The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (41 page)

Though many of the queen’s favourite gallants were now dead, Gloriana herself refused to accept the passage of time. When she was nearly seventy she conceived a last great passion, for the Earl of Essex. The thirty-three-year-old’s exploits at Cadiz had made him the hero of the hour, and thanks to his relationship with the queen, he had become one of the most powerful men in the country. Elizabeth was said to be completely infatuated with him, allowing him all kinds of liberties, including quarrelling with her, which had never been granted to any other of her courtiers.

Essex’s ambitions were limitless. He was especially keen to dislodge Burghley’s son Sir Robert Cecil from the cherished position to which he had succeeded in the queen’s counsels. Essex may in fact have been aiming to marry the queen. Whatever the truth, when she sent him to Ireland in 1599 to put down the uprising of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, there was gossip that he intended to seize the throne by turning his Irish troops on the queen herself. Mysterious meetings with Tyrone after a very unsuccessful campaign added grist to the rumour mill. When Essex abandoned his post in Ireland and suddenly appeared one morning in the queen’s bedroom at her palace of Nonsuch before she was up, Elizabeth herself believed it was the beginning of a coup. She was only half dressed, and had not had time to put on the huge red wig which took years off her age or the white lead make-up that set her features in a youthful mask. Wisps of her grey hair were hanging down. In a mixture of fury and fear she banished Essex from court.

Essex began to keep wilder and wilder company, and in February 1601 he staged a revolt in London which, though intended to remove the Cecils from power and reinstate Essex himself at the queen’s side, seemed merely treasonous. He was tried and executed that same month. There is a story that Essex from the Tower despatched a great ruby ring the queen had given him in happier times to ask her to relent. But he sent it via the Countess of Nottingham and she never handed it on. Two years later when the countess was dying the queen came to visit her and the countess confessed what she had done. The queen clutched at her heart as if it would break and ran out of the room crying, ‘God may forgive you, but I never can.’ This may be an old fairy tale, but it is certainly true that no more than a month after the countess’s death the queen herself also passed away. In any case as her friends died out Elizabeth had fallen into permanently low spirits. She did not have the same rapport with her new ministers as she had had with her old, not even with Cecil’s son Robert. She was increasingly depressed as she was left alone in old age: ‘Now the wit of the fox is everywhere on foot, so as hardly a faithful or virtuous man may be found,’ she remarked mournfully to one courtier.

Elizabeth had shown her father’s genius for charming the Commons, and her own civil servants had Cromwell’s aptitude for managing Parliaments: Sir Robert Cecil insisted on sitting in the House of Commons to control it better and many new boroughs were created to return Elizabeth’s supporters. But by the end of her life the queen no longer had the energy to be amused as she once had been by the Commons’ outspokenness. A bitterness was growing up between her and the now large numbers of Puritan MPs whose persecution by the Elizabethan Church was unremitting. That old parsimoniousness came into its own: she spent little so as not to have to call Parliament. Nevertheless, unlike her successors, Elizabeth always knew when to give in to the Commons. In 1601 she appeared to be about to abandon the monopolies system, after years of complaints in the Commons. A monopoly allowed the holder to set the price of a particular product–Essex had been the holder of the sweet-wines monopoly until it was removed from him after his disgrace. Monopolies were an excellent way of rewarding favourites and courtiers, but they weighed very heavily on ordinary people. But when she heard one MP say there would soon be a monopoly in bread, with her usual sparkle she told the Commons how much she owed them for keeping her in touch with her kingdom and promised to abolish the system.

And a very glorious kingdom it was in many ways. The explorer Sir Walter Raleigh had founded the first English settlement in America, which he called Virginia in honour of the Virgin Queen. The charming and poetic Raleigh had first come to Elizabeth’s attention when he spread his cloak beneath her feet to save her embroidered shoes from a puddle. He soon became one of her intimate circle, falling from favour only when she discovered he had married without her permission. Raleigh introduced two new plants to this country, the potato and tobacco, which were cultivated by the redskinned men he had encountered in America. But while the potato thrived, particularly in Ireland where because it was cheap and easy to grow it became the poor man’s food, the English climate was too wet and cold for tobacco. Nevertheless Sir Walter established a popular taste for it and, as the colony of Virginia developed, tobacco became one of its principal exports. Expanding the nation’s consciousness was not without its risks: when Raleigh first put tobacco in a pipe and lit it as he had seen the ‘redskins’ do, his servant threw a bucket of water over him thinking he was on fire.

From 1576 England had its first purpose-built theatre in Halliwell Street, Shoreditch, in London, east of the City boundary on the north bank of the Thames. It had been opened by an actor and manager called James Burbage. When Burbage died in 1597, his sons Cuthbert and Richard (a famous actor and friend of Shakespeare) moved the entire building upriver to Bankside, Southwark, where it was rebuilt as the Globe. Having a proper theatre to work in had an electrifying effect on the volume of plays written. A host of young men like Christopher Marlowe, whose first play
Tamburlaine the Great
was performed in 1587, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare were inspired by the open-air theatre to make London a capital for drama. By the mid-1590s Londoners had thrilled to such favourites of our day as
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
,
Love’s Labour’s Lost
,
The Taming of the Shrew
,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and
Romeo and Juliet
. Such was Shakespeare’s success that the son of a glover from Stratford upon Avon in Warwickshire became part of the court as a groom of the chamber. In his many history plays Shakespeare was inspired by the historical chronicles collected by the printer Raphael Holinshed and perhaps by the works of the antiquarian William Camden, to become the Tudors’ bard. Blackening the Yorkists with plays like
Richard III
played an important part in Tudor propaganda. From Cranmer onwards the English language was being fashioned into a newly expressive instrument. The King James Bible, begun the year after Elizabeth’s death, is a monument to a period which saw an astonishing literary flowering and ended with the Metaphysical poets.

By February 1603 the great queen who had presided over almost half a century of excitement and expansion was fading fast. She remained in her apartments, without eating or sleeping, and refused to change her clothes or go to bed. Day after day she sat utterly silent, with her finger in her mouth, on cushions scattered round her bedchamber. When the diminutive Cecil said with tears in his eyes, ‘Madam, you must to bed,’ she suddenly stirred and said, ‘Little man! little man! Your father would have known that “must” is not a word we use to princes.’ But a few hours later she at last consented to be put into the carved bed, behind whose hangings she tossed and turned during her final hours. On 23 March she could no longer speak. As her favourite Archbishop Whitgift prayed on beside her, she drifted into unconsciousness and died at about two o’clock the following morning.

Elizabeth had always refused to name her heir, but Sir Robert Cecil announced that she had indicated it was to be James VI; he had a chain of horses waiting every ten miles so that his trusted messenger Sir Robert Carey could convey the news all the way to Scotland so that the succession might be ensured as swiftly and as safely as possible. Sixty-two hours later, James VI knew that he had become James I of England, and began to make his way south. The Elizabethan age was over. A troubled era awaited England when all the contradictions the queen had managed to reconcile by her powerful personality would break into open warfare. Nevertheless at the beginning of the seventeenth century England seemed in good shape: Ireland was subdued, another Spanish attempt to invade England through Ireland had been defeated by Lord Mountjoy at the Battle of Kinsale in 1600, and Protestantism was gaining hold in Wales after the first translation of the Bible into Welsh by William Morgan, Bishop of Asaph. The accession of James I and VI to the English throne achieved what centuries of English monarchs had sought but had never achieved: the whole island was united under a single king. More importantly in the sea of troubles beyond England, he was a Protestant king.

From the death of Elizabeth in 1603 until 1714, England was nominally ruled by the Scottish dynasty, of whom James I was the first king. By the end of that era she had become the largest trading and colonizing nation in the world. Her dauntless countrymen, who had been great seamen in Elizabeth’s reign, turned into colonists under the Stuarts. They settled the greater part of the east coast of North America and most of the West Indies, and had trading stations from west Africa to India. As this notable expansion in trade began to enrich the non-noble or middling classes, the financiers, the merchants, the businessmen and the lawyers, inevitably it enhanced the House of Commons’ sense of its own power. Conscious of the wealth they commanded, these classes desired more of a hand in government. Yet this conflicted with the new dynasty’s profound belief that Parliament, the law and the Church should be subservient to the crown.

During eighty years of convulsion and upheaval, driven by religious conviction, Englishmen struggled to decide whether the king’s will should be supreme or Parliament’s. It took a bloody civil war, a republican experiment after the execution of one king, then the deposition of another, to settle the question permanently in Parliament’s favour. From William and Mary onwards the line of succession passed into the gift of Parliament, and Protestantism became an unconditional qualification of the English monarchy. By the end of the seventeenth century Protestantism had become synonymous with the rule of Parliament and liberty, while Catholicism was identified with tyranny and royal absolutism.

But in the early days of James I’s reign there were few indications of the conflict that awaited his descendants. The arrival of the House of Stuart on the English throne unified the kingdom as never before. Thanks to the recently completed Tudor conquest of Ireland, James I was king of the western island in fact as well as in name, which his predecessors had never been. Like Elizabeth, he benefited from the good advice of Robert Cecil (created Earl of Salisbury in 1605), and he persisted with most of the old queen’s policies. But there was one considerable difference: James, who liked to think of himself as a great peacemaker, ended the war with Spain as soon as he came to the throne.

In many ways James’s greatest problem was that he was Scottish, and the Scots had been the traditional English enemy since time immemorial. He was a tactless Scottish king at that, too ready to offer niggling criticisms of his magnificent predecessor though he had depended on her pension for the previous quarter-century. James’s sensible idea to unify Scotland and England into one kingdom–Great Britain as he called it–by having one Parliament and one legal system was treated with derision by the English Parliament. Despite efforts to do so under Cromwell, it was not achieved until a hundred years later, in the reign of Queen Anne. All that James was able to effect in his lifetime was that every Scots man and woman born after he ascended the throne became English citizens; he also invented a flag for the unified country called the Union Jack–the crosses of St George and St Andrew combined.

Despite the smooth Salisbury’s best efforts, James’s promotion of Scottish rights got him off on the wrong foot with the court and the country. So did the very obvious way he reserved his closest friendships for a gaggle of Scottish favourites who made it clear that they were looking forward to plucking the rich southern goose for all it was worth. In spite of his erudition James’s attitude to his new country was perhaps not much more sophisticated than that of a Scots border raider looking south and spying the rich lands of the English. On his way south James had already shown his lack of interest in English customs by hanging a thief without trial by jury.

The English, who were used to Elizabeth’s commanding, glamorous and autocratic court, were moreover embarrassed by the informal and undignified ways of the Scottish king. Though he was the only child of the beautiful Queen of Scots and the elegant Lord Darnley, James I was not such a perfect physical specimen. Once-popular descriptions of his grotesque appearance and personal habits–a tendency to dribble because his tongue was too long, greasy hands because his skin was too delicate to wash–have been exposed as satire. But in the seventeenth century, when a king was supposed to be a warlike and masculine figure, his new subjects were contemptuous of James having his doublet and breeches specially padded against daggers because he was so fearful of being assassinated, and they were scandalized by his habit of always having good-looking young men about him. A weakness in his legs from childhood rickets meant he liked to lean on other men’s arms, and this only increased his reputation for effeminacy.

Although initially the English were predisposed in favour of a man as ruler, and one with a large number of children, James I was incapable of making the effort to endear himself to his new people. Everything he did annoyed the English, especially his refusal to attempt to learn or understand their customs. They also detested his self-important habit of lecturing all and sundry–he went so far as to describe himself as ‘the great schoolmaster of the whole land’.

Unlike the usurper Tudors, the Stuarts were highly conscious of their hereditary right to rule, their family having already been kings of Scotland for over two centuries. But James I combined scholarship with kingship, and was an immensely erudite author. His particular interest in theology drew him to many excited conclusions about the nature of royal government, which he published at length in books and pamphlets in the course of his reign. According to the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, a doctrine James had deduced for himself, the fact that God had provided kings to act as His representatives on earth entitled them to control every institution in the kingdom from the laws to Parliament. There was no place for Parliament in James’s scheme of things unless it was totally subservient to the king. A king, James earnestly told the House of Commons in one of his many lectures to that body, ‘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’.

James tended to dilate on this idea at every opportunity, whether at court or to Parliament, in his irritating Scottish accent. He had it promoted in Sunday sermons through the English Church. Unfortunately it clashed with the reality of life in England, which the Scottish king was loath to understand. Although the autocratic and God-like Tudors clearly believed in something along the lines of Divine Right, they had been far too cunning to put it into words, or to do anything without appearing to consult Parliament. The learned James strangely lacked the Tudor shrewdness for seeing what was under his nose. Welcome or not, the Tudors had acknowledged that during the previous three centuries Parliament had become something like the partner of the king. Thanks to its control of money bills the king could not govern without it. In return MPs expected to have their say on most matters in the kingdom–where, as they would tell the disbelieving James, there was a tradition of free speech. They had grown used to debating foreign policy, which fortunately in Elizabeth’s reign had largely jibed with their deeply Protestant patriotism, and to running affairs in the Commons with little interference from the king.

But James refused to see their point of view. From the beginning to the end of his reign he managed to offend and be offended every time he met MPs. The boldness of their demands amazed him and affronted the royal dignity which he was determined to uphold. For unlike Scotland, where he had been at the mercy of the Kirk (the Church) and the powerful Scots nobles who had kidnapped him twice, England had a reputation for strong monarchs. He spent a good deal of time complaining about the House of Commons to anyone who would listen, not least the delighted Spanish ambassador. The highly educated James persisted in addressing MPs in a condescending fashion as if they were his children, and his inability to see any point of view other than his own truly merited the French king Henry IV’s description of him as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’.

James I’s reign was almost immediately marked by drama and discontent. There were two factions at court, one led by Robert Cecil, the other by the great Elizabethan gallant, explorer and poet Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh found himself a casualty of James’s favouring Cecil when he was removed from his prestigious position as Captain of the Guard. In the heady atmosphere of the new regime the impulsive and now embittered Raleigh was drawn into a conspiracy known as the Main Plot, to abduct Cecil.

No sooner had the Main Plot been discovered than the Bye Plot emerged. Wilder spirits among the Catholics, who were disappointed that the son of the martyred Mary Queen of Scots had not immediately suspended the draconian Elizabethan penal laws against them, planned to kidnap James and replace him on the throne with a Catholic cousin. With the uncovering of this plot, Catholics were treated even worse than before. While Raleigh himself was condemned to a life in the Tower for the next thirteen years (where he wrote
A History of the World
and much poetry), the very Puritan House of Commons enforced the penalties against Catholics to a level which brought them to despair.

Henceforth if any Catholic fell behind in paying the monthly fine of twenty pounds for not attending Protestant services, they incurred the crippling penalty of forfeiting two-thirds of their property. As the fines worked out at £240 a year, which was beyond the reach of men in respectable but moderate circumstances, quite soon the ordinary Catholic was ruined. A real element of persecution came into play, and there were night-time searches of private houses by armed soldiers looking for priests. The Church of England clergy became spies in their own parishes, required to denounce to the authorities all those who were not attending Protestant service on Sunday in their local church. A final insult awaited Catholics when they were refused burial in Protestant graveyards.

Even the wealthier Catholics had their lives destroyed for their faith. Protestant bishops were bound to excommunicate prominent Catholics in their dioceses and then certify their names in Chancery, which prevented Catholics from leaving money to relatives by deed or will. To add to the Catholics’ terrors, rumours were circulating that in the next Parliament measures would be taken to ensure the total extirpation of their faith. Hostile statements from the king and the fierce language of the Bishop of London in a sermon at St Paul’s Cross seemed proof to the exhausted Catholics that the rumours were true. It also convinced the extremists among them that something would have to be done. They decided that their best hope was to blow up the Puritan Houses of Parliament on 5 November 1605 when the king would open Parliament for that term. Having kidnapped the king’s daughter Princess Elizabeth, they would proclaim her queen on condition that the Roman Catholic religion was restored.

The leader of the plot was a Warwickshire gentleman named Robert Catesby, but the man who laid the gunpowder trail in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament on the night of 4 November was Guy Fawkes, a soldier of fortune who had fought in the Netherlands. From his name derives the tradition of giving ‘a penny for the old guy’, and it is he who is burned in effigy every 5 November. Fawkes was discovered crouching by the barrels of gunpowder with his dark lantern–one of the Catholic peers, Lord Mounteagle, having warned Salisbury, his conscience stricken by the thought of his fellow Catholic peers being blown up. It has since become part of the tradition of the Opening of Parliament for Beefeaters to conduct a ceremonial search of the cellars.

Appalled by the near miss, the government acted with great swiftness and savagery. In order to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, the authorities arrested any Catholic they had suspicions of, without troubling to obtain proof of their involvement. Guy Fawkes himself was hideously tortured and the Catholic community was scoured from top to bottom. In fact the whole country, including ordinary Catholics, was thrown into a state of shock by the sheer enormity of the assassination attempt. This was reflected in Shakespeare’s play
Macbeth
, written during the plot’s aftermath and performed six months later, which reverberates with the horror of an attack on the Lord’s Anointed. The government was particularly keen to get its hands on the Jesuits, who ever since their formation had been regarded as dangerous enemies of the English state. The authorities moved to arrest three prominent Jesuits who were important leaders of the Catholic community, Father Gerard, Father Garnet and Father Greenway.

Although Father Gerard and Father Greenway escaped to the continent, Father Garnet managed only to get to a house called Hindlip near Worcester which belonged to Thomas Habington, brother-in-law of Lord Mounteagle. There he lived in fear and trembling, sending protestations of innocence to Cecil, hiding in one of the many priest-holes constructed a generation before by a Catholic carpenter sworn to secrecy. Despite Mrs Habington’s brave attempts to mislead local magistrates who had been tipped off that he was in their vicinity, Father Garnet was found lying in a tiny chamber carved out under the hearth of a fireplace.

As a result of the Gunpowder Plot, all Catholics had become deeply unpopular. But with the arrest and interrogation of Father Garnet the idea that Catholics were natural traitors took a much stronger grip on the English imagination, and proved hard to eradicate. Loyalty to foreigners, whether Philip of Spain or the pope, had put a question mark over the Catholic community ever since England turned Protestant. When it emerged that Garnet had actually known about the plan to blow up Parliament because under the seal of the confessional another priest had told him of Catesby’s own confession three months earlier, public opinion turned even more dramatically against Catholics, many of whom decided to seek a less hostile environment on the continent.

New laws forbade Catholics to appear at court or to dwell within ten miles of the boundaries of London. They could not move more than five miles from home without a special licence which had to be signed by four neighbouring magistrates. A career in the professions was barred to them–there could be no Catholic doctors, surgeons, lawyers, executors, guardians, judges or members of any town corporation. To remain a Catholic meant in effect renouncing society or refusing to be part of it–hence the word ‘recusant’ used of old Catholic families (from the Latin verb
recusare
, which means to refuse). And those recusant families clung on somehow to their religion, but in the process became very poor and unworldly and remained so for over two centuries, until the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829.