The Early Stuart Kings, 1603-1642

Graham E Seel, David L. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415224000
• eBook ISBN: 9781134592869
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In 1603 King James I ascended the throne to become the first King of a united England and Scotland. There followed a period of increasing religious and political discord, culminating in the English Civil War. The Early Stuart Kings, 1603-1642 explores these complex events and the roles of the key personalities of the time - James I and VI, Charles I, Buckingham, Stratford and Laud.

1
JAMES VI AND THE ELIZABETHAN LEGACY

BACKGROUND NARRATIVE

Within a few hours of Elizabeth I’s death at Richmond early on the morning of 24 March 1603, James VI of Scotland was proclaimed in London as James I of England. Three days later, a despatch rider, Sir Robert Carey, arrived in Edinburgh to convey the news to the King in person. James’s accession to the English throne was remarkably peaceful: according to one contemporary there was ‘no tumult, no contradiction, no disorder’, and as he journeyed south into England his new subjects warmly welcomed him, ‘their eyes flaming nothing but sparkles of affection’. ¹ Early in May he arrived in London.

This opening chapter sets the scene for James’s reign by considering two key issues. First, how far was the England that he inherited from Elizabeth a flawed inheritance that presented its new ruler with serious problems? Second, to what extent did his lengthy experience as King of Scotland prepare him for his new role and give him a training that could usefully be transferred to England? These two questions provide excellent startingpoints for an account of English history under the early Stuarts.

ANALYSIS (1): TO WHAT EXTENT CAN THE ELIZABETHAN LEGACY BE CONSIDERED A DAMNOSA HEREDITAS , A PROBLEMATIC INHERITANCE?

Assessment of the nature of the Elizabethan legacy is of course central to any understanding of the reign of James and perhaps even his successors. On the one hand, if it is considered that the Queen bequeathed a governmental system that was in rude health, then it follows that the problems encountered by James were of his own making. For a long time this was the established picture, fashioned in the first instance by Elizabeth’s own propaganda designed to extol the virtues of Gloriana, Virgin Queen and Protestant saviour, and latterly by Sir John Neale’s classic biography published in 1934 in which he presented the image of an all-wise, all-competent national leader. ² On the other hand, if it is reckoned that Elizabeth bequeathed a damnosa hereditas, then it follows that James was not the author of at least some of the problems he encountered.

A large body of writing favours this latter view, historians frequently concurring that there existed a ‘crisis of the 1590s’. ³ Gordon Donaldson has concluded that ‘the cares and burdens [of the Jacobean period] were not of James’s making; they constituted the damnosa hereditas left by Elizabeth Tudor, a sovereign utterly careless of the well-being of her kingdom after her own demise, who had allowed problems to build up in her later years and whose reign had ended in anti-climax, in decline, almost in failure’. ⁴ More recently, J. A. Sharpe has argued that ‘early in [James’s] reign at least many of his problems arose from having to clear up the mess which his predecessor had left him’. ⁵ Certainly, in a number of respects Elizabeth seems to have left an awkward inheritance for her successor.

First, the country which James regarded as ‘the land of promise’ had in fact, by the time of his accession, been racked by the impact of eighteen years of war against Spain. In the county of Kent 6,000 men were impressed between 1591 and 1602 at a time when that county’s total population was no more than 130,000. Since 1585 the total number of men impressed for service in the Netherlands, France, Portugal and Ireland was 105,810. To the detriment of trade, the pressure of war had demanded that the Queen commandeer ships for naval service. Local taxation escalated since counties were responsible for such things as the provision of stocks of arms and armour, the repair of coastal forts and the payment of muster masters. During the 1590s the levies of men and equipment for overseas service were costing each county up to £2,000 every year, added to which were the demands of prerogative taxation. A forced loan was demanded in each of the years 1588, 1590, 1597 and 1601. Ship Money, a tax levied for the provision of ships, which was traditionally only paid by those communities on the coast, was now extended to inland areas.

Coupled with periodic outbreaks of plague and disastrous harvests in every year from 1594 to 1597, the pressures of war seem to have induced a malfunctioning of the relationship between the centre and the localities. By the time of the Queen’s death wide-scale passive resistance to the demands of the Privy Council was commonplace. The county of Suffolk, for example, failed to respond to the Council’s request for money in order to equip cavalry destined for Ireland. In March 1592 thirteen counties were identified as having failed to return certificates of their forces despite the fact that the Privy Council had requested them eighteen months earlier. The strongest opposition came to the demands for the payment of Ship Money. The Justices of the Peace of Suffolk, having put up persistent opposition to Ship Money, were accused by the Privy Council of having encouraged ‘the people to discontentments [rather] than to concur in Her Majesty’s service’. ⁶ In 1598 resistance was reported from Oxfordshire, Norfolk, Suffolk, Rutland, London and Coventry. London forced the Queen to drop her demand for ten ships in December 1596. Meanwhile, the overseas levies, composed mostly of ‘either [the] old, diseased, boys or common rogues’, mutinied rather than follow instructions. ⁷ In July 1602 a soldier stabbed his officer. Unsurprisingly, therefore, some historians have talked of James having inherited a ‘slide to disaster’ in the counties, country gentlemen having become dangerously alienated from the Court. ⁸

Second, although the traditional historical verdict is that the Queen distributed patronage in a way which ensured that no group felt excluded from any hope of obtaining favour, she nevertheless bequeathed to James a dangerous factional imbalance. Always short of money, especially after 1585, Elizabeth lacked the means to lubricate the patronage system effectively. Thus, after 1598 Robert Cecil so dominated the administration that he deprived his rivals of access to the person of the monarch, a circumstance which drove Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex to rebellion in 1601. Consequently, ‘James VI succeeded to a realm in which the control, no less than the fruits of patronage, were in the hands of one faction’. ⁹ From this state of affairs there might easily have sprung another rebellion if James had not very quickly met the desire for Court office among the nobility and gentry, pent up throughout Elizabeth’s reign. He therefore repaid some of his political debts by doubling the size of the Privy Council (to twenty-six) and tripled the number of knights (to about 1,500) in the first year of his reign as James I.

Third, Elizabethan parsimony not only distorted the patronage system but ensured that by 1603 corruption in government circles was endemic. Consequently, the reputation of the Court was besmirched by a number of scandals involving the buying and selling of office and the milking of the royal coffers. For instance, George Goring, Receiver-General of the Court of Wards from 1584 to 1594, died owing the Crown £19,777 although his official salary was £66 per annum. Burghley’s income as Master of the Wards for the two-year period 1596–1598 was £3,301, representing almost entirely receipts from private suitors as ‘arrangement fees’ for eleven grants of wardship at a time when his official salary was £133 per annum. Finally, Sir Thomas Shirley, Treasurer at War, enjoyed an income which ranged between £3,000 and £16,000 per annum, though his official salary was £365. As John Guy has concluded, ‘the theory that there was a deterioration of public morality in the 1590s and 1600s [therefore] bears examination’. ¹⁰ It seemed that it was very much the case that ‘for a [monarch] not to be bountiful were a fault’. ¹¹

Fourth, James inherited a Church which had been systematically plundered by Elizabeth and her predecessors. In 1590 Matthew Sutcliffe lamented how laymen had ‘devoured the late lands and abbeys’. ¹² Thus, recognising that many of the abuses in the Church, especially pluralism and non-residence, were the consequences of poverty, James sought to re-endow the Church, especially by liberating tithes from laymen and the universities. However, attempts to restore impropriated tithes to ministers were dashed on the rocks of vested economic interests among the laity and contributed to ill-feeling between James and the political nation.

Fifth, the last two Parliaments of Elizabeth (in 1597–1598 and 1601) proved to be the most fractious of the whole reign. Keenly fought disputes centred upon monopolies, responsible – among other things – for doubling the price of steel, tripling the price of starch and causing the price of imported salt to rise elevenfold. One MP complained of ‘a country that groans under the burden’ of monopolies and went on to call their owners ‘bloodsuckers of the commonwealth’. ¹³ After a mob petitioned Parliament to complain that they were being ‘imprisoned and robbed by monopolists’ Robert Cecil cautioned against the ‘people’ being involved in public matters. The crisis was at last defused by the Queen agreeing that some monopolies ‘should be presently repealed, some suspended, and none put in execution but such as should first have a trial according to the law for the good of her people’. ¹⁴ It seemed that James could realistically expect difficulties in his dealings with Parliament.

Sixth, the Queen’s successors suffered especially from her decision to put political goodwill before fiscal efficiency. In particular, the Elizabethan regime failed to revise subsidy assessments in response to the extraordinary price inflation of the sixteenth century. Consequently, few taxpayers were assessed at anywhere near their actual wealth. One Sussex JP estimated that ‘the rich were often rated … much too low, at not a fortieth part of their wealth’. ¹⁵ In a comment in Parliament in 1601, Raleigh suggested that ‘our estates that be £30 or £40 in the Queen’s books are not the hundredth part of our wealth’. ¹⁶ In 1601 the Earl of Derby was taxed on £400, though his rent roll was valued at £4,035 per annum. Inflation and static tax assessments, a reluctance to tax wage-earners alongside substantial property owners and a system which encouraged evasion thus combined to ensure a dramatic collapse in the yield of a subsidy, from £130,000 in the middle of Elizabeth’s reign to £70,000 by 1621 and to £55,000 by 1628.

The Queen coped with the declining value of a subsidy by pursuing the dual policy of penny-pinching and selling royal lands – between 1589 and 1601 this last measure realised £608,505. However, the sale of Crown lands, combined with the fall in the value of money, resulted in a rapid decline in royal income from the Crown estates: from £200,000 in the 1530s, to £72,000 in 1619 and no more than £10,000 in the 1630s. Robert Cecil duly informed a friend in 1602 that ‘all the [Crown] receipts are so short of issue, as my hairs stand upright to think of it’. ¹⁷ Moreover, Elizabeth bequeathed to her successor a debt totalling £365,254.

Faced with a political nation which seemed unable to acknowledge the devastating effect of inflation upon the value of a subsidy and, furthermore, one which remained wedded and glued to the notion that during peacetime the Crown should ‘live of its own’, James was compelled to raise even greater amounts of revenue by those very prerogative means which MPs most resented – in particular, wardships, purveyance, impositions and the granting of monopolies. It was a dangerous vicious circle to which Elizabeth had given momentum.

Finally, the political nature of the Jacobean inheritance amounted to what John Morrill has called a ‘dynastic conglomerate’, an amalgamation of territories each with its own identity. ¹⁸ The only union that took place in 1603 was a union of the Crowns. Institutional separateness remained and induced a profound political instability that was present for the whole of the first half of the seventeenth century. England, Scotland and Ireland retained their own Parliaments, each of which was structurally different from the other two. The new King’s government was made yet more difficult by the existence of three different Councils and legal systems and the fact that a significant minority of the inhabitants of the British Isles could not speak English, or any variant of it. Moreover, territories such as the Highlands and that part of Ireland outside of the Pale traditionally operated according to local allegiances and loyalties rather than any dictum from a distant government. Above all, in 1600 perhaps as many as one-third of the inhabitants of the British Isles were non-Protestant, the vast majority of the Irish population, large parts of Wales and the Highlands of Scotland adhering to Catholicism. In Scotland the national Church, although Protestant, differed in form from the Church of England.

Yet this negative picture of the Elizabethan legacy has been by no means fully accepted. In part this is because of a recognition that governmental structures continued to exist and government continued to function. There remained a considerable loyalty to the Court and Crown and general agreement about the need to implement laws. As John Guy has noted, ‘in the 1590s tension between “Court” and “Country” was neither as ideological as was the opposition to Charles I, nor in most cases were deputy lieutenants and JPs expressing more than war-weariness and dislike of fiscal burdens’. ¹⁹ In this sense James did not inherit a ‘slide to disaster’. Indeed, having demonstrated that ‘the homogeneity of Court and Privy Council under Elizabeth was a major source of stability’, Guy concludes that ‘“a slide to disaster” was inconceivable in the sixteenth century’. ²⁰

Historians have also pointed out that the Elizabethan Church settlement of 1559 – the famous via media, a middle way designed to allow the conscience of all but the most extreme Protestants to worship within the national Church – far from breaking down by 1603, was showing signs of having established healthy roots. It is no longer possible to argue that by failing to appease her Puritan critics by refusing to continue to reform the Church in a Protestant direction the Queen created impossible difficulties for her successors. By 1603 the greater part of the Puritans...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1. JAMES VI AND THE ELIZABETHAN LEGACY
• 2. JAMES I: RELIGION AND THE CHURCH
• 3. JAMES I: PARLIAMENTS AND FINANCES
• 4. BUCKINGHAM AND FOREIGN POLICY, 1618–1628
• 5. CHARLES I: RULE WITH PARLIAMENTS, 1625–1629
• 6. CHARLES I: RULE WITHOUT PARLIAMENTS, 1629–1640
• 7. IRELAND UNDER SIR THOMAS WENTWORTH, EARL OF STRAFFORD
• 8. THE COMING OF CIVIL WAR
• NOTES
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY