The Cradle King (36 page)

We are of all nations the people most loving and most reverently obedient to our Prince, yet are we (as time hath often borne witness) too easy to be seduced to make rebellion, upon very slight grounds. Our fortunate and oft proved valour in wars abroad, our hearty and reverent obedience to our princes at home, hath bred us a long, and a thrice happy peace: our peace hath bred wealth: and peace and wealth hath brought forth a general sluggishness, which makes us wallow in all sorts of idle delights, and soft delicacies, the first seeds of the subversion of all great monarchies. Our clergy are become negligent and lazy, our nobility and gentry prodigal, and sold to their private delights, our lawyers covetous, our common people prodigal and curious; and generally all sorts of people more careful for their private ends, than for their mother the Commonwealth.
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To remedy this state of affairs, the anonymous author continues, it was up to the King, as ‘the proper physician of his politic-body’ to purge it of those diseases. He should maintain public quiet and prevent commotions ‘by a certain mild, and yet just form of government’; to shame the people ‘of our sluggish delicacy’ through his personal example and that of his court; ‘to stir us up to the practice again of all honest exercises, and martial shadows of war’; and by his moderation, ‘to make us ashamed of our prodigality’. In particular, the good King should aim to awaken the clergy to be diligent; to try and punish ‘partial, covetous and bribing lawyers’; and ‘generally by the example of his own person, and by the due execution of good laws, to reform and abolish, piece and piece, these old and evil grounded abuses’.
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James thought he could effect this reformation through proclamations, speeches and his writings. But he knew that to change laws he had to turn to Parliament, and on 11 January 1604, just before the Hampton Court Conference, he called his first English Parliament. He may have thought he understood the mechanics of Parliament – had he not been attending for thirty years? – but, once again, English culture would surprise him. To English eyes, Scotland’s Parliament was risibly puny. This was because the King of Scots had a firm grasp on Parliament through the ‘Lords of the Articles’, a committee that controlled what legislation could reach the Parliament for debate: in 1598, James instructed his son Henry in all seriousness to ‘hold no Parliaments, but for necessity of new laws, which would be but seldom’.
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When James described Parliament as being ‘nothing else but the King’s great council’, and an advisory council at that, he was attempting to transfer his understanding of his first Parliament on to his new one. He demanded that all proposals for laws should be submitted to him twenty days before the opening of Parliament, so that he might select which would be sent on to Parliament. No other legislation would be debated, and even those laws selected by him and passed by Parliament would only become statutes with his final approval: ‘and if there be anything that I dislike, they raze it out before’.

Such demands were incredibly insulting to the English Parliament which, by the time of James’s accession, was a sturdy body. Henry VIII had come to rely on Parliament to bring about the legislative changes he needed to carry through his Reformation in Church and state, and in the forty-five years of Elizabeth’s reign it had consolidated its powers, the members of the House of Commons becoming more affluent, and gaining a sense of their own individual and corporate importance. Although outright battles between Queen and Commons had been avoided, calling a Parliament had become a risky business for Elizabeth: it was a forum in which members’ complaints were very publicly aired. By 1604 this pattern was well enough established that the Commons were bound to want to obtain certain concessions from the new King, in particular the redress of grievances arising from outmoded feudal tenures, and from antiquated crown rights such as purveyance (the fixing of prices for supplies to the King’s court), monopolies and wardships. Implied in most of these was a decrease in not only the revenue but the authority of the Crown, shifting power to Parliament.

James’s priority in the 1604 Parliament, on the other hand, was to bring his two kingdoms of England and Scotland into a Union.
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Writing to the Privy Council of Scotland in January 1604, he was confident that the case for union did not need to be made. ‘For that our equal right to both the crowns mon [must] needs affect us with an equal care to both their weals, and that being now joined together and under one head, as they have been of long time past in one religion and language, and one common habitation in an isle disjoined from the great continent of the world, our princely care mon be extended to see them join and coalesce together in a sincere and perfect union, and as two twins bred in one belly, love one another as no more two but one estate.’
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In his opening address to the English Parliament, James spoke at length of the natural reasons for the union of the kingdoms, and demanded rhetorically whether it was not ‘manifest that God by His Almighty providence hath preordained it so to be? Hath not God first united these two kingdoms both in language, religion, and similitude of manners? Yea, hath he not made us all in one island, compassed with one sea, and of itself by nature so indivisible, as almost those that were borderers themselves on the late Borders, cannot distinguish, nor know, nor discern their own limits?’ No sea, no great river, no mountain separated these two countries, ‘only small brooks, or demolished little walls’ – in fact, England and Scotland were divided ‘in apprehension’ rather than in ‘effect’. They were merely waiting for James who ‘united the right and title of both in my person, alike lineally descended of both the Crowns’. Just as Henry VII had brought to an end the Wars of the Roses by uniting the battling houses of Lancaster and York, James, Henry’s descendant, would bring about ‘the Union of two ancient and famous kingdoms’, an ‘inward Peace annexed to my person’. This new marriage could not be broken by divorce. ‘What God hath conjoined then, let no man separate. I am the husband, and all the whole isle is my lawful wife; I am the head, and it is my body; I am the shepherd, and it is my flock. I hope therefore that no man will be so unreasonable as to think that I that am a Christian King under the Gospel, should be a polygamist and husband to two wives; that I being the head, should have a divided and monstrous body; or that being the shepherd to so fair a flock … should have my flock parted in two.’ To split England from Scotland was to split James himself: ‘As God hath made Scotland the one half of this isle to enjoy my birth, and the first and most unperfect half of my life, and you here to enjoy the perfect and last half thereof, so can I not think that any would be so injurious to me, not in their thoughts or wishes, as to cut asunder the one half of me from the other.’
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While James had no doubt that his cause was just, Parliament had other concerns. Within the opening days of this first Parliament there emerged a dispute which, while relatively minor in its own right, set the pattern for what were to be regular, and perhaps inevitable, showdowns between the King and the Commons. This dispute concerned parliamentary elections. In his proclamation summoning the Parliament, the King had directed that returns were to be sent to the Court of Chancery where they would be checked to ensure that nothing was out of order; if irregularities were detected, then the offending return would be rejected, and a second election would have to take place. The Commons resented this royal intervention because it gave another body the right to determine the membership of the Lower House. This was by no means a Jacobean innovation (the Commons had protested against such a direction eighteen years earlier) but the first Parliament of a new sovereign seemed a good moment to iron out such long-standing anomalies.

The possibility arose when a Buckinghamshire election was contested, in which Sir Francis Goodwin had secured the larger number of votes and was duly returned. But Chancery found a technicality whereby the return was invalid; a new writ was issued and in the second election Sir John Fortescue was returned. Fortescue was well known to be the government’s preferred choice as member, and so the Lower House decided to ignore the second election, and on 23 March instructed Goodwin to take his seat. Four days later the matter flared again. The Lords asked, ‘for the removal of all stumbling blocks’, that they confer with the Commons on the matter; the Commons declined on the grounds that ‘it did not stand with the honour and order of the House to give account of any of their proceedings and doings’.
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At this stage, the King intervened. He ‘conceived himself engaged and touched in honour’ by the case, he told the Commons, and they should confer with the Lords on the matter. The Commons found this message ‘so extraordinary and unexpected’ that they asked to discuss the matter with the King himself.
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For his part, James had not expected this development, but he agreed to a meeting the following morning. There he reiterated that he had no intention to impeach parliamentary privileges, but pointed out that the Commons should realise that they derived all their privileges from him, and he therefore expected that such privileges should not be turned against him. As for the precedents they had offered, these had been taken from the reigns ‘of minors, of tyrants, of women, of simple kings’ and were not to be given too much credit. They should confer with the judges, and report their decision to the Privy Council.
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James’s words hit hard at the Commons’ sense of themselves as a body. They spent time debating the legal origins of privilege, which James had raised, and sent a lengthy tract to the King to justify the position they had taken. On 5 April, James sent back a message by the Speaker of the House. He had as great a desire to maintain their privileges as ever any prince had – indeed, as they had themselves. Having considered the matter carefully, balancing views of the Commons, his Council and judges, he was ‘now distracted in judgement’. So he ‘desired and commanded, as an absolute King’ that the conference between Commons and judges go ahead, with his Privy Council in attendance. The message was greeted with ‘amazement and silence’. In living memory, no one dared to speak to the Commons like this. ‘The Prince’s command is like a thunderbolt,’ exclaimed one member, ‘his command upon our allegiance like the roaring of a lion. To his command there is no contradiction.’
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The Commons were represented by Francis Bacon, whose performance was also a harbinger of many to come. The Commons, he announced, were ready to reconsider their decision, which they had never done before. James graciously replied that he would not press his royal prerogative against his subjects, but would instead allow free rein to his sweet and kindly nature by confirming their privileges. In return, they should agree to a compromise: both previous elections be voided, a new writ issued. There was hesitation on the part of the Commons’ delegates, but they finally accepted. James was happy. Although the Devil had cast in this bone of contention, he pronounced, God had turned it to good, for he, the King, had witnessed the loyalty of his people, and they had seen his grace and bounty. Everyone was happy. James thought he had established his prerogative; the Commons thought they had established one of their privileges by confirming their right to settle election disputes.
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None of this helped James’s plans for the Union. The subject was debated from mid-April onwards, but decisions were constantly deferred. Much time was spent on the proposed name of ‘Britain’; many members believed that the Union in government should be settled before the Union in name. On 20 April James met a committee on the Union and explained that he proposed two points: ‘first that by a Bill or Act there should be recognition that his just possession of the Crowns of both the famous, ancient and honourable nations of England and Scotland whereby they are united under one allegiance should be rightly understood of all men. The second was that commissioners might be appointed to confer with Scottish commissioners for the making of a resolution to be propounded to the next two Parliaments of England and Scotland.’
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But the Commons found the very name of ‘Britain’ a sticking point. They could not lose the ancient name of England. If they altered the name of England might they not accidentally abrogate all the laws of England, and force their re-enactment? Would laws passed in future be binding on all of Britain? Furthermore, ‘Britain’ had negative connotations – were not the Britons savages and pagans? The change in name must wait until the change in government was properly sorted out.

On 1 May, the MP for Launceston, Sir Thomas Lake, James’s Latin secretary and Keeper of the Public Records, read to the Commons a letter from the King. Resistance to the Union was nothing more than ‘jealousy and distrust’, he declared, stirred up by ‘the curiosity of a few giddy heads’. They could either yield to Providence and embrace what God was giving them, ‘and by the away-taking of that partition wall, which already by God’s Providence in my blood is rent asunder, to establish my throne and your body politic in a perpetual and flourishing peace; or else, contemning God’s benefits so freely offered unto us, to spit and blaspheme in His face by preferring war to peace, trouble to quietness, hatred to love, weakness to strength, and division to union; to sow the seeds of discord to all our posterities; to dishonour your King; to make both me and you a proverb of reproach in the mouths of all strangers, and all enemies to this nation, and all enviers of my greatness’, and to force England to build new fortifications along the Borders.
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The Commons were not impressed by this bombast, and, ultimately, James had no choice but to agree not to alter his title to ‘King of Great Britain’; Parliament did however concede to appoint a commission to look into matters pertaining to the Union.