Good order, for James, meant a narrowing of political participation, of subduing the crowd, not exciting it. Obedience to prescribed authority was his recipe for a well-ordered society, not the humanist emphasis on inculculating moral and civic responsibility in ordinary citizens. His dismissive attitude towards the people was reinforced by his conception of who ‘the people’ – meaning the political classes – actually were. Although Elizabeth had been just as determined as James was to keep the people in their place and to stifle public debate, she had at times relied heavily on the support of ‘baser personages’. Moreover, she had generally distrusted her great noblemen. By contrast, James was very indulgent of his nobility, even when they abused his trust, and thought that the only proper actors on the political stage were the great men of the realm. He regarded his people emphatically as subjects, not citizens. Popular participation in Church or state he associated with demagoguery and rebellion. In Scotland he had seen Presbyterian ministers – those ‘trumpets of sedition’ he called them – as the main agents of popularity.14 Once in England he broadened this category to include Puritans, lawyers and ‘free speakers’ in the House of Commons. He referred to a ‘vaine popular humour’ at work among such men, who ‘cannot be content with the present forme of Governement, but must have a kind of libertie in the people … and in every cause that concernes [the royal] Prerogative, give a snatch against a Monarchie, through their Puritanicall itching after Popularitie’.15
Browbeating ‘free speakers’ was one way of trying to curb popular humours; another was to expand the claims for the king’s imperial or legally unfettered prerogative. The suppression of English Presbyterianism during the early 1590s had encouraged high-fliers at court and in the Church to talk up the idea of imperial sovereignty. However, from 1603 the absolute power of kings was openly espoused by the monarch himself and by those who would later be dubbed the ‘Regians’: the ‘great Dependents upon the Crown, both in Church and State, who swell up the Prerogative, preaching and distilling into the King, the Almightiness of his power’.16 James and the Regians insisted that where necessity, or ‘reason of state’, demanded, the king could use his prerogative power to override the common law. James could be alarmingly frank on this subject – ‘the King is above the law’, and although a good king, in a settled kingdom, would usually abide by existing constitutional arrangements, ‘yet is hee not bound thereto but of his good will’.17 The nature of kingship and the actions of kings were like the ways of God, he insisted, not for ordinary mortals to question. If, God forbid, a king was set on being a tyrant there was nothing his subjects could do to stop him. James was wise enough not to act upon his more ‘absolutist’ pronouncements, and England remained in practice a mixed monarchy. But he was prepared to resort to prerogative taxation – that is, taxation without parliamentary consent – more brazenly than Elizabeth had, and without her excuse of having a war to fight. To the ‘free speakers’ in James’s first English Parliament (which sat intermittently between 1604 and 1610) it seemed that tyranny was almost upon them, and they questioned whether they had secure legal title in anything, even their own lands.
By investing his office with this godlike aura the first Stuart king of England was trying to emulate the first Tudor king in restoring the monarchy’s majesty and mystery, for to foreigners like James it seemed that female rule and Elizabeth’s overfamiliarity with her people had diminished the standing of the English crown. This princely desire to preserve a proper distance from the rude multitude was taking hold across Europe. Monarchs were beginning to withdraw from the public gaze into the more private world of their courts, recoiling from anything that smacked of popularity. James’s preference for this more intimate style of royal deportment acquired a new institutional form and location at his court: the Bedchamber.
The Bedchamber began life in 1603 as a Scottish outpost at the heart of what was still effectively an English court. Thwarted in his desire to divide all court offices equally between Englishmen and Scotsmen, James settled for creating a new department of the royal household, the Bedchamber, and staffing it almost exclusively with his most trusted Scottish courtiers. The Bedchamber took over control of the monarch’s private apartment(s) from the privy chamber, and was off-limits to all but the Bedchamber men – the king’s gentleman body-servants. They dressed and undressed him, one slept every night on a pallet at the foot of his bed, and one attended him when he relieved himself on the ‘close-stool’. These might seem like menial jobs for a gentleman, but in a personal monarchy a great deal depended upon access and proximity to the king – the fount of all patronage – and a place in the Bedchamber offered both. James returned to his native Scotland just once (in 1617) after becoming king of England, so the Scottish presence in the Bedchamber, and the presents James lavished on its members, helped reassure the Scots that they would not be ignored by their absentee monarch. The Bedchamber therefore buttressed royal authority in Scotland. Nevertheless, to the English, who were largely excluded from this charmed inner circle, the Bedchamber attracted a great deal of suspicion and resentment.
The Bedchamber aroused fears among the English of sinister court intrigues against liberty. These fears had a grain of truth, inasmuch as the Bedchamber became an alternative focus of power to the privy council – as the privy chamber had under Henry VIII – reviving the dual-centred politics of council and entourage that had disappeared during fifty years of female rule. Leicester and the other Protestant heroes on the Elizabethan council, and their success during the 1570s and 1580s in eroding personal monarchy, had created the myth that Elizabeth ‘governed by a grave and wise counsell’.18 Although this brief period of conciliar assertiveness was out of the ordinary, an influential body of opinion in England came to believe that it was the right and proper template for royal government. James more than doubled the size of the Elizabethan council, adding English noblemen and Scottish courtiers, yet many of his English councillors, including his chief minister Sir Robert Cecil (created earl of Salisbury in 1605), struggled to adjust to the normal pattern of politics under an adult male monarch – that is, to having to vie for influence and favour with the king’s entourage. They resented the ‘base and beggarly’ Scots of the Bedchamber for supposedly encouraging James in his various experiments with prerogative finance, and certainly for profiting by them.
James’s failure to stick to ‘the publick beaten way’ did indeed cause wonder, but not necessarily obedience. His rancorous relationship with his English Parliaments owed a lot, as we shall see, to the crown’s ramshackle and overstretched finances. But what made this problem intractable was a lack of trust between the king and some of his leading subjects; and this, in turn, can be traced to the emergence during Europe’s wars of religion of two competing visions of ‘good government’. James and his senior legal adviser Lord Chancellor Ellesmere (1540–1617) championed the authoritarian model, with its emphasis on the unfettered power of kings, or what James called ‘free monarchy’. If he were to do his job properly and as God had ordained then James must have discretionary emergency powers that trumped all human laws. In the most advanced versions of this doctrine – which drew heavily on contemporary French writings on divine-right kingship – the monarch actually was the nation in a political and legal sense. Ellesmere certainly, and probably James too, distrusted the political models and lessons that the Essexians and other ‘popular’ politicians drew from classical antiquity. The ancient Greeks might have been ‘men of singular learning and wisdome’, Ellesmere conceded, but they had lived in ‘popular States: they were enemies, or at least mislikers of all Monarchies … their opinions therefore are no Cannons to give Lawes to kinges and kingdomes, no more than sir Thomas Moores Utopia, or such Pamphlets as wee have at everie Marte [market]’.19 Ellesmere probably detected such classical influences in the readiness of popular politicians to suggest that the people’s primary allegiance was not to the monarch’s person but to the crown.
Elizabeth’s long reign had encouraged her ministers to think and act in ways that reinforced this distinction between crown and monarch. They had defied her will on the grounds that they were acting as she would have done had she not been incapacitated by her sex. Obviously this argument would not wash under a competent male monarch such as James, and Ellesmere thought that the ‘dangerous distinction betweene the King and the Crowne’ was merely a cloak for rebels and extremists.20 He was convinced that a faction of unscrupulous MPs, sitting