A History of Britain, Volume 2 (6 page)

The confederates came to famously gruesome ends: Catesby and Thomas Percy were tracked down to their safe house in Staffordshire and killed in the assault, Catesby dying holding a picture of the Virgin. Their bodies were exhumed from their graves so that their heads could be removed for proper display at the corners of the parliament building they had planned to detonate. Tresham died in the Tower of some monstrous urethral infection after a copious confession, his excruciating condition presumably making the customary rack redundant. Fawkes and the rest were hanged very briefly, then, still living, had their hearts cut out and displayed to the appreciative public.

More important than the plot itself were the effects it had on the prospects of the Stuart monarchy, which were all positive. Even though he always suffered from the conspiracy jitters (his father, Darnley, had, after all, also been the victim of a gunpowder plot), the king was careful not to go on an anti-Catholic rampage. In fact, he and his government were at pains to separate the ‘fanatics' like Fawkes from loyal Catholics like the senior Tresham and to hope that they had been scared into settling for private ways of exercising their conscience. But 5 November became the Protestant holy-day
par excellence
, the new ‘birth-day of the nation', with bonfires and bells celebrating the deliverance of not only the king himself but also the entirety of the English constitution. James had never seemed so English, so parliamentary as when he had come close to sharing a terrible incineration with the Lords and Commons. Catesby, Percy and Guy Fawkes had achieved something that James could never have done by himself: they had made him a popular hero. Declaring the Gunpowder
Treason day a holiday, parliament outdid itself in eulogizing James as ‘our most gracious sovereign . . . the most great learned and religious king that ever reigned'.

This did not mean, of course, that the next twenty years were a prolonged honeymoon. If anything, the longer the reign went on, the more out of love with each other James and the British became. Godfrey Goodman, Bishop of Gloucester, was just one of many contemporaries who noticed nostalgia for Elizabeth grow ever rosier as the lustre of the Jacobean court became tarnished by outlandish extravagance and scandal. The dimming of reputation, though, was not necessarily a prelude to constitutional crisis, not least because parliament met for only thirty-six months in total out of the twenty-two years of James I's reign, and this intermittent record seemed no more controversial than it had been in the reign of Elizabeth. Parliament did not yet think of itself as an ‘opposition' nor even as an institutional ‘partner' in government. The majority of its members, in both the Lords and Commons, accepted the king's view that their presence was required principally to provide him with the money needed to conduct the business of state. But – and it was an enormous qualification – they shared the inherited truism that they had a responsibility to offer the king counsel and to see that this revenue was not raised in a way that damaged the ‘liberties' or the security of the people. This meant that, when the king did come to them for money, they felt duty bound to present him with a list of grievances. The litany of complaints had become a ritual, and the king was expected to respond, after cavilling about the infringement of his prerogatives, with concessionary gestures, such as the impeachment of some disposable officer of state or a few generalized expressions of love for the worthy representatives of the nation. Sometimes James could be relied on to make those gestures, but most often he had to be pushed. Not infrequently he behaved like a sulky adolescent forced to come home and ask his parents to bale him out from the creditors, gritting his teeth and rolling his eyes while they berated him for his wickedly irresponsible behaviour.

But then James's problems of the purse were self-inflicted. Compared with the famously tight-fisted Elizabeth he was a bottomless well of prodigality. From the very beginning of his reign he threw money at his Scottish companions and courtiers, provoking one parliamentarian to characterize the treasury as a ‘royal cistern wherein his Majesty's largesse to the Scots caused a continual and remediless leak'. But James had come from a relatively poor country with limited resources (which had not, however, stopped him from piling up debts), and in England he obviously felt himself to be in hog heaven. Lands, monopolies, offices, jewels, houses were all
showered on favourites, who then took their cue from the king by themselves spending colossally more than they could afford. The entire court culture was drunk on spending, and there was plenty to spend it on: elaborate masques (average cost £1400 a year) devised by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, in which mechanical contraptions were constructed to make men appear to be flying through the air or swallowed by the oceans; fantastic costumes, encrusted with carbuncle gems; immense dresses for the ladies, pseudo-Persian, billowing beneath the waist, or breasts revealed above, covered only with the most transparently gauzy lawn (a fashion that, to the horror of godly ministers, became ubiquitous at court). Feasting was Lucullan. In 1621 – a rocky year for Crown-country relations – one such banquet costing more than £3000 needed a hundred cooks for eight days to produce 1600 dishes including 240 pheasants. The Jacobean court's devotion to futile excess was perfectly epitomized by the novelty of the ‘ante-supper' invented by the Scots lord James Hay, later Earl of Carlisle. Guests would arrive to ogle a vast table magnificently set with food, the only point of which was to be inspected, tickling the saliva glands into action before the whole thing was removed, thrown away and replaced by identical food that had just come from the kitchens.

The craze for conspicuous waste was contagious. Anyone within the wide circle of the court (which James made a lot wider by creating no fewer than thirty-two earls, nineteen viscounts and fifty-six knight baronets, the last a wholly new invention) who wanted to be taken seriously needed to build on the spectacular scale demanded by fashionable taste and by a king who was constantly on the hoof between hunting lodges and who, even more than Elizabeth, expected to be entertained in palatial style. James made himself so much at home in his courtiers' houses that one desperate host wrote a letter to his bulldog, Mr Jowler, asking him, since he had the royal attention, if he would not mind urging departure on the king. Inevitably, the ‘prodigy houses' that had been going up in the last decades of Elizabeth's reign became even more prodigious in James's time. With Britain at peace, its aristocrats travelled more freely and widely in Europe and brought back with them exuberantly Mannerist designs for stone-clad façades and intricately carved interior panelling. The show places of the Jacobean grandees, like Robert Cecil's Hatfield (the Hertfordshire estate given by the king in exchange for Cecil's sumptuous Theobalds), the Earl of Pembroke's Wilton in Wiltshire or the most prodigious monster of them all, the Earl of Suffolk's Audley End in Essex (on which James passed his famous backhand compliment, ‘too big for a king but might do well enough for a Lord Treasurer'), boasted galleries as long as football pitches, and, now that the English glass industry had been
properly established, great ranges of windows to light them. Even the furniture of the houses – beds, desks and cabinets – sprouted putti and sphinxes, obelisks and miniature temples. Draperies were required to be especially stunning and often renewed. Some £14,000 were spent just to furnish the Countess of Salisbury's (by definition temporary) lying-in chamber with white satin, embroidered with gold and ornamented with pearls. Nothing was too fantastic not to be diverting, especially the stunning gardens, which, since they now featured complicated riddles and allusions to the classics, embedded in statuary, fountains and grottoes, now required specialized hydraulic engineers, like the de Caus family, to design and maintain them.

All this was, of course, ruinously expensive, and many of the most ambitious builders were duly ruined. The most prodigal of all, the king (whose spending was at twice the rate of Elizabeth), drove successive treasurers to distraction attempting to find ways to support his extravagances. There were old ways and there were new ways, but none of them ever came up with enough money and all of them created resentment. The old ways featured the exploitation of ‘Crown rights' like the ‘purveyances', the right granted to the Crown to set prices for goods and services, ostensibly for the household, at well below market rates. Over time it seemed easier, especially to the Crown, to settle for money sums that represented the difference between purveyance prices and market prices, instead of the goods themselves. What had begun as something necessary to the dignity of the Crown had degenerated into a racket. That the honour of the Crown – still an important element in its authority – was shabbily compromised by James's creation of more than 800 new knights at £30 a head was obvious from all the jokes showing up in libels and ballads featuring figures like ‘Sir Fabian Scarecrow', whose landlady coughed up the necessary for his knighthood.

None of these expedients was likely to endear the Crown to its subjects, especially out in the country, where knighthood and aristocratic hierarchy were still treated with reverence. Likewise, when the government sold tax ‘farms' (the right, in return for an up-front sum, to run a tax-collection or customs operation as a private business), it seemed to be delivering the helpless consumer to a private individual who had an interest in maximizing his take in a period of continuing low wages and high prices. In many respects it was no worse than their experience in the last decade of Elizabeth's reign. But then there had been hope, by now gone, that James's government would be an improvement. By 1610 it was clear to Robert Cecil, now given the thankless job of Lord Treasurer in addition to being Secretary of State, that something had to be done to find a
more dependable source of income for the Crown. In that year he did his best to sell a ‘Great Contract' to parliament, in which the Crown would relinquish its feudal rackets, like purveyances and ‘wardships' (the right to manage the property of a feudal minor), in return for a guaranteed annual revenue of £200,000. The deal came to grief when, simultaneously, James decided to demand compensation for the abolition of wardship officers and parliament came to the conclusion that it had overpaid. In the general bitterness, the row over money turned constitutional. Dissolving the uncooperative parliament, James denounced the Commons who had ‘perilled and annoyed our health, wounded our reputation, embouldened an ill-natur'd people, encroached on many of our privileges and plagued our purse'. Lord Ellesmere believed that the Commons' presumption in denying the king adequate funds had encroached on the ‘regality supreme' of the Crown by parading a concern for ‘liberty' that, if not checked hard and fast, ‘will not cease until it break out into democracy'.

Without its life-line, the government staggered on, although Robert Cecil did not, dying of stomach cancer in 1612. He was hardly gone before the predictable attacks on ‘Deformity', including one very pointed polemic by Francis Bacon, appeared. With Cecil collapsed both the moral and actual credit of the Crown. London brewers (hitting the king where it hurt) refused to supply any more ale without advance payment. A Dutch goldsmith, from whom James asked for a £20,000 loan on security of jewels he had bought from him, turned James down on the grounds that others had contributed to the purchase price! It did not help that the king now entrusted the Treasury to one of the Howard clan, the Earl of Suffolk, whose reckless prodigality at Audley End ought to have been an immediate disqualification. But the bigger the debt the more impressive the player, the king seems to have felt.

Little went right in the years ahead. In 1612 Henry, the Prince of Wales, the paragon of Protestant patriots, lauded as virtuous, intelligent, handsome on a horse and (compared to his father, old
Rex Pacificus
) refreshingly interested in bloodshed, died. The outpouring of sorrow at his huge funeral was genuine. In contrast to the defunct Protestant hero, his replacement as Prince of Wales, Charles, had been such a puny child that no one expected him to survive infancy, and even at the age of five he needed to be carried around in people's arms. He was tongue-tied (in glaring contrast to his father), solemn and very short. After Prince Henry died the golden suit of parade armour that had been made for him was passed down to the new Prince of Wales. It was too big for him. Much of his subsequent life would be spent trying to grow into its imperial measurements.

To compensate for a death, two great weddings were celebrated the following year, 1613. At the time there seemed reason only for rejoicing, but both unions turned out to be extremely bad news for the peace and good order of James's realm. The more auspicious of the two matches was the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the prince-elector of the Rhineland Palatinate. If the court had had to suffer the loss of its own native Protestant son in Henry, the son-in-law, Frederick, seemed a reasonable replacement. The festivities, held in mid-February, were, as usual, rowdy and excessive, culminating in an elaborately staged mock naval battle on the Thames between ‘Turks' and ‘Venetians', during which the paper and paste-board port of Algiers went up prematurely in flames.

The second marriage crashed and burned even more spectacularly. The match was between Frances Howard, the daughter of the spendthrift Lord Treasurer, the Earl of Suffolk, and James's current favourite, Robert Carr (Scottish page of Lord Hay, the great party thrower), whose shapely length of leg caught James's eye when Carr was injured in the tilts. Carr, whom the Earl of Suffolk described as ‘straight-limbed, well-favoured, strong-shouldered and smooth-faced with some sort of cunning and show of modsty, tho, God wot, he well knoweth when to show his impudence', had been promoted at dizzy speed, first in 1611 to the Viscountcy of Rochester, where he had been endowed with Henry II's immense pile of a castle, and then in November 1613 to the even grander earldom of Somerset. For the nuptials Ben Jonson produced a masque called
Hymenaei
, designed, in its rapturous extolling of marriage, to draw a veil over the unsavoury circumstances in which the union had come about. For Frances Howard had been married before, in 1606, at the age of thirteen, to the second Earl of Essex, then fourteen. But – so it was later claimed in the proceedings for annulment – the marriage had not gone well, at least not in bed. Not much was kept private in the world of the Jacobean court, especially since this kind of gossip was meat and drink for the printed
courants
or news-sheets, which, much as tabloids today, lived off stories of spooky astral occurrences and the juicy adulteries of the rich and famous. In Frances Howard they had a story beyond their wildest dreams.