Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (9 page)

Here are your ‘pretenders to wit! Your Three Cranes, Mitre and Mermaid men.’ These three taverns were the haunt of poetasters and men of supposed good taste. ‘Moorfields, Pimlico Path or the Exchange’ are mentioned a few moments later as places of resort for tired Londoners. In the puppet play at the close of the proceedings, the myth of Hero and Leander is set in the city.

Littlewit:
As, for the Hellespont, I imagine our Thames here; and then Leander I make a dyer’s son, about Puddle Wharf; and Hero a wench o’ the Bankside, who going over one morning to Old Fish Street, Leander spies her land at Trig Stairs.

It is remarkable that ordinary Londoners were supposed to be wholly familiar with the old story, perhaps from Marlowe’s poem published sixteen years earlier.

Many of the play’s allusions are lost to us, and many of the words are now strange or unfamiliar. A ‘hobby-horse’ was a prostitute. An ‘undermeal’ was a light snack. To ‘stale’ was to urinate. When one character discloses that ‘we were all a little stained last night’, he means that they were drunk. ‘Whimsies’ were the female genitalia. A ‘diet-drink’ was a medicine. A Catholic recusant was derided as ‘a seminary’.

The visitors to the fair often refer to ‘vapour’ or ‘vapours’ that can mean anything or nothing. To vapour is to talk nonsense or to brag; a vapour is a frenzy or a passing mood or a mad conceit of the town. In the popular ‘game of vapours’ each participant had to deny that which the previous speaker had just said. London seethed with vapours.

Quarlous:
Faith, and to any man that vapours me the lie, I do vapour that. [
Strikes him
].

It is in a sense like watching a foreign world, except that there are still flashes of recognition and understanding. And then once more we are part of the Jacobean city.

7

What news?

The trial of Somerset and his wife marked the beginning of a deterioration at court, where it was believed that the king had become both more cunning and more cowardly; his learning had once been praised but now behind his back he was called a pedant. His new fancy for Villiers provoked scorn, jealousy and even disgust. His own health also showed signs of decline. His doctor wrote subsequently that ‘in 1616 pain and weakness spread to knees, shoulders and hands, and for four months he had to stay in a bed or in a chair’. He became impatient and morose and bad-tempered. The doctor went on to say that ‘he is extremely sensitive, most impatient of pain; and while it tortures him with violent movements, his mind is tossed as well, thus augmenting the evil’.

James drank frequently and immoderately. He perspired heavily, and caught frequent colds; he was always sneezing. His face had become red; he was growing fat, and his hair was turning white. At the age of fifty, he was rapidly ageing. He was still averse to business and preferred to hunt, but now he rode more slowly and allowed his horse to be guided by grooms.

So the eyes of aspirants turned more often to the heir. Charles, at the age of fifteen, had acquired many of the virtues of a prince. He was a champion at tennis and at tilting; he delighted in horses and in masques; he was already a connoisseur of art and music. Yet he was also pious and reserved; he was silent and even secretive; he blushed at an indelicate word. He was 5 feet 4 inches in height, and had a pronounced stutter.

The Venetian ambassador reported that his chief endeavour ‘is to have no other aim than to second his father, to follow him and do his pleasure and not to move except as his father does. Before his father he always aims at suppressing his own feelings.’ So Charles grew to be uncertain and hesitant, apt to cling to the few maxims that he had already imbibed. He was too modest for his own good, perhaps stunned by the loquacity of his father and the beauty of Villiers. When he did try to act forcefully, in later life, he often descended into rash action without any thought of the consequences. His piety, and sense of divine mission, also rendered him humourless and strict.

In the summer of the year the king turned upon his judges. Edward Coke, the chief justice of the king’s bench, had often angered James by his continual assertion of common law over the claims of royal power. The king called the judges before him in June 1616, and accused them of insubordination; they fell on their knees, pledging their loyalty and obedience. The king then asked each of them in turn whether they would consult with him before pronouncing on matters of the prerogative. All assented, with the notable exception of Coke himself, who simply answered that he would behave in a manner fitting for a high judge. The king turned upon him, calling him a knave and a sophist. James proceeded to the Star Chamber a few days later, where he delivered a long speech on his zeal for justice. ‘Kings are properly judges,’ he told his councillors, ‘and judgement properly belongs to them from God … I remember Christ’s saying, “My sheep hear my voice”, and so I assure myself, my people will most willingly hear the voice of me, their own shepherd and king.’ It was not the most modest of his pronouncements.

Coke was not destined to remain in the king’s service for much longer. He was removed from the privy council and ordered to desist from his summer circuit of the kingdom; he was told to revise his law reports ‘wherein (as his Majesty was informed) there were many exorbitant and extravagant opinions’. Five months later, in November 1616, he was dismissed from office. He was, in a phrase of the time, ‘quite off the books’. The king had rid himself of a turbulent judge but, in the process, he had turned Coke into a martyr for the rule of law and the liberties of the people.

The nature and the character of the ‘people’, however, could be understood in a multitude of ways. The population itself was growing rapidly until 1620, with the consequence that the number of the poor also began to rise. As late as 1688 it was reported that over half of the population, both rural and urban, were below the level of subsistence. The purchasing power of the wages of agricultural labourers or minor craftsmen was in relative terms at its lowest point for generations. In 1616 it was recorded that in Sheffield, out of a population of little over 2,000, 725 persons were ‘not able to live without the charity of their neighbours’; they were all ‘begging poor’. There were 160 others who ‘are not able to abide the storm of one fortnight’s sickness but would thereby be driven to beggary’. Their children ‘are constrained to work sore to provide them necessaries’.

The inequalities of society were such that, in this same period of want, the prosperity of the rural gentry and the wealthier citizens increased dramatically; this in itself may help to account for the great period of building and rebuilding that culminated in the Jacobean country house with its elaborate ornamentation and astonishing skyline.

It also became plain that, as the gentry increased in wealth and status, so the members of the old aristocracy lost some of their authority. The rise of the country gentleman in turn materially affected the power and prestige of the Commons, of which they were the most considerable element; it was said that they could buy out the Lords three times over. In a later treatise,
Oceana
, James Harrington stated that the work of government was ‘peculiar unto the genius of a gentleman’. The decline in the fortunes of the old lords, in favour of the rising gentry, has been variously explained. It had to do with the loss of wealth and territory; but it was also the natural consequence of diminished military power. The king in any case had been selling peerages and the new baronetcies for cash, thus diminishing the honourable worth of any title.

As the gentry rose in influence, so there was a corresponding increase in what might be called the professional classes. The number of lawyers rose by 40 per cent between 1590 and 1630, in a period when doctors and surgeons also multiplied. The merchant class, too, was now thriving and was no longer considered to be a demeaning connection; the younger sons of squires were happy to become apprentices with the hope of an eventual rise to partnership. The division between rich and poor had been sharpened while, at the same time, the wealthier elements of society were drawing together.

The gentry now also controlled the machinery of local government. The lords-lieutenant and deputies, the sheriffs and justices of the peace, were indispensable for the order and safety of the country; the king and his council wholly relied upon them for such matters as the collection of taxes, the regulation of trade and the raising of troops for any foreign war. In turn a form of local government grew up at the quarter sessions, where the most important men of the county or borough met to discuss the business of the community. They were collectively known as the commission of the peace, and their clerk was called the clerk of the peace. Their authority filtered down to the high constables in the hundred and to the petty constables, the churchwardens and overseers of the poor in the parish.

The country gentry had also in large part taken against the court. In a local election of 1614 both candidates claimed to represent ‘the country’ and denied charges of ‘turning courtier’. Soon enough ‘court’ and ‘country’ factions would manifest themselves. The ways of Whitehall were already deeply suspect. The king’s extravagance required higher taxation. The practice of purveyance, by which the court could effectively seize goods and services for royal use, had become iniquitous. Rumours of the king’s homosexual passions also circulated through the nation. At the beginning of 1617 George Villiers, now Viscount Villiers, was created earl of Buckingham and appointed Master of the Horse. His lands were extensive, his income immense, but he had also acquired a monopoly of patronage. Any aspirant for office had to transact his business with the earl, and Buckingham insisted that all his clients acknowledged him as their only patron. Lucy Hutchinson, a memoirist of puritan persuasion, wrote that he had risen ‘upon no merit but that of his beauty and prostitution’.

An office was considered to be a family property. The great officials were permitted, and expected, to appoint their successors; of course they made their choice after an appropriate fee was exacted. Negotiations took place between the incumbent of the office, the favourite for the post and the various aspiring candidates. Some officials were the private employees of other officials. All that mattered was who you knew and how rich you were. When the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster fell vacant in 1618, forty-three competitors vied for the post which was being sold for approximately £8,000. The administrators of the navy were particularly corrupt, taking bribes, appointing private servants as public officials, diverting supplies, paying themselves double allowances, ordering inferior material and pocketing the difference in cost, employing ships for merchant journeys and charging accordingly.

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.