Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (5 page)

A group of disparate and variously inclined parliamentarians was not necessarily on the king’s side. Francis Bacon wrote to the king that ‘that opposition which was, the last parliament, to your majesty’s business, as much as was not
ex puris naturalibus
but out of party, I conceive to be now much weaker than it was’. This did not yet embody the partisanship of later struggles, or the creation of ‘parties’ in the modern sense, but it suggests a change in national affairs. Some of the disputatious details have been recorded. Sir Edward Herbert ‘plops’ with his mouth at Mr Speaker. John Tey complains that Mr Speaker is ‘clipping him off’ and proceeds to threaten him.

The king had another doughty opponent. A legal dispute had arisen. Was there a distinction between those Scots born before James’s accession to the English throne and those born after it? The king argued that those born after his accession were naturalized by common law and, therefore, could hold office in England. James turned to the judges whom he assumed to take his part. One of them refused to do so. Sir Edward Coke had been chief justice of the common pleas since 1605, and was an impassioned exponent of English common law. James had no real conception of common law, having been educated in the very different jurisprudence of Scotland. Coke believed, for example, that both sovereign and subject were accountable to a body of ancient law that had been conceived in practice and clarified by usage; it represented immemorial general custom, but it was also a law of reason. This was not, however, the king’s opinion. He had already firmly stated that ‘the king is above the law, as both the author and the giver of strength thereto’. From this it could be construed that the king possessed an arbitrary authority. James alleged, for example, that he could decide cases in person. Coke demurred: a case could only be judged in a lawcourt. Coke’s own report tells the story of bad blood.

James:
I thought the law was founded on reason. I and others have reason as well as the judges.

Coke:
Although, sir, you have great endowments of nature, yet you are not learned in the laws of England. Causes are not to be decided by natural reason but by the artificial reason and judgment of law.

More debate followed.

James:
So then I am under the law? It is treason to affirm that!

Coke:
Bracton has said that the king should not be under man but under God and the law.

An observer noted that ‘his majesty fell in that high indignation as the like was never known in him, looking and speaking fiercely with bended fist, offering to strike him, which the Lord Coke perceiving fell flat on all fours…’ Coke might yield and beg for mercy, but over succeeding years the debate between the Crown and the law continued with ever greater volume and seriousness.

The manoeuvres of the court were never still. The favourite, now Sir Robert Carr, needed land to complement his title. By Carr’s great good fortune Sir Walter Raleigh, still incarcerated, had forfeited his interest in the manor of Sherborne; he thought that he had conveyed it to his son, but the king’s council believed otherwise. It was given to the favourite. Lady Raleigh, accompanied by her two sons, was admitted into the king’s presence where she threw herself at his feet. ‘I maun have the land’ was his only reply. ‘I maun have it for Carr.’ This is the true voice of the king.

3

The beacons

In 1605 one of the king’s ‘learned counsel’ presented him with a treatise that summoned up the spirit of a new age. Francis Bacon’s ‘Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human’ is better known to posterity as
The Advancement of Learning;
it can justifiably be said to have changed the terms of human understanding and the nature of knowledge. Bacon had been a royal servant for some years under the patronage of his uncle, Lord Burghley, and had been first enlisted in the court of Elizabeth. But the advent of a new king promised more tangible rewards and, soon after the accession, Bacon provided James with texts of advice on such matters as the union of Scotland with England and ecclesiastical polity.

Yet
The Advancement of Learning
was a work in quite another key, and one that helped to create the climate of scientific rationalism that characterized the entire seventeenth century. Bacon had first to clear away the clutter of inherited knowledge. In the early pages of the treatise ‘the first distemper of learning’ is denounced as that by which ‘men study words and not matter’. Yet words, and not matter, had been the foundation of traditional learning for innumerable centuries, whether in the rhetorical humanism of the Renaissance or in the scholastic theology of the Middle Ages. Bacon declared, however, that ‘men have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reasons and conceits’. It was time to look at the world.

He further observed that:

this kind of degenerate learning did chiefly reign amongst the schoolmen, who having sharp and strong wits, and abundance of leisure, and small variety of reading, but their wits being shut up in the cells of a few authors (chiefly Aristotle their dictator) as their persons were shut up in the cells of monasteries and colleges, and knowing little history, either of nature or of time, did out of no great quantity of matter, and infinite agitation of wit, spin out unto us those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books … cobwebs of learning admirable for the fineness of thread and work, but of no substance or profit.

The clarity and cogency of his prose are the perfect instruments for his attack upon the ornateness and excessive ingenuity of the old learning. That is why Shelley cited Plato and Bacon as the two most influential of all the poet-philosophers.

Bacon was assaulting the methods and principles of previous human learning in favour of experiment and observation, which he believed to be central to true natural science. He was suggesting that the scholars and experimenters of the time should confine themselves ‘to use and not to ostentation’ and to ‘matters of common sense and experience’. He warned that ‘the more you remove yourselves from particulars, the greater peril of error you do incur’. At a later date this would be described as the ‘scientific’ disposition.

The purpose of all learning was, for Bacon, to promote the benefit and prosperity of humankind. The material world is to be understood and mastered by means of ‘the laborious and sober inquiry of truth’ which can be pursued only by ‘ascending from experiments to the invention of causes, and descending from causes to the invention of new experiments’. This was a revolutionary statement of intent that places Bacon, and the Jacobean period, at the opening of the modern age.

Bacon desired an institutional, as well as an epistemological, change; he suggested that universities, colleges and schools be directed ‘by amplitude of reward, by soundness of direction, and by the conjunction of labours’. We may see here the origin of the attitude that was to guide the Royal Society and to inform the inventive energies that emerged in the first years of the Industrial Revolution. Bacon himself was of a puritan disposition. He believed in the power of individual agency above the manifold allures of tradition and authority; he believed in observation rather than contemplation as the true instrument of practical reason. The beacons of utility and progress were always before him.

Bacon hoped that by their bright light ‘this third period of time will far surpass that of the Grecian and Roman learning’. It would be fair to say that he helped to change the pace and the direction of that new learning. He entitled a later work
Instauratio Magna
, ‘the great innovation’ or foundation; the frontispiece of that book shows a ship sailing through the two Pillars of Hercules that traditionally signified the limits of knowledge as well as of exploration. It is an emblem of a journey of discovery in defiance of the motto ‘
nec plus ultra’
, nothing further beyond. The reign of James I, therefore, can be said to mark the beginning of a voyage through strange seas of thought.

4

The god of money

The treasury was bare; the officers of the Crown were demanding their salaries, but there was no money to be found. Parliament was reluctant to vote taxes, and local officials in the counties were not zealous in collecting the proper revenues from their neighbours; much of the money raised on custom duties was diverted into the pockets of those who collected it.

When parliament reassembled in February 1610, it was in a fractious mood. Salisbury outlined the financial woes of the nation, but the members were more concerned to arrest the prodigal spending of the court rather than to vote new taxes. One of them, Thomas Wentworth, argued that it would be worse than useless to grant new moneys to the king if he refused to reduce his expenditure. He asked, ‘To what purpose is it to draw a silver stream into the royal cistern, if it shall daily run out thence by private cocks?’ Salisbury was not impressed. It was his understanding that the Commons had a duty to supply the needs of the king, after which their grievances might be addressed. The members, on the other hand, demanded that their complaints be answered before turning to the demands of the king.

A conference was called in which Salisbury put forward a long-meditated plan that became known as the ‘great contract’. The king would give up his feudal dues and tenures in exchange for a guaranteed annual sum; the Commons offered £100,000, only half of the amount James required. Parliament still seemed to believe that he should and could be as economical, or as parsimonious, as his predecessor. The negotiations were suspended.

On 21 May the king summoned both houses of parliament into his presence and upbraided them for sitting fourteen weeks without relieving his necessities. He would listen to what they had to say about increased taxation, but he would not be bound by their opinions. They must not question the royal prerogative in such matters. The members answered that, if this were the case, then the king might lawfully claim all that they owned. A deputation, armed with a petition of right, met James at his palace in Greenwich. Realizing that he had perhaps gone too far, he welcomed them and explained that he had been misunderstood. He always knew when to draw back from confrontation, a lesson never learned by his two more earnest sons.

The debate on the great contract resumed on 11 June, with the concomitant issues of supplies, revenues, grievances and impositions. When the grievances were presented to the king on a long roll of parchment, he remarked that it might make a pretty piece of tapestry. Concessions were yielded on both sides, but there was no end in sight. On 23 July James prorogued the parliament, and the members dispersed to their constituencies where the details of the great contract would further be discussed. Naturally enough the towns and counties were more concerned with their injuries than with the poverty of the king. The whole debate had served only to demonstrate the gulf between king and country, between court and realm.

The king was irate at the lack of progress. He resolved that he would never again endure ‘such taunts and disgraces as have been uttered of him’. If they came back and offered him all he wished, he would not listen to them. James had in any case already made a speech which rendered the political situation infinitely worse. In March 1610 he had assembled at Whitehall the Lords and the Commons. ‘The estate of monarchy’, he proclaimed, ‘is the supremest thing upon earth: 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.’ He went on to claim that kings ‘exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power on earth’. The sovereigns of the world can ‘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’. He admonished them that ‘you cannot so clip the wing of greatness. If a king be resolute to be a tyrant, all you can do will not hinder him.’ Did they really want him to be a mere doge of Venice?

James’s sentiments were not necessarily very welcome to the members of parliament. A contemporary news-writer, John Chamberlain, noted that they were ‘so little to their satisfaction that I hear it bred generally much discomfort’. If the parliament acquiesced in this bravura statement of kingship, ‘we are not like to leave to our successors the freedom we received from our forefathers’.

James did not understand common law, as his confrontations with Coke had suggested, and seemed to be unaware that the principle of absolute sovereignty was not one the English would even remotely entertain. It was noted that ‘the king speaks of France and Spain what they may do’. He did not realize, or pretended not to realize, that the sovereigns of those two countries were in a position very different from his own. He maintained the theory of divine right without any clear understanding of how it would operate in the context of parliamentary authority and the common law.

He may have adopted his position for less theoretical reasons. His hatred of the Presbyterian elders of Scotland derived from the fact that they directly challenged his authority. The nobility of that country, also, had been inclined to treat him as if he were one among equals. So his statements about his own powers are likely to have been in part a response to his difficult and sometimes dangerous position as king of Scotland. He had once observed that ‘the highest bench is the sliddriest to sit upon’.

He might also have been acutely aware that his temperament and behaviour were not always impeccably regal; he slobbered and walked at an odd angle; he kissed and slavered over his handsome favourites. In compensation for his apparent weaknesses, therefore, he may have been all the more eager to maintain the doctrine of divine right.