine rights of kings. And, mundanely enough, the issue was tax. Blocked by Parliament in his pursuit of an adequate income, James used his prerogative to levy money from indirect taxation. Many saw this as unconstitutional, but, backed by the opinions of judges, James got his own way. But it meant a head-on collision with Parliament. If ever an English king managed to raise enough money by indirect means without consent, MPs reasoned, he would be able to dispense with parliaments altogether and reign as a tyrant.

Addressing Parliament in 1610, James went far beyond all his predecessors in arguing for his rights as king. Although he would respect Parliament, he said, MPs had no right to question his prerogative of taxing without consent. It may have been a constitutional or legal matter, but James went one step further. ‘The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth,’ he told Parliament; ‘for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God Himself they are called gods.’ James had after all been brought up a scholar, and this was the intellectual justification for what he was doing. He would not turn the monarchy into quite the absolutist institution which many were coming to fear would be the ultimate outcome of the Stuart succession. But that was because of his moderation and not because of any limitation on his quasi-divine majesty.

But James’s words fell on deaf or deliberately uncomprehending ears. And, faced by widespread obstruction, by the time of his death, in 1625, he had retreated into a sort of internal exile, abandoning the task of government, and secluding himself with his favourites and horses at Newmarket. Nevertheless, he had managed, by a mixture of tact, duplicity and masterful inaction, to stick to the middle ground and hold together the warring extremes of the Church of England on the one hand and the differing religious policies of England and Scotland on the other. The result was a smooth succession on both sides of the border of James’s son Charles to the glittering inheritance of the Imperial Crown of Great Britain. Within a decade and a half, Charles, by his intransigence and his ineptitude, had thrown it all away.

III

Charles was crowned king of England at Westminster Abbey on 2 February 1626. For James, divine right had been an intellectual position; for Charles it was an emotional and religious one. This was immediately made clear by his coronation service, which, meticulously organized by the up-and-coming cleric William Laud, lovingly reproduced all the splendour, solemnity and sacred mysteries of the medieval Catholic rite.

The ceremony is one of the best-documented as well as the best-organized of coronations thanks to the survival of two fascinating service books. One is Charles’s own copy of the coronation service, which he used to follow the ceremony. The other is Laud’s version of the same text, which he used as a kind of score to conduct the service. He also made notes in the margins in a different-coloured ink to record unusual features of the ceremony as it actually took place.

These notes take us into Charles’s own mind. During the five-hour ceremony the king was invested with the carefully preserved robes and regalia of Edward the Confessor, the last sainted Anglo-Saxon king, and Charles’s attitude to these ancient relics was unique. Laud notes that he insisted on placing his feet inside the sacred buskins or sandals which were normally only touched against the royal leg, and that he actually used, apparently for the only time in the 1500-year history of the coronation, the Anglo-Saxon ivory comb to tidy his hair after he had been anointed on the head with the holy oil.

This wasn’t mere idle curiosity or historical re-enactment for its own sake. Instead Charles was treating each and every item of the regalia as a holy sacrament of monarchy. With each touch of the precious oils and the ancient fabrics, jewels and comb, God was washing away the merely human in him and leaving him purely, indefeasibly and absolutely a king. Or so Charles at least thought.

Charles, as his behaviour at his coronation would suggest, was an aesthete, a lover of beauty, elegance and order. His tutor had been chosen not for his scholarship but for his taste in fashion, and Charles himself grew up to be not only fastidious in dress and manners but also the greatest connoisseur ever to have sat on the throne of England. He built up a staggering collection of paintings and he commissioned portraits of himself and his family from the greatest contemporary artists, such as Sir Anthony van Dyck. And it is van Dyck above all who shows us Charles as he wanted to be, suggesting the grandeur of his kingship on the one hand and the Christ-like wisdom and self-sacrifice with which he hoped to rule on the other. It masked the reality. Charles was short of stature, weak and shy. Even when he was a teenager, his father nicknamed him ‘Baby Charles’. The lustre of majesty with which Charles surrounded himself was intended to make up for his personal failings.

Like most royal heirs, Charles defined himself by espousing policies that were the opposite of his father’s. Throughout his reign, James had been unfavourably compared with Elizabeth, the queen who had defeated the Armada. Throughout his reign, many had wanted a war to help the beleaguered and persecuted Protestants of France, Denmark, the Low Countries and Germany. Charles was pro-war, but Parliament, despite its vocal enthusiasm for a Protestant crusade in Europe, was never prepared to vote enough taxation to make war an affordable option. Frustrated by Parliament’s unwillingness to put its money where its Protestant mouth was, Charles, instead of fighting the Catholic French, married the French, and of course Catholic, princess Henrietta Maria in 1626. On account of Henrietta Maria’s religion the marriage was extremely unpopular with Parliament. It didn’t even succeed in cementing an alliance with France.

The result was that Charles soon found himself in the worst of all possible worlds – without money, with a Catholic wife and fighting a hopeless war against both major Catholic powers, France and Spain. Charles, looking for a scapegoat for the debacle, found it in what he saw as Parliament’s sullen obstructiveness. He decided that parliaments were more trouble than they were worth and that in future he would rule without them.

All over Europe, monarchs were dispensing with parliaments. So in attempting personal rule, Charles was simply following the European trend. But unlike his European counterparts, he lacked the legal ability to tax his subjects at will. Only Parliament could legislate new taxes. So, like his father before him, Charles’s only recourse was to squeeze more revenue out of his customary rights and prerogatives. In order to launch a campaign to save the French Protestants persecuted by France, he asked for a ‘Free Gift’ from his subjects. In reality it was a forced loan, raised by threats. The subsequent campaign was a disaster, and much of the money, rather than being used to raise and support soldiers, was spent on the royal art collection.

Those who bravely refused the ‘Free Gift’ were sent to prison. As the 1630s continued, the unconstitutional methods of revenue-gathering, the threat to liberty and the flagrant waste of money on rash military adventures hardened parliamentary opinion against Charles. The king seemed to be augmenting his wealth at the expense of freedom. Parliament would not vote him money unless he gave guarantees that he would rule constitutionally. Parliament’s attitude, in turn, hardened Charles. He resolved to rule regardless of its obstructiveness and belligerence. Fortunately, he had a crack team of lawyers to help him.

The most ingenious of Charles’s lawyers was the Attorney General, William Noy. ‘I moil in the law’ was the anagram of his name, and he moiled – that is toiled or laboured – in the legal archives to great effect. His masterpiece was ship money.

Ship money was a traditional levy imposed on the port towns to raise vessels for the navy in times of war, as, for example, against the Spanish Armada in the heyday of Elizabethan England. This was uncontroversial, but Attorney General Noy said that the law allowed the king to extend ship money from the ports to the inland counties and to impose it in peacetime as well as in war. All this at the king’s mere say-so. The extended ship money was first imposed in 1634, and within a year it was yielding over £200,000 annually and producing 90 per cent of what the king demanded. This was the Holy Grail of royal administration, which had eluded English kings ever since the Middle Ages: a large-scale permanent income which came in regularly, year by year, without the bother of consulting troublesome parliaments.

Those who refused to pay the tax on the grounds that it was unconstitutional soon found themselves confronted with the full force of royal government. The MP John Hampden was one of these people. His trial was a test case for Charles’s new style of government by royal decree. Hampden was found guilty and the judge ruled that the king might levy money whenever he liked ‘for the preservation of the safety of the commonwealth’. Without this power, one of the judges continued, ‘I do not understand how the King’s Majesty may be said to have the magisterial right and power of a free monarch’. But for a growing number of people, the king’s actions marked the beginning of absolute royal government. It appeared that Charles had the right to confiscate private property and punish people at will. All legal and property rights were at his mercy. ‘Grant him this,’ wrote John Milton of extra-parliamentary levies, ‘and the Parliament hath no more freedom than if it sat in his Noose, which when he pleased to draw together with one twitch of his Negative, shall throttle a whole Nation.’

The idea of taxing without any parliamentary consent was bound to cause grievances, as James I had found. But Charles exacerbated matters still further by attempting religious innovation at the same time.

Whatever the formal rules of the Church of England, many of the parish churches in the country had seen the development of a stripped-down fundamentalist Protestantism, very little different in practice from the Scottish Kirk. But a richer, more ceremonious vision had been preserved in a handful of places, in particular the Chapels Royal and the greater cathedrals. Here there were choirs, organs and music, candles and gold and silver plate on the communion tables, and rich vestments for the clergy. William Laud, now Charles’s archbishop of Canterbury, determined to use the Royal Supremacy to impose this opulent religious tradition on the whole country. He did so because he thought religion should be about sacraments as well as sermons, and appeal to the senses as well as to the mind. Above all he wanted to stamp out the menace of Puritanism that was gaining a hold on the Church.

In England some welcomed the new policy, but many more saw it as an assault on the very essence of their beliefs and a covert attempt to re-Catholicize the Church. Had not Charles married a Catholic? And had he not failed to help European Protestants? It all began to seem like a sinister conspiracy. But, despite some foot-dragging and grumbling, there was little overt resistance. Emboldened, Charles and Laud decided the policy should be extended to Scotland as well. Here the Reformation had been far more thoroughgoing and radical and the risks of change were correspondingly greater. But Charles, confident as ever in his God-given rightness, was undeterred. He decided that a barely modified version of the English Book of Common Prayer should be used throughout Scotland. And he did so on his own personal authority without consulting either the Scottish Parliament or the General Assembly of the Kirk. Charles was behaving as though he were the Supreme Governor of the Scottish Kirk. But would the Scottish Presbyterians accept his authority?