Strange Outlandish Word

On​ a recent visit to Apethorpe Palace in Northamptonshire, I was told by the English Heritage tour guide that James VI of Scotland was ‘the person whom Elizabeth I had chosen to be her successor’. Only days after Elizabeth’s death aged 69 in March 1603, Henri IV of France’s ambassador, the comte de Beaumont, similarly reported from London ‘the immediate election and nomination of the king of Scotland as her successor’. Beaumont added that support for his accession as King James I of England was strengthened ‘by the fact that he has sons’ and was ‘already versed in government’ (he had been crowned king of Scotland as an infant in 1567), not to mention his strong hereditary claim as Elizabeth’s first cousin twice removed. Beaumont nevertheless marvelled at the prevailing mood of tranquil unanimity, given that ‘for years, all Christendom held for certain’ that the death of England’s Virgin Queen would ‘be attended with trouble and confusion’. As Susan Doran points out on the first page of From Tudor to Stuart, only a few years earlier at least a dozen candidates for the succession had been identified, with James jostling alongside Philip II of Spain’s daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia and his own English-born first cousin Arbella Stuart.

The term ‘regime change’ was coined in the US in the 1920s, but Doran applies it to the dynastic shift in 1603, which ‘despite all the contradictory claims and constitutional uncertainties … was remarkably efficient and unproblematic, even something of an anticlimax’. Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Robert Cecil, had without her knowledge masterminded a succession plan, starting a clandestine correspondence with James two years before her death. Accordingly, James had been shown the proclamation announcing his accession that was read aloud at Richmond Palace a few hours after the queen’s death on 24 March, and thereafter across London; his accession was confirmed by a specially convened Great Council which met at Whitehall that evening. James himself did not arrive in London until 7 May, having deliberately waited until after Elizabeth’s funeral.

All the same, accounts of Elizabeth’s ‘nomination’ and James’s straightforward succession are ultimately misleading. The queen had not only steadfastly refused to name a successor but had also overseen legislation rendering it treasonable (and therefore a capital crime) to discuss the succession. Elizabeth’s refusal to make a will or leave directions for her funeral reinforces the impression of ‘a woman fearful of death’ (in Doran’s words), whatever the subsequent reports of her deathbed piety and preparedness. The playwright Thomas Dekker described the news of her death as landing ‘like a thunderclap’ among her stunned subjects, who ‘never understood what that strange outlandish word Change signified’.

Having ‘studied the Tudors for decades’, Doran tells us that she decided to ‘embark on an entirely new period of research’ by studying the decade following Elizabeth’s death. She finds James ‘an intriguing figure: as clever and witty as his predecessor and just as skilled in the arts of deception and realpolitik’. Any fresh appraisal must reckon with the question posed more than forty years ago by Doran’s former Oxford colleague, the late Jenny Wormald. Given the starkly divergent judgments of Scottish and English historians, was he ‘two kings or one’? Wormald contrasted Gordon Donaldson’s cool assessment that, as king of Scotland, James was ‘a man of very remarkable political ability and sagacity in deciding on policy and of conspicuous tenacity in having it carried out’ with Lawrence Stone’s shrill insistence that ‘as a hated Scot, James was suspect to the English from the beginning, and his ungainly presence, mumbling speech and dirty ways did not inspire respect.’ According to Stone, the new king’s ‘blatantly homosexual attachments and his alcoholic excesses’, as well as his poor personal hygiene, meant that ‘the sanctity of monarchy itself would soon be called into question,’ and civil war become imaginable. Though she is clear that ‘James I of England differed little from James VI of Scotland,’ Doran is not concerned with how James’s English self diverged from his Scottish one, but with the ways in which he differed – or didn’t – from Elizabeth, his fellow monarch and godmother, whom he never met, but with whom his relations had been complex and often fraught, despite the diplomatic amity agreed between England and Scotland in 1586.

Doran shows mastery of the extensive state papers and private archives surviving from the 1600s – not least the voluminous Cecil papers at Hatfield House – and the majority of her references cite manuscript sources. At the same time, she synthesises numerous historiographical debates, steering readers to well-informed conclusions. She is also refreshingly willing to state her views. Assessing decades of salacious speculation regarding the nature of James’s teenage relationship with his older French cousin Esmé Stewart, duke of Lennox, she concludes: ‘My guess is that James was physically attracted to Lennox, but that their relationship was sexually unconsummated.’

Elsewhere, she summarises divergent readings of the king’s epic poem, The Lepanto, first published in 1591, a retelling of the major naval battle fought two decades earlier which resulted in victory for Catholic Habsburg forces over the Ottoman Turks. While some scholars discern early evidence of James’s religious ecumenism in the poem, others find elements of militant Protestantism. Doran plumps for an alternative argument suggesting a deliberate authorial ambiguity.

In the book’s conclusion, Doran acknowledges that her comparison of Elizabeth and James emphasises areas of continuity in order to redress a long-standing tendency to dwell ‘on the contrasting personal traits of the two monarchs’. There was considerable common ground on religion; as a result, James was the first adult English monarch since Henry VII whose reign was not accompanied by a radical change in policy. Although disaffected puritans sought further reformation of the Church of England, Doran insists that ‘James was no more inclusive of puritans and Presbyterians than Elizabeth had been.’ When he directed parish ministers to avoid ‘the deep points of predestination’ in their sermons, ‘Elizabeth would have approved.’ Politically, James ensured continuity by retaining many of his predecessor’s advisers – most notably Cecil, later earl of Salisbury, as his principal secretary – and by avoiding ‘any radical overhaul of the administration or governance of the realm’. Discussing The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), James’s main work of political theory, Doran argues that ‘there was actually very little in the book with which Elizabeth would have disagreed,’ though she did believe that arcana imperii were better preserved as private credos than printed manifestos.

Meanwhile, ‘visitors to James’s court would have found many similarities in its culture to the previous reign.’ The comparisons are, if anything, to James’s advantage, since he achieved ‘remarkably frictionless connections’ between his household and those of Queen Anna and his eldest son, Prince Henry, and presided over an international and sophisticated court. With Shakespeare and Ben Jonson benefiting from extended seasons of royal revels, there was an increase in the number of plays commissioned and staged, as well as ‘more imaginative and expensive’ masques, which celebrated a monarch who, Doran says, ‘arguably … did more to promote culture – especially poetry – in Scotland than ever Elizabeth did in England’. At the other end of the social scale, for those with ‘little or no political voice, the accession of James brought little that was new, and their lives went on much as before’.

Doran’s enumeration of the scale and seriousness of the challenges confronting James on his accession nevertheless makes clear that some amount of change was not only inescapable, but desirable. England was ‘a divided and disaffected realm’ in 1603: its population had increased by around 35 per cent during the queen’s 45-year reign, with a significant decline in real wages. There were recurrent periods of famine and dearth, while rising fiscal levies were exacted in order to support the Dutch in their efforts to overthrow Spanish rule, as well as to fund a simultaneous, ruinously expensive campaign to suppress rebellion in Ireland. Rural resentment erupted in riots against land enclosure, while urban animosity was directed at courtiers who enriched themselves through monopolies and other lucrative privileges conferred by an ageing monarch. Unsurprisingly, popular ‘expectations were unrealistically high that as a new broom [James] would sweep away old abuses and corruptions in the system.’

The​ arrival of a married king with three living heirs – Henry, Elizabeth and Charles – did, however, resolve the long-standing uncertainty surrounding the English succession. Doran remarks that a ‘young and good-looking royal family was more glamorous than the elderly figure of Elizabeth, who could not hide her wrinkled skin and rotting teeth during the last years of her life’. (After the family moved to London, two more daughters were born, though both died in infancy.) But dynastic security came with an expectation, on James’s part, of major constitutional change. The new king wanted to unite England and Scotland into a single polity – Great Britain – with, in Doran’s words, ‘one law and one society though not total uniformity in the customs of each place’. Despite an extensive pamphlet debate and protracted parliamentary wrangling, James’s unionist ambitions failed, and were only partially realised, more than a century later, when his great-granddaughter Queen Anne signed the Treaty of Union in 1707. A new British state was created, with a single legislature at Westminster, a common currency and single economic market, while separate national churches, legal systems and educational provision were retained in Scotland and England.

At the time of James’s move to England in 1603, Anglo-Scottish tensions were such that Doran judges his decision to downgrade the privy chamber and create a separate bedchamber entirely staffed by Scots to be ‘a political error’. The king also swiftly reorganised the English court timetable to enable him to spend significant amounts of time away from London, preferably hunting (Doran calculates that ‘the time James spent at his favourite recreation amounted to about six months each year’). Politically, the Westminster Parliament was ‘the institution which James found most alien’: he was dismayed by the rambunctiousness of the House of Commons, which contrasted unfavourably with the smaller, unicameral Scottish Parliament, where legislative initiative, as well as freedom of speech, could be tightly controlled. Doran summarises complex Westminster debates, including those relating to crown finance, prerogative fiscal dues, parliamentary privileges and the royal proposals for Anglo-Scottish union. She points out that, despite all the rebarbative rhetoric and mutual recrimination, the first session of James’s first English parliament in 1604 was ‘more legislatively productive than any Elizabethan parliament’: 39 private acts and 33 public statutes were passed, including major legislation relating to witchcraft and game laws.

As with any regime change, ‘expectations were high but also contradictory.’ While puritans with reformist aspirations were frustrated, many Catholics had regarded a Stuart accession as auspicious, welcoming James as the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was widely regarded as an unofficial Catholic martyr after her execution on Elizabeth’s orders in 1587. Although relatively few openly declared themselves as such, Doran suggests that a quarter of the population ‘self-identified as Catholic’, grudgingly attending Protestant church services only to avoid punitive fines. But Catholic hopes that James might grant religious toleration proved illusory. Indeed, radical religious reversal – accompanied by murderous mayhem – was only narrowly averted by the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Doran remarks that ‘although conspiracies to murder monarchs were not new to Britain nor the Continent, the Gunpowder Treason was distinct because it intended the “destruction” of the whole governing class. Nothing like it had ever been attempted before; and it also came within a hair’s breadth of success.’

From Tudor to Stuart provides a learned and judicious guide to English politics that James would have benefited from reading as he travelled south from Edinburgh in 1603. At the same time, however, he might well have cavilled that comparison with his predecessor is not the sole means by which his first ten years as English king should be evaluated. As anyone who has started a new job succeeding a long-serving postholder knows, constant comparisons with previous incumbents are inescapable – and often distorting and grating. Doran quotes James ‘bluntly’ pointing out that he was not obliged to follow ‘the causes of his predecessor’ in axiomatically extending military and financial support to the Dutch.

James, moreover, wasn’t a political neophyte. In June 1616, speaking to judges in the Star Chamber the day after he turned fifty, he recalled that ‘when I came into England’, he had been ‘an old king, past middle age, and practised in government ever since I was twelve years old’. In 1621, he said that he had relied ‘upon the old councillors that I found, which the old queen had left’, but claimed that he had been badly advised. Doran accepts that ‘James’s criticisms may have been fair’ – the House of Commons was permitted to adjudicate disputed election results without royal interference, for instance – but denies that he was insufficiently warned about likely opposition to his plans for Anglo-Scottish union. Rather: ‘It is hard to see how the privy council could have diverted him.’

Although James attracted many more supporters than detractors at his accession, he was always likely to breach English etiquette inadvertently. Having had to postpone summoning his first parliament on account of plague, he eventually opened it on 19 March 1604. But he was ‘unaware of the exact ceremonial procedure for the occasion’ and unexpectedly embarked on an hour-long address ‘setting out his vision for England and his relationship with his subjects’, although a tenth of the MPs had still not entered the chamber. Alerted to the ‘mishap’, James repeated his speech the following day and oversaw its publication (it ran into four editions that year). But one senses a new king quickly blotting his parliamentary copybook. Four days later, Parliament held its first working session, and the MP for Middlesex, Sir Robert Wroth, ‘opened the batting’ – in Doran’s very English metaphor. A ‘veteran of nine Elizabethan parliaments’, Wroth outlined ‘a seven-point programme of reform’. Clearly, there was no shortage of Elizabethans keen to dictate the agenda.

Some degree of royal frustration seems inevitable. Doran cites James’s response to concerns that he was spending too much time away from London for reasons of what we might now call ‘self-care’. To reassure his English ministers, James promised that

if my continual presence in London be so necessary, as my absence for my health makes the Councillors to be without authority or respect, one word shall bring me home and make me work till my breath work out, if that be the greatest well for the kingdom; but I cannot think that course so needful if ye make not mountains of molehills.

One suspects that his criteria for distinguishing between mountain and molehill might have differed from those of his advisers.

Although not explored by Doran, the one area where James’s accession as king of England brought significant and irreversible change was north of the border. Scotland became an absentee monarchy whose state business was conducted through conciliar bodies and trusted ministers, notably George Home, earl of Dunbar. Despite publicly pledging in 1603 to return to Scotland at least every three years, if not more frequently, James returned only once, in 1617. From Tudor to Stuart concludes with the period during which James suffered the deaths of Dunbar in 1611, followed by those of Salisbury and his heir, Prince Henry, in 1612. James would reign until 1625, with Doran suggesting that he became ‘far less sure-footed’ in his later years. But that is ‘the subject of another book’.