8

A Bohemian tragedy

In April 1618 a little book, bearing the royal arms, was published. It was entitled The Peacemaker, and it extolled the virtues of James as a pacifier of all troubles and contentions. The ‘happy sanctuary’ of England had enjoyed fifteen years of peace since the time of the king’s accession, and so now ‘let it be celebrated with all joy and cheerfulness, and all sing – Beati Pacifici’.

Contention, however, was about to manifest itself in the distant land of Bohemia (now roughly equivalent to the Czech Republic) which was ruled by the Holy Roman Emperor Matthias. In the month after the book’s publication certain Protestant nobles of Bohemia stormed the imperial palace in Prague and threw the emperor’s deputies out of the windows; Matthias had tried to impose upon them the rule of Archduke Ferdinand, a fierce Catholic and a member of the Habsburg family. The Bohemian rebels were soon in charge of their country, posing a challenge to the Catholic dynasty of the Habsburgs, which included Philip III of Spain.

The German Calvinists of course took up their cause, thus posing a problem for the king of England. The head of the Calvinist interest was none other than James’s son-in-law, Frederick of the Palatinate. Yet James was also seeking the daughter of Philip III for his son. What was to be done? Was James to side with the Spanish Habsburgs against the Protestant party? Or was he to encourage his son-in-law to maintain the Bohemian cause? He prevaricated by sending an arbiter, but none of the combatants was really willing to entertain his envoy. Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, remarked that ‘the vanity of the present king of England is so great that he will always think it of great importance that peace should be made by his means, so that his authority will be increased’. It did not quite work out like that.

In March 1619 Matthias died, and Archduke Ferdinand was elected as the new Holy Roman Emperor. The Bohemians took the opportunity of formally deposing him as their sovereign and invited Frederick to take his place. Frederick hesitated only for a moment. James complained that ‘he wrote to me, to know my mind if he should take that crown; but within three days after, and before I could return answer, he put it on’.

After Frederick had accepted their offer, he travelled to Prague in October in order to assume the throne. The Protestants of England were delighted. Here at last was the European champion they had needed. A great comet passed across the skies of Europe in the late autumn of 1618; its reddish hue and long tail were visible for seven weeks, and it became known as ‘the angry star’. It was of course considered to be providential, a token or warning of great change. Could it portend the final defeat of the Habsburgs and even the Antichrist of Rome?

James’s opinion was not entirely in keeping with that of his Protestant subjects. He was angered by what he considered to be Frederick’s rashness in accepting the crown of Bohemia; his son-in-law was in that sense an aggressor flouting the divine right of kings. ‘You are come in good time to England,’ he told Frederick’s envoy, ‘to spread these principles among my people, that my subjects may drive me away, and place another in my room.’ More significantly, he did not wish to drop the Spanish connection he had so carefully fashioned. And yet his daughter was now queen of Bohemia. Surely there was glory in that? It was the greatest dilemma of his reign, combining in deadly fashion his amity with Spain and his relationship with his fellow Protestants in Europe; he had tried to conciliate both forces, but now they threatened to tear him apart. So he prevaricated. The French ambassador reported that ‘his mind uses its powers only for a short time, but in the long run he is cowardly’.

Relations with the Spanish were in a difficult and delicate balance. The business of the marriage of Prince Charles to the infanta was infinitely protracted, and popular opinion in England was one of dismay at a possible liaison with a Catholic power. In the event of marriage, therefore, the king was likely to be estranged from his subjects; but James was too eager for a vast Spanish dowry to heed any warnings. The Spanish in turn required that English Catholics be allowed to practise their religion freely, but the change in law would need the consent of parliament. Parliament would never concede any such request. All was in suspense. When a gentleman from the Spanish embassy rode down a child in Chancery Lane, a crowd developed and tried to seize him; he spurred his horse but the crowd of citizens, now swelled to the number of 4,000 or 5,000, followed him to the ambassador’s house. They besieged it, breaking the windows and threatening to force the doors, until the lord chief justice arrived and took away the offender.

It was possible, to put it no higher, that Spain was planning to invade the Palatinate. James was in an agony of indecision, at one moment promising to send a large army to help his son-in-law and at another claiming that he was in no position to aid anyone. He did not wish to meddle in the matter. He could not afford a war, and the country was not ready for military action. Was the election of Frederick, in any case, legally valid? If not, any war on Frederick’s behalf might then be unjust as well as unnecessary.

Politics, and diplomacy, could not be separated from the issues of religion; all were intimately related in a continent where the division between Catholic and Protestant was the single most important fact of the age. There were of course divisions within the ranks of Protestants themselves. At the end of 1618 a national synod of the Dutch Reformed Church was held in the city of Dordrecht, known colloquially as Dort, to which came six representatives from England. The debate was of vital interest to the king. It was concerned with the Calvinist doctrine of predestination which was denied by a Dutch theologian, Jacobus Arminius, and his followers. Arminius also condemned religious zealotry of the kind practised by his opponents. He declared that religion was about to suffer the same fate as the young lady mentioned by Plutarch; she was pursued by several lovers who, unable to agree among themselves, became violent and cut the woman to pieces so that each could have a portion of her. The Calvinists, holding the dominant faith of Holland, called Arminius and his supporters to account. The arguments, impassioned and even bitter, lasted for seven months.

An English puritan, Thomas Goodwin, noted that the reports of the synod ‘began to be every man’s talk and enquiry’ and another English theologian, Peter Heylyn, stated that the debates ‘wakened Englishmen out of “a dead sleep”’. Theologians were then of the utmost consequence in political as well as spiritual affairs; religion was, in this century, the principal issue by which all other matters were judged and interpreted. At the conclusion of the synod the Calvinists emerged triumphant and their opponents were either imprisoned or deprived of their ministry; 700 families of Arminians were driven into exile. For James it seemed to be a victory for the purity of religion, and one English divine, Francis Rous, excoriated Arminianism as ‘the spawn of the papists’. The battle lines of Protestantism were set ever more firmly in stone. Arminianism would emerge in England at a slightly later date, with fatal consequences for the next king.

James was growing sick with the strain and tensions induced by Spain and the Palatinate. He was suffering from an unhappy combination of arthritis and gout together with what was called ‘a shrewd fit of the stone’. The death of his wife, Anne of Denmark, in the early spring of 1619 caused a further decline in his health. The king’s doctor noted ‘continued fever, bilious diarrhoea … ulceration of his lips and chin. Fainting, sighing, dread, incredible sadness, intermittent pulse.’ The king voided three stones and the pain was so great that he vomited. He seemed likely to die. Charles, Buckingham and the leading councillors were summoned from London to Royston, where he was staying, and he delivered what was considered to be a deathbed speech. Yet this was premature. Within a few days he began to recover, although he was still too weak to attend his wife’s funeral in the middle of May. He had been informed that the best remedy for weak legs was the blood of a newly slaughtered deer; so for some weeks he was to be found, after the hunt, with his feet buried in the body of an animal that had just been brought down.

He returned to London at the beginning of June, dressed so luxuriously that he was said to resemble a suitor rather than a mourner. He had some cause for celebration. The new Banqueting House was about to be completed, one of the few physical memorials of his reign that survive intact. It had been designed by Inigo Jones in the novel and controversial neoclassical style, conceived in the spirit of Palladio and of the Italian Renaissance; it was devised to represent the twin concepts of ‘magnificence’ and ‘decorum’, with the king presiding in its ornate and mathematically correct interior as both judge and peacemaker. The Banqueting House was the seat of majesty. It was also considered to be a suitable setting for the eventual reception of Charles and the infanta. Sixteen years later Rubens completed the canvases for the great ceiling; James here is depicted as a British Solomon, uniting the kingdoms of England and Scotland, while on the oval canvas that acts as centrepiece he is raised into heaven by the figures of Justice, Faith and Religion.

The cost was very high, approximately £15,000, at a time when the royal treasury was almost bare. The country itself was also suffering a financial crisis. The growing preference on the continent for cheaper local cloth, as opposed to the more expensive English woollens, and the competitive power of Dutch traders meant that there was a significant fall in economic activity. ‘All grievances in the kingdom are trifles,’ Sir Edwin Sandys told the Commons, ‘compared with the decay in trade.’ Lionel Cranfield, who became lord high treasurer in 1621, explained that ‘trade is as great as ever, but not so good. It increases inwards and decreases outwards.’ The balance of trade, in other words, was not in England’s favour. This was one of those spasms of economic distress that have always hit the English economy, but in the early seventeenth century no one really understood what was happening.

Cranfield added that ‘the want of money is because trade is sick, and as long as trade is sick, we shall be in want of money’. Too many manufactured goods were entering the country, among them the import of what were widely regarded as vain and unnecessary items such as wine and tobacco. The luxurious world was one of velvets and satins, of pearls and cloth of gold. Yet elsewhere economic failure had become endemic. The export of London broadcloths, in 1622, had fallen by 40 per cent from the figures of 1618; the hardship was compounded by the failure of the harvest in 1623. ‘There are many thousands in these parts,’ one Lincolnshire gentleman, Sir William Pelham, wrote, ‘who have sold all they have even to their bed-straw, and cannot get work to earn any money. Dog’s flesh is a dainty dish, and found upon search in many houses.’ This is the context for the unrest and disturbance of the last years of James’s reign.

It is also one of the principal causes for the number of English colonists seeking a new life in America. In the autumn of 1620 the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth; some of its passengers were religious separatists who had come from Leiden, in Holland, but the majority were English families looking for land and for material improvement. It has been estimated that over the next two or three decades some 60,000 left English shores, one third of them bound for New England. When they cross the Atlantic, they are lost from the purview of this history.

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It was becoming increasingly likely that the Spanish would invade the Palatinate in revenge for Frederick’s assumption of the Bohemian throne. A successful attack would have serious consequences for Protestantism in Europe and might well lead once more to Habsburg domination; an ambassador was sent to England, therefore, from the princes and free cities of the Protestant Union in Germany. The envoy did not receive a warm welcome from the king. James, divided in his loyalties, decided to do nothing. The archbishop of Canterbury, horrified at this desertion of the Protestant cause, pleaded with him to allow voluntary contributions from the clergy for the sake of their co-religionists. To this the king reluctantly assented.

He was of course still pursuing Spain for the hand of the infanta. He called the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, to him. ‘I give you my word,’ he said, ‘as a king, as a gentleman, as a Christian, and as an honest man, I have no wish to marry my son to anyone except your master’s daughter, and I desire no alliance but that of Spain.’ He took off his hat and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He had made an implicit admission, to the effect that he desired no alliance with Frederick or the German princes. What did Bohemia mean to him? It was a distant land of which he knew nothing, remarkable only for the scene of shipwreck in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, performed nine years before, in which it was miraculously granted a sea coast.

Gondomar quickly sent a message to Philip III that he could invade Frederick’s territories without risk of a war with England. Thus began the struggle which eventually became known as the Thirty Years War, one of the most destructive conflicts in early modern European history that ravaged much of the Holy Roman Empire and spread to Italy, France, the Netherlands and Spain.

At the end of July 1620, the king set out on a progress. The Venetian ambassador reported that he seemed glad to leave London behind. He added that ‘the king seems utterly weary of the affairs that are taking place all over the world at this time, and he hates being obliged every day to spend time over unpleasant matters and listen to nothing but requests and incitements to move in every direction and to meddle with everything’. James had remarked, ‘I am not God Almighty.’

A few days later news reached him that a Spanish army of 24,000 soldiers was moving against the Palatinate; at the same time the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand, whose throne had been usurped, was marching upon Prague. ‘What do you know,’ James asked an adviser who had questioned him on the perilous situation. ‘You are ignorant. I know quite well what I am about. All these troubles will settle themselves, you will see that very soon. I know what I am talking about.’

Yet he was troubled by what he now realized was Spanish duplicity. Gondomar had talked of conciliation while all the time Philip III had been planning for war. James summoned the ambassador to Hampton Court, where he raved about his double-dealing. Gondomar politely replied that he had never said that Spain would not invade the Palatinate, whereupon the king burst into tears. Could he not be allowed to defend his own children? His policy of compromise, bred out of vacillation and indecision, was in ruins.

The Spanish were victorious in November 1620, at the battle of White Mountain just outside Prague. The Protestant army was devastated, and Frederick was removed from his temporary kingdom of Bohemia. On the following day he fled for his life into the neighbouring region of Silesia; he could not even return to his homeland, since in the following summer the Spanish occupied half of the Palatinate. He and his wife, Elizabeth, were effectively exiles. In turn the Bohemian leaders of the Protestant rebellion were led to the scaffold and a new imperial aristocracy rose in triumph. The news alarmed and enraged the English public in equal measure, and it was not long before all the blame was being laid upon James.

The Venetian ambassador reported that ‘tears, sighs and loud expressions of wrath are seen and heard in every direction’. Letters against the king were scattered in the streets threatening that if he did not do what was expected of him, the people would soon display their anger. All sympathies lay with his daughter Elizabeth, who had been forced to flee without the assistance or protection of her father. Prince Charles, in agony over the unhappy situation of his sister, shut himself in his chambers for two days. The king himself was said to be in great distress but, having recovered from the initial shock, was heard to murmur that ‘I have long expected this’.

He very soon took on his favourite role as arbitrator or peacemaker. He devised a plan that might prove acceptable to all sides. Frederick would submit to the emperor and renounce any claim to Bohemia on condition that his Palatinate was returned to him untouched. There ensued a process of elaborate diplomatic negotiations that achieved nothing. A parody of the time noted that James would present his son-in-law with an army of 100,000 ambassadors.

It was time to call a parliament; it assembled in the middle of January 1621. It did not augur well that the king had to be carried to its opening in a chair. His legs and his feet were so weak that it was believed he would soon lose the use of them. He did not in any case desire to consult with the Commons on matters of policy. He was there to deliver his demands. He ordered them not to ‘meddle with complaints against the king, the church or state matters’. He himself would ensure that the proposed Spanish match between his son and the infanta did not endanger the Protestant religion of England; he also stated that he would not allow his son-in-law’s Palatinate to be broken up. And for that he needed money. It was the only reason he had summoned them. He had once said that he was obliged ‘to live like a shell-fish upon his own moisture, without any public supply’. It was one of James’s arresting similes.

A committee of enquiry had already estimated that a force for the protection of the Palatinate would cost approximately £900,000 each year; James, sensing the outrage such a sum would cause, asked for £500,000; parliament granted him £160,000 before turning its attention to such domestic grievances as the abuse of patents and monopolies by unscrupulous agents. It was the first meeting of parliament for almost seven years and, as such, became a clearing house for all the complaints and problems that had accrued in the interim. In the course of this first session some fifty-two bills were given a second reading.

The weather outside the chamber was bitter. John Chamberlain wrote at the beginning of February that ‘the Thames is now quite frozen over, so that people have passed over, to and fro, these four or five days … the winds and high tides have so driven the ice in heaps in some places, that it lies like rocks and mountains, and hath a strange and hideous aspect’.

The depression of trade was the single most important theme for the assembly beside the frozen river. The gathering of members of parliament at Westminster gave the opportunity for the exporters, landlords and graziers among them to vent their complaints about falling prices and unsold wool. It was declared that poverty and want were rife. One member told his colleagues that ‘I had rather be a ploughman than a merchant’. Disorderly interventions did not quell the embittered speeches. No parties had as yet emerged, in the modern sense, only individuals expressing vested interests or local grievances. It was becoming clear, however, that the political initiative was being grasped by parliament rather than by the king and council.

In the same session parliament drew up a petition against ‘Jesuits, papists and recusants’. It was the only way they knew of unravelling the Spanish connection that the king favoured. The member for Bath, Sir Robert Phelips, raised the temperature by saying that if the papists were not checked they would soon comprise half of the king’s subjects. So parliament acted. All recusants to be banished from London. All recusants to be disarmed by the justices of the peace. No subject of the king should hear Mass. James was in a quandary, suspended between his parliament and the king of Spain; it was reported that he would accept the principal recommendations but would reserve the particulars for further consideration. This was widely believed to be an evasion.

The feeling of the people against the Spaniards was now palpable. A caricature had been circulated at the beginning of 1621 that depicted the king of Spain, the pope and the devil as conspirators in another ‘powder-plot’. The Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, was proceeding down Fenchurch Street when an apprentice called out, ‘There goes the devil in a dung-cart.’

One of Gondomar’s servants responded. ‘Sir, you shall see Bridewell ere long for your mirth.’

‘What! Shall we go to Bridewell for such a dog as thou!’

Eventually the apprentice and his companions were whipped through the streets, much to the indignation of the citizens.

Parliament itself was enthusiastic for Frederick’s cause. When one member made a speech advocating war against the imperial forces the Commons responded with a unanimous vote, lifting their hats high in acclamation, and vowed to recover the Palatinate. James seemed for the moment to share their enthusiasm, but he was too shrewd or too wary to commit himself to a European war against the Catholic powers. He had in any case grown impatient with parliament. It had sat for four months, and spent most of its time in delivering to him requests and grievances. It had not addressed the necessities of the king, or his request for a further grant of money. So at the beginning of June 1621, he adjourned it.

At a later date a notable parliamentarian, Sir John Eliot, reflected upon the failure of this assembly. The king believed that the liberties of parliament encroached upon his prerogative, while in turn parliament feared he ‘sought to retrench and block up the ancient privileges and liberties of the house’. So both sides became more intransigent, the king maintaining his royal power and the parliament standing upon its privileges. Eliot believed that there was a middle ground, but at the time it was overlooked.

This was the rock upon which the constitution would founder. An eminent nineteenth-century jurist, John, Baron Campbell, wrote that ‘the meeting of parliament on 30 January, 1621, may be considered the commencement of that great movement, which, exactly twenty eight years afterwards, led to the decapitation of an English sovereign, under a judicial sentence pronounced by his subjects’. A portrait of the king, completed in this year by Daniel Mytens, shows James in his robes of state; he has a preoccupied, or perhaps a perplexed, expression.

When parliament met once more on 20 November, it was clear that its zeal and anger had not noticeably diminished. Its members were in a sense liberated by the absence of the sovereign; James had decided to leave London and, with Buckingham, travelled to Royston and Newmarket. The chamber was united in its horror of recent policies. Sir Robert Phelips was once again on the attack. The Catholic states of Europe were England’s enemies, while in England the Catholics had grown so bold that they dared to talk of the Protestants as a ‘faction’. Let no supply be granted to the king until the dangers, home and abroad, had been resolved. Edward Coke, now a leader of the malcontents, then rose to remind his colleagues that Spain had sent the Armada, that the sheep scab which destroyed many flocks came from the same country, and that the most disgusting disease to strike humankind – namely, syphilis – had spread from Naples, a city controlled by Spain. That country was the source and spring of all foulness.

The Spaniards were also attacked in violent terms when John Pym, soon to become the fiercest opponent to the pretensions of the Crown, rose to speak against the Catholic threat in England itself, where ‘the seeds of sedition’ were buried beneath ‘the pretences of religion’. The Venetian ambassador reported that the members ‘have complained bitterly because his majesty shows them [the Catholics] so much indulgence’. The sovereign was indeed the problem; he had asked for a supply, but had not properly disclosed his policy. What could his supporters say on his behalf? The parliament had also raised the matter of the prince’s marriage. If the infanta of Spain eventually became the queen of England, one of her offspring would at a future date assume the throne; this would mean the return to the rule of a Catholic king. The members of the Commons drew up a petition in which they asked James to declare war on the Catholic powers of Europe and to marry his son to a Protestant.

When the king received word of this petition he is supposed to have cried out, ‘God give me patience!’ He wrote to the Speaker of the Commons complaining that ‘some fiery and popular spirits’ were considering issues that were beyond their competence to resolve; he demanded that no member should in the future dare to touch upon issues ‘concerning our government or matters of state’. The Spanish match was not open for discussion. He then issued a threat that he felt himself ‘very free and able to punish any man’s misdemeanours in parliament as well during their sitting as after’. He had effectively denied them any rights at all. Phelips described it as ‘a soul-killing letter’.

The Commons then drew up a petition in which they asked the king not to believe ill-founded reports on their conduct; they also requested him to guarantee their privileges. When they came with the document to Newmarket, he called out, ‘Stools for the ambassadors!’ He realized now that they did indeed represent a separate power in the land. In response to the petition, however, he warned them not to touch his sovereign power. One member, Sir Nathaniel Rich, objected to these commands. He took offence at such royal demands as ‘Meddle not with this business’ or ‘Go to this business first’. ‘When I speak of freedom of speech,’ he declared, ‘I mean not licentiousness and exorbitancy, but speech without servile fear or, as it were, under the rod.’

On 18 December 1621, by candlelight in the evening, the Commons issued a ‘protestation’ in which they asserted that their privileges, and indeed their lives, ‘are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England’. They had every right to discuss foreign affairs. Any matter that concerned the defence of the realm, or the state of religion, came within the scope of their counsel and debate. They demanded freedom of speech and freedom from arrest. James, now thoroughly exasperated, adjourned and then dissolved parliament. He called for the journal of the Commons and with his own hand ripped out the ‘protestation’; it now had no status. ‘I will govern’, he said, ‘according to the commonweal, but not according to the common will.’ The ‘commonweal’ was the term for the general interests of the nation. He then consigned Coke and Phelips to prison and confined Pym to his house. ‘It is certain,’ Gondomar wrote, ‘that the king will never summon another parliament as long as he lives.’

The dissolution marked the beginning of the end of James’s authority in England. His policy had been a dead failure, and he had alienated all the citizens and gentry who took the side of the Commons. He had no money to fight any war on behalf of the Palatinate, and he was obliged to continue negotiations with Spain. It was also widely believed that Buckingham’s advice lay behind the king’s intransigence; the favourite was even more distrusted than before. The times were dangerous and uncertain.

The reputation of the king was now constantly under attack. He was accused of being lazy and improvident; his will was weaker than water. He was no more than the king of Spain’s viceroy. In January 1622, a man was put upon the rack ‘for saying that there would be a rebellion’. A manuscript libel by ‘Tom-Tell-Truth’ passed among the people, saying that James may be ‘defender of the faith’, according to his title, but the faith was that of the Catholics; he was head of the Church dormant, not the Church militant or triumphant. ‘Tom’ added that Gondomar had the golden key to the king’s cabinet of secrets and that James himself had committed the most hideous depravities of which a human being was capable. This was a reference to the king’s relationship with Buckingham. A preacher at Oxford, a young man named Knight, declared that it was ‘lawful for subjects when harassed on the score of religion to take arms against their Prince in their own defence’. Soon enough James issued ‘directions concerning preaching’ in which the clergy were forbidden to make ‘bitter invectives and indecent railing speeches’ against the Catholics and were told to avoid ‘all matters of state’. ‘No man can now mutter a word in the pulpit’, Buckingham boasted to the Spanish ambassador, ‘but he is presently catched and set in straight prison.’

With the same wish to silence dissent the king proclaimed that ‘noblemen, knights and gentlemen of quality’ should return to their rural estates. It was claimed that this was a measure to promote hospitality in the countryside but it was widely believed that it was aimed at the gentry who, while residing in London, compounded their discontent by sharing their grievances.

The lawyers of Gray’s Inn had decided to take some small cannon from the Tower in order to celebrate Twelfth Night. They shot them off in the dead of night, but the report was so loud that it awoke the king at Whitehall. He started out of his bed crying, ‘Treason! Treason!’ The whole court was in alarm, and the earl of Arundel ran to the royal bedchamber with his drawn sword in his hand. The false alarm had arisen from the king’s own fears. He seemed to lack both moral and physical courage. The Venetian ambassador reported that he was ‘too agitated by constant mistrust of everyone, tyrannized over by perpetual fear for his life, tenacious of his authority as against the parliament and jealous of his son’s obedience, all accidents and causes of his fatal and almost desperate infirmity of mind, so harmful to the general welfare’.

On the day on which the dissolution of parliament was announced James was riding in the park at his palace of Theobalds when his horse stumbled and threw him into the New River that flowed through the grounds; the ice of January broke beneath him and he sank into the water until only his boots could be seen. He was rescued, and was none the worse after the incident, but it is an apt image of a hapless sovereign.