The appeal of (and to) commonwealth courses went far beyond Essex’s circle. The huge gap that the dissolution of the monasteries and religious guilds had left in the provision of education and communal welfare had been filled in the decades after 1540 by a multitude of secular ‘little commonwealths’. Borough corporations and grammar schools had multiplied rapidly as the crown responded to local requests for greater powers to maintain order and manage public services by granting new charters of incorporation. These ‘corporate and politic’ bodies had become vehicles for a new sense of communal identity that mingled traditional notions of the ‘goodly commonwealth’ with humanist ideas about civic virtue, and, as time went on, the moral reformism of godly Protestantism.77 Civil authority and commonwealth principles had found another important focus after 1540 in England’s 9,000 or so parishes. The medieval parish had been primarily a religious body devoted to promoting neighbourly good will. With the retreat of communal religious sociability at the Reformation, however, the parish had been given, or took over, a wide range of secular functions, becoming the fundamental unit of state power. This process reached its climax under the Tudors with parliamentary legislation in 1598 and 1601 for parish poor relief, whereby rates were levied on better-off parishioners to keep their poorer neighbours from starving. These measures not only imitated schemes in towns on the Continent but also built upon many local initiatives for relieving poverty. In fact, the poor laws owed more to local than to central pressures, and are a prime example of how, since the Middle Ages, the English state had been moulded as much by forces from within political society as by the will of successive monarchs.
Economic forces during the 1590s pushed parish communities into the front line of the war against ‘sin and enormities’. Harvest failures and government demands for more money and military resources made the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign particularly wretched for the poor. The price of basic foodstuffs climbed higher in real terms in 1594–8 than at any time in the sixteenth century, while the death-rate among the poor also jumped alarmingly. Yet the inflation that reduced many smaller landholders to vagrancy – creating a permanent underclass of labouring poor – meant bumper profits for those farmers able to produce a surplus to sell at market. This widening economic divide at parish level during the second half of the sixteenth century assumed a political and cultural dimension as the prospering ‘middling sort’ came to regard many popular recreations – maypoles, tippling in alehouses etc. – as licentious, and used commonwealth rhetoric and parish office to impose civility upon their poorer, increasingly desperate, neighbours. For conscientious Protestants there was also a moral imperative to join the fight against popery (which to the godly was synonymous with sin and disorder) at all levels of public life, from punishing village drunkards and unmarried mothers to supporting parliamentary candidates who promised to purge the state of papists and ‘evil counsellors’.
An important reason for the failure of the commons to rise in rebellion during the 1590s, as they had done in similarly hard times forty years earlier, was that the prosperous farmers and tradesmen who had traditionally led such protests now sided with the gentry against their social inferiors. Like the gentry, the middling sort would be more closely integrated into crown administration in the localities during the Tudor period. This high (and rising) level of participation in local government – both by contemporary European and modern-day standards – strengthened the English people’s already firm commitment to the rule of law, and their sense of public duty. Political power was not only more widely diffused by 1600 than it had been a century earlier but it had also assumed a more civic, less martial, character.
The earl of Essex’s last desperate bid for power attempted to trade upon this commitment to public-spiritedness, or ‘active citizenship’. Henri IV’s peace with Philip II at the treaty of Vervins in 1598 had undermined the earl’s policy of an alliance between England, France and the Dutch republic against Spain. And his disastrous tour as lord lieutenant of Ireland had ended in 1599 with him storming back to England and into the queen’s bedchamber while she was still half-dressed and her hair in disarray. Banished from court and facing financial ruin, he and his diehard supporters decided to stage a coup to ‘rescue’ Elizabeth from the clutches of the Cecilians and other courtiers eager to end the war with Spain. The Essexians feared that peace would leave the Spanish free to wipe out Dutch resistance, and then to strike at England and the German Protestants. Essex was also convinced, wrongly, that his enemies at court were plotting with the Spanish to kill him and to have Elizabeth succeeded not by the Protestant James VI but by a Catholic.
On 8 February 1601, Essex and several hundred ‘swagringe companions’ – among them three earls, three barons and the younger brothers of several noblemen – marched through the London streets, trying to rouse the inhabitants as concerned citizens as well as loyal subjects: ‘now or never is the tyme for you to pursue your liberties: which yf at this tyme you forsake, you are suer [sure] to enduer bondage’.78 But this half-baked and treasonous resort to ‘popularity’ met only with stunned surprise; Essex, cornered in his London residence by nightfall, was forced to surrender. After a brief trial he was executed in the courtyard of the Tower on 25 February, his head ‘severed from his bodie by the axe at three stroakes’.79 Among the small party of onlookers was Sir Robert Cecil. And it was Cecil who took over Essex’s surreptitious contacts with James VI, and who reaped the rewards after overseeing the Scottish king’s succession to the English throne following Elizabeth’s death in March 1603.
With the dismal failure of Essex’s rebellion, victory in Ireland over the earl of Tyrone, and the peaceful transition to a new ruling dynasty, it seemed that the crown had finally rid itself of over-mighty subjects and dispelled lingering fears of baronial revolt left by the Wars of the Roses. Yet the aristocratic constitutionalism that Essex had honed and levelled, if only briefly, at the court would prove a potent weapon in more capable hands and in a greater cause. The language of commonwealth had emerged at national level in reaction to the failings of the Plantagenet king Henry VI in the mid-fifteenth century. The same commonwealth courses that bound English society together had the potential, should monarch and political nation become estranged, to tear it apart. In the words of one of Essex’s later admirers, and himself a reluctant rebel against his prince: ‘Thus may wee see that setled governments doe cherish in themselves their owne destructions, and their own subjects are oftentimes cause of their owne ruine, unlesse God of his mercy prevent it.’80
3
Free Monarchy, 1603–37
But the Popular state, ever since the begynnynge of his maiestes gracious and sweete governement, hath growne bygge and audacious. And in every session of Parlement swelled more and more.
Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, ‘Speciall observacions touching all the
sessions of the last Parliament’ (1611)1
Kings walke the heavenly milky-way,
But you in by-paths goe astray.
God and King doe pace together,
But vulgars wander light as feather …
Hold you the publick beaten way,
Wonder at Kings and them obey.
For under god they are to chuse,
Whats rights to take and what refuse:
Wherto if you will not consent,
Yet hold your peace, least you repent,
And be corrected for your pride,
That Kings designes dare thus deride
By raylinge rimes and