Civil War: The History of England Volume III (12 page)

The weather outside the chamber was bitter. John Chamberlain wrote at the beginning of February that ‘the Thames is now quite frozen over, so that people have passed over, to and fro, these four or five days . . . the winds and high tides have so driven the ice in heaps in some places, that it lies like rocks and mountains, and hath a strange and hideous aspect’.

The depression of trade was the single most important theme for the assembly beside the frozen riven The gathering of members of parliament at Westminster gave the opportunity for the exporters, landlords and graziers among them to vent their complaints about falling prices and unsold wool. It was declared that poverty and want were rife. One member told his colleagues that ‘I had rather be a ploughman than a merchant’. Disorderly interventions did not quell the embittered speeches. No parties had as yet emerged, in the modern sense, only individuals expressing vested interests or local grievances. It was becoming clear, however, that the political initiative was being grasped by parliament rather than by the king and council.

In the same session parliament drew up a petition against ‘Jesuits, papists and recusants’. It was the only way they knew of unravelling the Spanish connection that the king favoured. The member for Bath, Sir Robert Phelips, raised the temperature by saying that if the papists were not checked they would soon comprise half of the king’s subjects. So parliament acted. All recusants to be banished from London. All recusants to be disarmed by the justices of the peace. No subject of the king should hear Mass. James was in a quandary, suspended between his parliament and the king of Spain; it was reported that he would accept the principal recommendations but would reserve the particulars for further consideration. This was widely believed to be an evasion.

The feeling of the people against the Spaniards was now palpable. A caricature had been circulated at the beginning of 1621 that depicted the king of Spain, the pope and the devil as conspirators in another ‘powder-plot’. The Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, was proceeding down Fenchurch Street when an apprentice called out, ‘There goes the devil in a dung-cart.’

One of Gondomar’s servants responded. ‘Sir, you shall see Bridewell ere long for your mirth.’

‘What! Shall we go to Bridewell for such a dog as thou!’

Eventually the apprentice and his companions were whipped through the streets, much to the indignation of the citizens.

Parliament itself was enthusiastic for Frederick’s cause. When one member made a speech advocating war against the imperial forces the Commons responded with a unanimous vote, lifting their hats high in acclamation, and vowed to recover the Palatinate. James seemed for the moment to share their enthusiasm, but he was too shrewd or too wary to commit himself to a European war against the Catholic powers. He had in any case grown impatient with parliament. It had sat for four months, and spent most of its time in delivering to him requests and grievances. It had not addressed the necessities of the king, or his request for a further grant of money. So at the beginning of June 1621, he adjourned it.

At a later date a notable parliamentarian, Sir John Eliot, reflected upon the failure of this assembly. The king believed that the liberties of parliament encroached upon his prerogative, while in turn parliament feared he ‘sought to retrench and block up the ancient privileges and liberties of the house’. So both sides became more intransigent, the king maintaining his royal power and the parliament standing upon its privileges. Eliot believed that there was a middle ground, but at the time it was overlooked.

This was the rock upon which the constitution would founder. An eminent nineteenth-century jurist, John, Baron Campbell, wrote that ‘the meeting of parliament on 30 January, 1621, may be considered the commencement of that great movement, which, exactly twenty eight years afterwards, led to the decapitation of an English sovereign, under a judicial sentence pronounced by his subjects’. A portrait of the king, completed in this year by Daniel Mytens, shows James in his robes of state; he has a preoccupied, or perhaps a perplexed, expression.

When parliament met once more on 20 November, it was clear that its zeal and anger had not noticeably diminished. Its members were in a sense liberated by the absence of the sovereign; James had decided to leave London and, with Buckingham, travelled to Royston and Newmarket. The chamber was united in its horror of recent policies. Sir Robert Phelips was once again on the attack. The Catholic states of Europe were England’s enemies, while in England the Catholics had grown so bold that they dared to talk of the Protestants as a ‘faction’. Let no supply be granted to the king until the dangers, home and abroad, had been resolved. Edward Coke, now a leader of the malcontents, then rose to remind his colleagues that Spain had sent the Armada, that the sheep scab which destroyed many flocks came from the same country, and that the most disgusting disease to strike humankind – namely, syphilis – had spread from Naples, a city controlled by Spain. That country was the source and spring of all foulness.

The Spaniards were also attacked in violent terms when John Pym, soon to become the fiercest opponent to the pretensions of the Crown, rose to speak against the Catholic threat in England itself, where ‘the seeds of sedition’ were buried beneath ‘the pretences of religion’. The Venetian ambassador reported that the members have complained bitterly because his majesty shows them [the Catholics] so much indulgence,. The sovereign was indeed the problem; he had asked for a supply, but had not properly disclosed his policy. What could his supporters say on his behalf? The parliament had also raised the matter of the prince’s marriage. If the infanta of Spain eventually became the queen of England, one of her offspring would at a future date assume the throne; this would mean the return to the rule of a Catholic king. The members of the Commons drew up a petition in which they asked James to declare war on the Catholic powers of Europe and to marry his son to a Protestant.

When the king received word of this petition he is supposed to have cried out, ‘God give me patience!’ He wrote to the Speaker of the Commons complaining that ‘some fiery and popular spirits’ were considering issues that were beyond their competence to resolve; he demanded that no member should in the future dare to touch upon issues ‘concerning our government or matters of state’. The
Spanish match was not open for discussion. He then issued a threat that he felt himself ‘very free and able to punish any man’s misdemeanours in parliament as well during their sitting as after’. He had effectively denied them any rights at all. Phelips described it as ‘a soul-killing letter’.

The Commons then drew up a petition in which they asked the king not to believe ill-founded reports on their conduct; they also requested him to guarantee their privileges. When they came with the document to Newmarket, he called out, ‘Stools for the ambassadors!’ He realized now that they did indeed represent a separate power in the land. In response to the petition, however, he warned them not to touch his sovereign power. One member, Sir Nathaniel Rich, objected to these commands. He took offence at such royal demands as ‘Meddle not with this business’ or ‘Go to this business first’. ‘When I speak of freedom of speech,’ he declared, ‘I mean not licentiousness and exorbitancy, but speech without servile fear or, as it were, under the rod.’

On 18 December 1621, by candlelight in the evening, the Commons issued a ‘protestation’ in which they asserted that their privileges, and indeed their lives, ‘are the ancient and undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England’. They had every right to discuss foreign affairs. Any matter that concerned the defence of the realm, or the state of religion, came within the scope of their counsel and debate. They demanded freedom of speech and freedom from arrest. James, now thoroughly exasperated, adjourned and then dissolved parliament. He called for the journal of the Commons and with his own hand ripped out the ‘protestation’; it now had no status. ‘I will govern’, he said, ‘according to the commonweal, but not according to the common will.’ The ‘commonweal’ was the term for the general interests of the nation. He then consigned Coke and Phelips to prison and confined Pym to his house. ‘It is certain,’ Gondomar wrote, ‘that the king will never summon another parliament as long as he lives.’

The dissolution marked the beginning of the end of James’s authority in England. His policy had been a dead failure, and he had alienated all the citizens and gentry who took the side of the Commons. He had no money to fight any war on behalf of the Palatinate, and he was obliged to continue negotiations with Spain. It was also widely
believed that Buckingham’s advice lay behind the king’s intransigence; the favourite was even more distrusted than before. The times were dangerous and uncertain.

The reputation of the king was now constantly under attack. He was accused of being lazy and improvident; his will was weaker than water. He was no more than the king of Spain’s viceroy. In January 1622, a man was put upon the rack ‘for saying that there would be a rebellion’. A manuscript libel by ‘Tom-Tell-Truth’ passed among the people, saying that James may be ‘defender of the faith’, according to his title, but the faith was that of the Catholics; he was head of the Church dormant, not the Church militant or triumphant. ‘Tom’ added that Gondomar had the golden key to the king’s cabinet of secrets and that James himself had committed the most hideous depravities of which a human being was capable. This was a reference to the king’s relationship with Buckingham. A preacher at Oxford, a young man named Knight, declared that it was ‘lawful for subjects when harassed on the score of religion to take arms against their Prince in their own defence’. Soon enough James issued ‘directions concerning preaching’ in which the clergy were forbidden to make ‘bitter invectives and indecent railing speeches’ against the Catholics and were told to avoid ‘all matters of state’. ‘No man can now mutter a word in the pulpit’, Buckingham boasted to the Spanish ambassador, ‘but he is presently catched and set in straight prison.’

With the same wish to silence dissent the king proclaimed that ‘noblemen, knights and gentlemen of quality’ should return to their rural estates. It was claimed that this was a measure to promote hospitality in the countryside but it was widely believed that it was aimed at the gentry who, while residing in London, compounded their discontent by sharing their grievances.

The lawyers of Gray’s Inn had decided to take some small cannon from the Tower in order to celebrate Twelfth Night. They shot them off in the dead of night, but the report was so loud that it awoke the king at Whitehall. He started out of his bed crying, ‘Treason! Treason!’ The whole court was in alarm, and the earl of Arundel ran to the royal bedchamber with his drawn sword in his hand. The false alarm had arisen from the king’s own fears. He seemed to lack both moral and physical courage. The Venetian
ambassador reported that he was ‘too agitated by constant mistrust of everyone, tyrannized over by perpetual fear for his life, tenacious of his authority as against the parliament and jealous of his son’s obedience, all accidents and causes of his fatal and almost desperate infirmity of mind, so harmful to the general welfare’.

On the day on which the dissolution of parliament was announced James was riding in the park at his palace of Theobalds when his horse stumbled and threw him into the New River that flowed through the grounds; the ice of January broke beneath him and he sank into the water until only his boots could be seen. He was rescued, and was none the worse after the incident, but it is an apt image of a hapless sovereign.

9

The Spanish travellers

Prince Charles was becoming impatient with the slow progress of the negotiations concerning his betrothal to the Infanta Maria Anna of Spain. The marriage itself had been contemplated twelve years before. Yet there had been endless wrangles about the status of Catholics in England, a sensitive affair that became embroiled with the disputes over the Palatinate and the general state of religious warfare in Europe. There was still some doubt whether the Spanish were in earnest about the match, and disputes arose over the size of the dowry; these doubts were not assuaged by the accession of Philip IV in 1621. It was not at all clear, to put it no higher, that parliament or people would support their sovereign’s wishes in the matter. When in 1622 the king ordered that Catholic recusants should be released from prison, after they had given security for any subsequent appearance in court, the fear and anger of the Protestant majority were evident.

It was proposed that Buckingham, now lord high admiral, would himself sail to Madrid; it was also whispered that ‘he intended to take his friend with him in secret, to bring back that beautiful angel’. The friend in question was Charles himself. The plan was dropped only to be replaced by another.

In February 1623, Charles and Buckingham approached the king with a scheme of their own devising. It would take too long
for a fleet to be prepared for the voyage to Madrid. The effort of obtaining travel warrants for France would be immense. Their plan was to travel to Spain in disguise, with the intention of wooing and winning the most eligible woman in the world. For them it was a great adventure, a grand European romance. The king, sick and weary, seems to have assented; he rarely withstood the blandishments of his favourite or the urgent entreaties of his son.