With these contending agendas of free monarchy and ‘commonwealth courses’ went rival demonologies. James equated opposition to his will with puritanical popularity, while his critics came to regard free monarchy as a manifestation of popery. Popularity and popery – although conspiracy theories for the most part – seemed to make sense of the forces that menaced European society, and as solvents of traditional loyalties and constitutional niceties they would have no equals.
New Jerusalem
‘First for the countrey I must confesse it is too good for them that possesse it and too bad for others to be at charge to conquer it, the ayre might be wholsome but for the stinckinge people that inhabit it …’ was how one of James’s English courtiers began his Discription of Scotland, and he was just warming up.22 The strain of having to be polite about the Scots soon began to tell on the English. The Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605 was only the most extreme example of this disenchantment with England’s new Scottish king.23 Even in James’s first English Parliament some MPs attacked his countrymen as beggars and traitors. English contempt for the Scots (as for the Irish) was a combination of xenophobia and chauvinism. Humbling the Spanish had strengthened the English people’s belief in the superiority of their laws and national character over those of other nations. Yet their Scotophobia also reflected a fundamental truth about the relative power and wealth of the component parts of the Stuart dynastic union. It was hard for the English to respect a nation five times smaller, and with a crown twenty times poorer, than their own.
The Scots were not only poorer than the English but also, like ‘the Irish’, had an identity problem. When James transferred his court from Edinburgh to London in 1603 he left behind a kingdom of just 750,000 people, divided ethnically between Anglo-Scots-speaking Lowlanders and Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. The cultural gap between these two groups was growing in the seventeenth century as Lowlanders increasingly embraced notions of Protestant civility and derided their Highland neighbours as lawless savages, given to feuding and raiding. One Lowland poem described how God had created the first Highlander from a horse turd. Similarly, Highlanders tended to think of Lowlanders as a different race, the Gaill (non-Gael or foreigner), and resented them for having driven the Gaels from the fertile Lowlands. Another important difference between the two regions of Scotland centred on their relationship to the crown. Lowlanders participated in and attempted to manipulate central government. Most Highlanders, by contrast, although they acknowledged themselves subjects of the Scottish crown, preferred to ignore royal authority altogether.
Significant differences existed within as well as between the two regions of Scotland. Irish Franciscan friars created pockets of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in the western Highlands during the early seventeenth century, particularly among the clan enemies of the zealously Protestant Campbells of Argyllshire in the south-west Highlands. In the Lowlands, Ayrshire and the surrounding region was the heartland of Presbyterianism, whereas Aberdeenshire was noted for its episcopalian sympathies.
Although James extended the reach of his government deep into the Highlands and islands, Scotland remained a highly decentralised kingdom. Even the most powerful instrument of royal authority, the Scottish privy council, relied for local enforcement not upon crown officials but the landed elite. The heads of Scotland’s 2,000 or so lairdly families dominated all aspects of public life. The crown could not rule effectively without their cooperation. James had increased royal control over the Scottish national Church – known as the Kirk – by reintroducing bishops in the late sixteenth century, but the Kirk remained more or less Presbyterian in structure, and therefore difficult for him to bend to his will.
Despite the many disparities and differences between England and Scotland, James dreamed of turning the 1603 union of crowns into a union of laws, Parliaments and churches. ‘I am the Husband, and all the whole Island is my lawful Wife,’ he told his first English Parliament, ‘I am the Head, and it is my Body … I hope therefore no man will be so unreasonable as to think that I … should be a Polygamist, and Husband to two Wives.’24 His scheme for merging his two British kingdoms into a new monarchy of Great Britain was overambitious, however, and proved unacceptable to both the Scots and the English. There were, admittedly, some Scottish Protestants, and not a few English ones, who got excited by the idea that the dynastic unification of Britain heralded the Apocalypse: the climactic confrontation between ‘true religion’ and the popish Antichrist supposedly foretold in the Bible. But most Englishmen thought James’s union scheme favoured the Scots too much, ‘fearing that the Scots (creeping into English Lordships, and English Ladies Beds, in both which already they began to be active) might quickly make their least half the predominant part’.25 In practice the only kind of union most Englishmen would consider was that of incorporating Scotland into a greater English state, as their Tudor forebears had with Wales. England was constituted essentially by its laws, argued MPs, so that merging them with those of another country was effectively to abolish the kingdom itself. In taking this line, MPs were straying close to Ellesmere’s ‘dangerous distinction’ between king and crown, and it is not hard to see why the union project was an early flashpoint in the running battle between James and the ‘popular spirits’. The Scots, more realistically, thought in terms of a federal union that would preserve their own laws and the purity of their reformed Kirk. But the English Parliament had effectively killed the whole idea by 1607. It grudgingly accepted the naturalisation of the king’s Scottish subjects, and free trade between England and Scotland, but little else. James had to introduce his new title of ‘King of Great Britain’ and a new flag for the king’s ships, the Union Flag, solely on his own authority.
One king ruling separate kingdoms was not unusual in early modern Europe. The Spanish and Austrian branches of the Habsburg family each ruled composite monarchies, and their experience suggested that unity was best achieved by tolerating a fair degree of diversity. That said, it was widely believed that any prince who failed to impose religious uniformity on his subjects was asking for trouble. It was ‘A generall Opinion received by all men’ that ‘One religion is the author of unitie, but from a confused religion, there alwaies groweth dissention … it giveth boldnesse to subiectes not onely to forsake God, but likewise to spurne against the Prince, and to live in contempt of his lawes and proceedinges’.26 The fact that the Puritans were denied the kind of reformed church government that operated in Lowland Scotland, or that English Catholics did not have the religious leeway that their co-religionists enjoyed in Ireland, seemed to bode disaster. James’s plan to bring the established churches – and in the long term, religious loyalties – in his three kingdoms more into line with each other was entirely understandable therefore. In England he turned a blind eye to what the godly got up to at parish level so long as they recognised episcopal authority, which they mostly did, and therefore Puritanism was safely contained within the Church. However, from north of the border, royal policy came to be viewed in a more sinister light, as a process of creeping Anglicisation that threatened to sully the purity of the Kirk and to reduce Scotland to the status of an English province.
James’s gradualist approach to religious reform, and his far from empty boast that he could govern Scotland by pen from England, ensured that discontent in his northern kingdom did not get out of hand. It also helped that he had been raised, and remained, a doctrinal Calvinist, as distinct from the ‘practical’ Calvinism of the Puritans with their inward and outward war against ungodliness. Nevertheless, he had developed a taste for ornate ceremony in his own Chapel Royal even before he had succeeded to the English crown, and once ensconced in London he came to favour the Church of England, with its dutiful bishops and pre-Calvinist liturgy, as