Dangerous distinctions
A mood of pessimism descended over western Europe during the 1590s. In the face of unabating religious wars and inflation, of massive plague outbreaks and bad harvests, it seemed that humans could merely hope to endure the flux of time rather than participate in God’s great redemptive drama. Christian humanist schemes for promoting civil society began to seem hopelessly idealistic, as fashionable opinion shifted towards an increasingly cynical, self-interested view of public life. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) looked to the narrowing political horizon, insisting that ‘a wise man ought inwardly to retire his minde from the common prease [press] … Publicke societie hath nought to doe with our thoughts.’3 Princes were the only legitimate source of public authority. Citizens – those capable of perceiving and acting on the public good, of exercising civic virtue – must learn to be passive subjects once again. Britain’s first two Stuart kings were quick to nose out and beat down ‘popularity’ – that is, the incitement or political empowerment of the people. Unlike Elizabeth, a pragmatist to the core, James Stuart, king of Scotland from 1567 and of England from 1603, and his son and successor Charles I were visionary monarchs. Theirs would be an age of ‘projects’ – grand designs to increase royal authority and revenues – and they themselves the chief projectors. The trend towards a more peremptory and exacting style of government that had begun during the 1590s would continue after 1603. But the new authoritarianism did not go unchallenged. The nobility and zealous Protestants, groups that had absorbed classical republican ideas from the humanists, developed sophisticated arguments to preserve a political space for the citizen and the patriot. James VI of Scotland had succeeded in taming these disruptive forces in Scotland. Could he do so again as king of England?
James was a man of strong likes and dislikes. His love of hunting, for example, rivalled that of his great-great-uncle Henry VIII. He spent weeks on end enjoying the pleasures of the chase, just he and a few select companions pursuing a stag across miles of country until it died of exhaustion, whereupon the king would dismount, cut it open, and ‘blood’ his fellow huntsmen. He hunted with hawks too, he even fished in the Thames using cormorants (a technique probably imported from China). This ‘perpetual occupation with country pursuits’, observed one foreign diplomat, often left government business at a standstill.4 On one occasion one of James’s favourite hounds was abducted and later returned with a note round his neck asking it to speak to the king, ‘for he hears you every day, and so doth he not us’, and urge him to return to his kingly duties in London.5 James thought this a great joke, and stayed on to hunt for another fortnight. When he was not out harrying animals himself, he and his courtiers spent many happy hours watching bears, bulls and lions being baited by dogs. Another of his great pleasures was alcohol. Indeed, he was so fond of binge-drinking that his queen, Anne of Denmark (1574–1619), feared for his life. His favourite tipple was ‘thick white muscatel’, which was diagnosed as the cause of his chronic diarrhoea. His dislikes were equally vigorous. Smoking was a particular bugbear, and he attacked it at length in print.
Yet even ‘so vile and stinking a custome’ as smoking was not as contemptible in his eyes as popularity.6 His own aversion to courting the mob was apparent from his very first days in England. As he neared London in May 1603 on the final leg of his journey from Edinburgh to claim the English crown, the common people flocked to see their new monarch, just as they had done during Henry VII’s journey down to London after the battle of Bosworth. How Henry responded to this plebeian throng is not known, but James was clearly discomfited by it and would have preferred the crowds to keep their distance. It would not be long before the ‘poore sort’ started grumbling that on public occasions he treated them ‘with a kind of kinglie negligence, nether speakeinge nor lookeinge uppon them’.7
Why did James, one of the age’s shrewdest political operators, disdain to work the crowd? The answer is complex. In part it was simply because he misread the nature of his welcome in England. James had never been formally acknowledged by Elizabeth as her successor, and he was by no means the only claimant to her crown. At the time it seemed little short of a miracle to the English that the king of one of their most ancient enemies had succeeded to the throne without violent opposition. The ‘papists’ had certainly been expected to mount some kind of a challenge, and perhaps they would have, had it not been for James’s diplomatic skill in persuading the Spanish not to field a Catholic candidate. The crowds that greeted him in England were therefore animated by sheer relief as much as anything else. James, however, attributed his rapturous reception to gratitude; had he not ended the ‘curse’ of female rule and given England a secure Protestant succession? In other words, he thought he was doing the English a favour, not the other way round. But it was not only James who was mistaken. The people had assumed, quite unreasonably, that he would show the same deft common touch that Elizabeth had, and would grace them with ‘well-pleased affection’.8 They took his aloofness so badly because it contrasted with ‘the manner of there laite Queene, whoe when she was publiquely seen abroad would often staye & speake kindlie to the multitud’.9
James’s churlishness in public – he would often ‘bid a p[iss] or a plague on such as flocked to meet him’ – was not natural to his character.10 In less formal surroundings he could be affability itself. Indeed, he was as extravagant and indiscreet with his affections as he was with his money – or as some MPs liked to point out, taxpayers’ money. He was a good conversationalist too, and a man of formidable learning – ‘they gar [made] me speik Latin ar [before] I could speik Scotis’ he recalled of his boyhood tutors.11 Perhaps afflicted by a mild form of cerebral palsy, and certainly in later life by arthritis, James was none too steady on his feet, which probably did little for his confidence in public. But fundamentally his distaste for crowds was a reflection of his political philosophy.
James brought a new and authoritarian style of kingship to England. He set much greater store than his Tudor predecessors had on the mystical claims of royal blood as a source of political authority, and hence he played up his descent from Henry VII and from the ancient kings of Scotland and Ireland. Hereditary kingship, he argued in his writings, was prescribed by the will of God as revealed in nature and the Bible. Royal authority was conferred by God alone, and in consequence kings were answerable to none but Him. Kings were like gods themselves, said James (taking his cue from the 82nd psalm), or the head of another supposedly divinely ordained institution, the patriarchal household. His intellectual and emotional investment in the divine right of kings far outstripped Elizabeth’s, and grew out of his tough political apprenticeship in Scotland, where he had endured the indignity of kidnapping by power-hungry noblemen, and of Presbyterian ministers berating him as ‘God’s sillie [weak] vassall’.12 None of these affronts had troubled him as much, however, as the strictures and beatings administered by his principal tutor George Buchanan (1506–82). Buchanan had belonged loosely to a group of Calvinist writers whose arguments for contractual kingship, and the right of the people – or more usually their governors or political representatives – to resist tyrants were to prove hugely influential across Protestant Europe. He had argued for the duty of true citizens to depose and if necessary kill their king if he subverted the civil society he was appointed to preserve, defining these true citizens not in religious terms but as ‘Those who obey the laws and uphold human society, who prefer to face every toil, every danger, for the safety of their fellow countrymen rather than grow old in idleness …’13
The most radical arguments for popular sovereignty had been made by Huguenot writers in the aftershock to the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres of 1572, when the French monarchy had become stained with the blood of its own people. Equally, it was French writers who had led the counter-reaction in favour of authoritarian, divine-right kingship, which had gathered pace following the recognition in 1584 of the Huguenot Henri de Bourbon (the future Henri IV), king of Navarre, as heir-presumptive to the French crown. James, in turbulent 1580s Scotland, had eagerly embraced this reaction against the political legacy of his old tutor. In fact the French wars of religion generated useful ideas and lessons for monarchs everywhere in the face of potent new challenges to their authority, whether it be Calvinist resistance theories or Catholic claims for papal