Five hundred miles to the north of the Chesapeake was the more bracing climate (moral as well as meteorological) of the Plymouth colony, founded by the Mayflower Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. Today it is famous as the setting for the first Thanksgiving celebrations, but at the time it was overshadowed by its larger neighbour, the Massachusetts Bay colony. The 14,000 or so colonists in New England by 1640 were grouped mainly in small towns near the coast and eked out a living by farming and fishing. Most of the population was made up of Puritan families from England’s ‘middling sort’, eager for the chance not simply to own their own land but to create a godly, disciplined commonwealth, a New Jerusalem in a new world, free of what they saw as the spreading stain of popery back home. This conviction – that England’s rulers and churchmen were failing God’s cause – would help to build Britain’s transatlantic periphery even as it undermined kingly power at the centre.
The crisis of Parliaments
One of the driving forces behind the Puritan exodus to the New World was fear that the rising tide of popery had all but washed away the greatest bulwark of English liberties – England’s Parliament. The war against Spain had forged an unbreakable link in popular imagination between Parliament and the defence of Protestantism and national autonomy. But this almost mystical understanding of Parliament’s place in national life was lost on James I and his successor Charles I, who held stubbornly to the view that Parliament’s main role was to vote them taxes. Money – who should provide it and how it should be spent – was central to the relationship between the early Stuarts and their English Parliaments.
A characteristic of most European states during the early modern period was their governments’ drive to build the necessary institutions, industries and political relationships – particularly with their nobilities – to raise money for and to fight wars. This process, as we have seen, had begun in England under the Plantagenets, but had then stalled after defeat in the Hundred Years War and the Tudors’ failure to find a politically acceptable way either to levy taxes without parliamentary consent, or to scrap the convention that the crown should ask Parliament for cash only to meet the extraordinary demands of war or national defence. The rise of the fiscal–military state elsewhere in Europe was accelerated by the Reformation – which created new and bitter divisions among Christians – but also by the escalating costs of war itself. The limited range and accuracy of early modern firearms meant that they had to be used in mass formations to be effective, which meant more men, training and equipment, and consequently more cash. Building the latest in artillery-proof fortifications – complex polygonal structures of brick and earth – could bankrupt smaller states, while at sea, the gradual shift in naval tactics during the period 1580–1650 from boarding to broadside fire required specialised, and very expensive, warships. Elizabeth could use the prospect or the fact of war with Spain to wring taxes from her Parliaments. But James I faced the problem that had confronted Edward IV and Henry VII: peace. No war meant little or no money from Parliament.
James brought this problem upon himself to some extent by presenting himself in the role of Europe’s peacemaker. The great enemy to European order in his view was religious intemperance, whether Protestant or Catholic. One of his first acts as king of England was to make peace with Spain. The Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1604 ended the privateer war, at least in the Channel, and allowed for the formal restoration of England’s lucrative commerce with Spain and its outposts in Europe. But there would be ‘no peace beyond the line’ – that is, outside of European waters. Indeed, it is a measure of how well the English had performed in the war that the Spanish could not bring them to recognise Spain’s claim to exclusive dominion in the Americas. Even so, Elizabeth had done little to carry the fight against Spain across the Atlantic; and James would do nothing at all. As far as his subjects were concerned, he had made peace, and in peacetime they expected him to live largely off his own revenues from crown lands and customs.
What many overlooked, or were not aware of, was that the sale of crown lands to finance war – notably in the 1540s and 1590s – had severely reduced the size and value of the royal estate. Inflation had bitten deep too, so that royal revenue by 1600 was 40 per cent less in real terms than it had been a century earlier. Peace would of course reduce James’s outgoings. On the other hand, he had three courts to maintain – his own, his wife’s, and his eldest son Prince Henry’s – to Elizabeth’s one; and royal households were ruinously expensive. James’s only way round the resulting financial shortfall was to do as Henry VII and VIII had done in similar circumstances, and that was exploit the crown’s prerogative rights for all they were worth. These financial expedients brought some short-term relief, but were merely ‘patchings and plasterings of a ruinous edifice’.37 And whereas Parliament had just about tolerated Elizabeth’s resort to prerogative taxation in wartime, the same practices in time of peace were bound to meet with resistance from a body newly sensitised to the monarchy’s financial needs and assertiveness. MPs had only to look at France to see how enfeebled representative assemblies became when kings had the power to raise taxes by their own command.
Any prospect of James living off his own ‘proper’ revenues, however, was skewered by his utter fiscal incontinence. He thought that balancing the books was a matter for his privy councillors to sort out, and was not really his problem. He had been profligate as king of Scotland, but once he succeeded to the English crown, with its vastly greater revenues, his largesse knew no bounds. Royal debts rose from £387,000 in 1603 to £775,000 by 1606, and by 1610 he had handed out some £90,000 in gifts and £10,000 a year in pensions to his Bedchamber men and other Scottish courtiers. It was generally accepted that kings, and especially newly enthroned kings, needed to splash out on gifts and sweeteners in order to cement the loyalty of their subjects, but there were limits, and James completely overstepped them. On one occasion in 1621 he laid on a feast for his Scottish friend Viscount Doncaster that consisted of 1,600 dishes and was rumoured to have cost £3,000, or 300 times what the average labourer earnt in a year.
The unseemly scramble for the delicacies that tumbled from the royal table did nothing for the court’s already unsavoury reputation. The factionalism of the 1590s had destroyed any vestigial notion of the court as a forum for virtuous reform. It was now seen as a place of unbridled ambition and vice, where honest men were corrupted or destroyed. Yet if the late Elizabethan court glowed and shone like rotten wood, to borrow Ralegh’s phrase, its Jacobean successor was positively incandescent. It was not only the fact of James’s extravagance that drew criticism but also its objects. James’s choice of royal favourites was invariably unfortunate. He was probably bisexual, but after he had done his dynastic duty and fathered two sons and a daughter – Henry (1594–1612), Elizabeth (1596–1662) and Charles (1600–49) – his preference was for handsome young men. His first favourite as king of England was a ‘comely visag’d’ Scottish pageboy, Robert Kerr, who caught James’s eye during a court tournament and was made a groom of the Bedchamber.38 Kerr dominated James’s affections from 1607 until 1615, when he was implicated in a murder scandal at court for which he was tried and very nearly executed. He was quickly succeeded by another young gentleman – only this time English – George Villiers (1592–1628), whom the king created viscount and eventually (in 1623) duke of Buckingham. A legal student, Simonds D’Ewes, who got a close-up look at Buckingham, found ‘everything in him full of delicacy and handsome features; yea, his hands and face seemed to me, especially effeminate and curious’.39 James’s extraordinary affection for Buckingham prompted his astonishing remark that ‘as Christ had his John, so he [James] … had his George’.40
James’s aversion to dealing with petitioners and court suitors meant that he was happy to allow Buckingham to