Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (51 page)

This left the king and his advisers with but two choices: cut expenditure or raise revenue. Both had significant drawbacks. On the one hand, cutting expenditure involved eliminating court and government jobs, pensions, and other goodies which made the king popular and the court attractive for the ruling elite. As a result, many of those closest to the king did everything in their power to oppose such cost-cutting measures. In other words, the contest between administrators and courtiers fought in the previous reign was to a great extent replicated in this one (with, as we shall see, one crucial difference). On the other hand, raising revenue required parliamentary permission. This was unlikely to be granted in peacetime, for many MPs privately shared one member’s view that the money would just end up in courtiers’ pockets: “to what purpose is it for us to draw a silver stream out the country into the royal cistern, if it shall daily run out thence by private cocks [taps]?”
¹⁴
(Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was during this period that the word “country” came to signify those who were not part of, even opposed, to the “court”.) Moreover, if new taxes
were
granted, Parliament’s role would inevitably increase. If refused, this would throw the king back onto option one.

Cecil was the first minister to tackle these problems seriously. He had inherited the old administrative connection of his father, Lord Burghley, and was, as we have seen, highly instrumental in James’s smooth accession. James rewarded him, first, by continuing him as secretary of state, then creating him earl of Salisbury (1605), and finally promoting him to his father’s old office of lord treasurer (1608). Like his father, Salisbury worked hard to enhance the government’s revenue and to keep royal expenditure in check. As treasurer he launched a reform of Crown lands administration and sought to raise the Customs yield by farming out its collection. That is, he sold the right to collect the Customs revenues to a consortium of the highest bidders, who would pay the government a large lump sum and keep whatever profit remained. He was forced to do this, in part, because the royal Customs administration was simply inadequate to do the job itself. To ensure that there was enough revenue to make everybody rich, the Crown issued a new Book of Rates which added some 1,400 new items to the Customs rolls – without asking parliamentary permission. The government could do this because in 1606 it had won Bate’s case, in which John Bate, a London merchant, had sued over a similar imposition on red currants from Turkey. The court agreed with the Crown that the impositions were a legitimate part of the prerogative by which the king made foreign policy by regulating foreign trade. But despite this legal victory, Salisbury’s retrenchment policy was, in the end, unsuccessful. Because the royal administration was so inadequate, the new survey of Crown lands was never completed. Its preliminary findings were that the Tudors had sold or given away so much land that the potential yield from the remainder was negligible in any case. As for the impositions, they did raise much needed revenue, but at the cost of deep resentment among the merchant community and a growing distrust between king and Parliament on money issues.

This explains why Salisbury’s next initiative failed. In the Great Contract, which he proposed in 1610, the king would exchange his rights to feudal dues from wardship, knightage, and purveyance for a permanent, annual tax yielding
£
200,000. This was promising, but the deal was wrecked when Parliament upped the ante by demanding the surrender of additional prerogative rights and presenting a list of grievances, headed by the hated impositions. The king dissolved Parliament and the Great Contract was never struck. This left James with few options, none of them pretty. One was to begin to sell titles: in 1611 he created that of baronet, ostensibly to raise cash to suppress yet another rebellion in Ulster. While this initially brought in
£
1,095 a creation, it also cheapened the social hierarchy, and so weakened the Great Chain. In fact, the subjection of “honor” to market forces led to discounting: by 1622 a baronetcy could be had for just
£
220. In addition, James, like the Tudors, sold monopolies on goods and services and forced loans from the wealthy. These initiatives kept the government going, but at a price in the Crown’s reputation and its subjects’ good will.

In the meantime, ambitious courtiers did their best to thwart Salisbury’s attempts to restrain James’s bounty.
¹⁵
First, it was the “hungry Scots,” led by Robert Carr, earl of Somerset. James lavished lands and titles on his favorite; after Salisbury died worn out with administrative care in 1612, he controlled access to the king. The next year Somerset sought to enhance his new-found status at court by marrying the well-connected Frances Howard (1590–1632), of the prominent – and often Catholic – family. Unfortunately, she was already married to Robert Devereaux, third earl of Essex (1591–1646). Moreover, Somerset’s close friend and mentor, Sir Thomas Overbury (1581–1613), opposed the match. Eventually, a divorce was secured by the novel argument that Essex had been unable to consummate his five-year marriage because he had been bewitched into impotence! As for Overbury, he had managed to offend the king on a number of other accounts, and so was safely locked up in the Tower, where he conveniently expired. James blessed the new marriage by his attendance in 1613, only to discover later that the countess had sought to have Overbury poisoned, possibly with Somerset’s connivance. While the actual cause of Overbury’s death remains uncertain, the
Overbury Scandal
led to the conviction and imprisonment of both Somersets in 1616. Although the king later pardoned them, the damage to the royal finances and the court’s reputation had been done. In any case, by the time of his fall, Somerset had already been displaced by a favorite of much greater weight.

In 1614 James I was introduced to a young courtier from a minor gentry family named George Villiers (see
plate 14
). Villiers had all the qualities required of a favorite: he was handsome, courtly, and an excellent dancer, musician, and horseman. Historians have charged him with vaulting ambition and an absence of scruples, though he had some political ability. In any case, the king saw something in young Villiers which he liked very much, for he showered him with honors, offices, pensions, and favors. He rose to be a gentleman of the Bedchamber in 1615, master of the Horse and knight of the Garter in 1616; earl of Buckingham in 1617, marquess by the same title in 1618, admiral of England in 1619, and, finally, duke of Buckingham in 1623. The titles were pleasant, the offices lucrative. More importantly, they gave Buckingham control over vast amounts of patronage, allowing him to fill the government with his relatives and clients. By the 1620s, his stranglehold on royal largesse had given him an army of followers comparable to Wolsey’s a century previously – thus reducing the diversity of the Jacobean court.

Plate 14
George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham,
by William Larkin. National Portrait Gallery.

But a more apt comparison might be drawn with Leicester in the previous reign, for Buckingham had James’s heart as fully as “sweet Robin” held Elizabeth’s. In fact, James was far less discreet than his predecessor, informing his Privy Council in 1617 that “Christ had his John, and I have my George.”
¹⁶
Moreover, again unlike Elizabeth, James gave in to his heart more often than to his head. In particular, after Salisbury’s death in 1612 there was no one at court powerful enough to restrain the king from showering his favorites with wealth and power. In response, Parliament grew even less willing to finance his pleasures. It should therefore come as no surprise that the next parliament, called in 1614 to deal with the king’s debts, became known as “the Addled Parliament” for its failure to initiate any important legislation. As we shall see, the 1621 Parliament was to prove more cooperative, but at a price.

By this time, James’s debts stood at over
£
1 million and City loans were drying up. Without a parliamentary subsidy to stave off his creditors and critics, he cagily turned to one of them, a London merchant named Lionel Cranfield (1575–1645). Initially supported by Buckingham, Cranfield was named lord treasurer in 1621 and earl of Middlesex the following year. Middlesex introduced vigorous cost-cutting and almost succeeded in eliminating the king’s debts. But as James noted “All Treasurers if they do good service to their master, must be generally hated.”
¹⁷
In particular, his attack on expenditure threatened Buckingham and his considerable following. For a while Middlesex fought back, even trying to promote another young male courtier as a rival to Buckingham. But the latter was too powerful with the king and had too many followers in Parliament. A compliant House of Commons impeached Middlesex in 1624. The king pardoned him a year later, but he would never again play an important role in government. James continued to spend time and money on his favorite and on his favorite’s projects. By 1624, those projects included something more ambitious and expensive than before: a war.

The Problem of Foreign Policy, War, and England’s Place in Europe

As we have seen, one of James’s first acts as king of England was to negotiate a peace treaty with Spain. For most of the remainder of his reign, he pursued a pacific foreign policy. This was wise, for it kept England out of the last round of bitter and bloody European Wars of Religion, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48). This conflict pitted Habsburg Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and their mostly Catholic German allies against Bourbon France, Protestant Denmark and Sweden, and a number of northern German States. The former were, for the most part, Catholic countries, the latter mostly Protestant. (While France was officially Catholic, it had a large number of Protestant Huguenots, thanks to Henry IV’s Edict of Toleration of 1598.) So, on one level, the Thirty Years’ War was another War of Religion. But the fact that Catholic France fought Catholic Spain indicates that it was also a geopolitical contest between the two most powerful European nations. Governments spent massively to field vast armies which criss-crossed central Europe, laying waste to the countryside and destroying, directly or indirectly, as much as one-third of the population in some areas. In the end, these wars would devastate the Holy Roman Empire, bankrupt Spain, and convince many contemporary Europeans that religious uniformity could not – and perhaps should not – be won by force of arms.

The Thirty Years’ War was one of the great tragedies of early modern history. James showed greater wisdom than his predecessor, Henry VIII, by staying out of this continental quagmire. In fact, one of his long-cherished goals was to engineer a European-wide peace using an old Tudor strategy: diplomatic marriage. The linchpins of James’s new European plan would be two royal matches: that of his eldest son, Prince Henry, to a princess of Spain, the principal Catholic power; and that of his daughter, Elizabeth (1596–1662), to Frederick V (1596–1632), the ruler of Rhine-Palatine and a leading Protestant. Through the lineage of the
Rex Pacificus
, the two sides would be brought together in peace. James would be arbiter of Europe.

It was not to be. The Catholic marriage was scuttled when Henry died of typhoid fever in 1612. The Protestant marriage to Frederick V went off the next year without a hitch. English Puritans were thrilled when, in 1618, the rebellious Protestants of Bohemia, in the opening act of the Thirty Years’ War, threw off their allegiance to the Catholic Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor and offered their crown to Frederick. They were ecstatic when he and Elizabeth decided, before consulting the cautious James, to accept that crown. They were correspondingly alarmed when the emperor decided to fight back; and suitably devastated when, in the autumn of 1620, Bavarian forces allied with the emperor crushed Frederick’s Protestant army at the battle of the White Mountain. Frederick and Elizabeth fled their new kingdom after less than a year. Soon a Spanish army drove them out of their ancestral lands of Rhine-Palatine also, making them refugees. These events were reported avidly, dramatically, even apocalyptically in contemporary pamphlets and newspapers (the first English-language
corantos
– derived from Latin for “current” news – which dealt only in foreign news). They caught the public imagination and put tremendous pressure on James’s pacific regime. This was the chance for which many red-blooded Protestant Englishmen had been waiting. If James wanted peace with Catholic Europe, his most enthusiastic Protestant subjects wanted war with the forces of anti-Christ. In particular, Puritan MPs, egged on by Puritan preachers, fearing the extinction of European Protestantism, saw the Thirty Years’ War as an apocalyptic struggle between good (Protestantism) and evil (Catholicism) that England was morally bound to join. They found the court’s pacifism, profligacy, and obsession with pleasure disgraceful. In fact, if James’s ambitions for a European peace were wildly ambitious, so were Puritan hopes for a Protestant crusade. Like Henry VIII before them, few had any realistic idea of how much such a war would really cost or of how puny English power really was.