Charles I 1625-1640

Brian Quintrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317902232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Draws on recent interpretations of the period to re-evaluate Charles I's reign. This work analyses the reign of Charles I against the background of his father's legacy and the problems he inherited. The study assesses Charles's own methods and style of government, suggesting that these were mainly to blame for the difficulties he encounted.

Part One: The Background

1 The Jacobean Legacy

‘We live,’ said William Laud, Bishop of St Davids, in his sermon at the opening of Charles’s first Parliament in June 1625, ‘to see a miracle, change without alteration: another king, but the same life-expression of all the royal and religious virtues of his father; and no sinews … shrinking in the State’ (31, vol. 1, p. 98). Charles’s succession was the first since 1509 to be entirely straightforward; but change was in the air, and Laud, although long in the royal service, did not in his own person entirely bear out his confident words. His new-found prominence at Court owed little to James and much to the support of the Duke of Buckingham and the new King. To the Court at large, too, change was more immediately evident than continuity. Charles remained faithful to his father’s favourite, Buckingham, who had become his constant political ally [doc. 3]; but he had lost little time in introducing a new regimen, restoring an Elizabethan concern for proper forms, decorum and order in place of his father’s characteristically relaxed ways. He intended, as he later put it, ‘to establish government and order … [there] which from thence may spread with more honour thorough all parts of our kingdoms’ (188, p. 171). But James had never seen his Court as an exemplar in this way; and it would be wrong to conclude that Jacobean England had been grievously illregulated or that a loosely ordered Court was necessarily an ineffectual one. James’s Court was merely following the more relaxed style familiar in France and Scotland.

This qualification deserves emphasis, as prevailing fashions in English historiography, whether Whig or Marxist, have seldom been kind to James. So much is this so that the scathing comments of Sir Anthony Weldon, a minor courtier upset by his dismissal for insulting the Scots, for many years provided the popular image of James I and his Court, after being given new currency in the nineteenth century. Weldon’s more balanced final assessment of James has had less prominence (2). Historians of Scotland have generally shown an acuter awareness of his qualities as James VI, and recently one of them, Jenny Wormald, has asked whether James VI and I should be regarded as ‘two kings or one?’ (219). It is a question both pertinent and timely, as James has in recent years begun to escape from the hapless supporting role in impending disaster to which traditional English historiography assigned him. The hoary Whiggish assumption of a ‘high road to civil war’, along the early stretches of which James was commonly held to have stumbled, has finally been undermined by further search for the origins, and the mechanics, of the breakdown of Stuart government under Charles (88).

Instead, a number of historians, known collectively but not entirely accurately as ‘revisionists’ (for they form no school and do not always accept the label), have, in pursuing shorter-term explanations of the Civil War’s origins, stressed the low-key nature of much of early modern government. They have established, for example, that relations between Crown and Parliament were by no means always combative, and that much was done, even in the Commons, in a cordial and cooperative way. Enjoyment of royal patronage, and the need to retain royal favour, almost invariably exercised a constraining influence. There was no sharp division between ‘Court’ and ‘country’ (82, Introduction). The Commons themselves were much concerned with local issues, and even in the tensest session it was not uncommon for the bulk of the legislation to be of a private or local kind. Indeed, it has been argued that this local concern inhibited MPs, discouraging close interest in national and international affairs, and making them so reluctant to commit their constituents to taxation for such purposes that the Commons were in danger of proving an irrelevance to the demands of war during the 1620s. Views were not polarised during the parliamentary tussles of these years, and there was no necessary prelude to the breakdown of government in 1640 (178). Other historians, who might be called ‘post-revisionists’, fully accept the Commons’ concern with local issues, but maintain that MPs were perfectly capable of combining it with an active interest in the wider world; and that, while relations between the Crown and Parliament were frequently harmonious and cooperative, the Commons never lost sight of the need to protect parliamentary privilege and the property rights of the subject, as they showed in 1604 and 1610 (82). If taxation was not always readily forthcoming in the 1620s, it was primarily because the political will was lacking. And if that was the case, serious – and perhaps momentous – parliamentary conflict could not be far away (113, 204).

From such historiographical debates, James emerges moderately well. His relations with his Parliaments were always patchy, and his efforts to increase his revenues were always likely to arouse fears about his subjects’ property; but particularly in his early years, his misunderstandings may often be traced to lack of accurate counsel from his ministers, who had their own axes to grind, and to the unhappy influence of his Bedchamber officers (77). As a consequence, he failed to secure either the full union he wanted between his kingdoms or the sorely needed reforms of royal finances. More constructively, his Scottish upbringing had given him a life-long interest in the making and enforcement of legislation, as he insisted both to Prince Henry in his Basilikon Doron and to his early Parliaments, and he quickly appreciated the problems for central and local administrators of the tangled mass of Tudor statutes which urgently needed to be digested and codified (26). His fondness for royal proclamations, which dealt with specific pressing problems, stemmed from this concern rather than, as some MPs feared, from a readiness to use his prerogative to make law outside parliamentary statute (29).

James’s financial position was, however, never secure. He hoped to overcome the weakness of his Elizabethan inheritance by taking advantage of the Exchequer’s apparently hopeful verdict in the case of the malcontent Turkey merchant John Bate in 1606 to create a solid annual source of ordinary revenue through an extension of the customs, beyond the limits set by statutory regulation of tonnage and poundage (28, 76). But this took time, and by 1618, when the Thirty Years’ War broke out, he was scarcely better equipped to face heavy demands for extraordinary, wartime expenditure than Elizabeth I had ever been. Such demands were, however, almost inevitable after his son-in-law, the Elector Palatine Frederick V, had been forcibly removed by vengeful Habsburg forces both from the throne of neighbouring Bohemia, which he had recently accepted against James’s advice, and from his hereditary Palatinate. The exile of James’s firmly Calvinist daughter Elizabeth and her children at the Hague, while Frederick struggled to recover his fortunes, daily emphasised the blow to Stuart honour. If diplomacy failed, funding for war might well be needed (116, 164).

This situation brought into sharper focus the delicate and ill-defined relationship between the granting of supply by the Commons and the remedying by the Crown of the grievances they put before it (69 and, e.g., doc. 11). In 1621 James got the supply he asked for early, and without discussion of grievances, but even though the circumstances warranted speed, the Commons first devoted a week to considering whether a recent proclamation, forbidding anti-Spanish comment while the King was engaged in the protracted negotiations for a Spanish match for Charles, infringed their freedom of debate (124). The second session, later that year, was to end abruptly without further supply, after a more celebrated difference of opinion over the extent to which the Commons were entitled to proffer advice on foreign policy. They also felt let down by James’s failure to respond to their rapid grant of supply in the first session by allowing them time for a thorough consideration of grievances in the second. Many completed bills thereby failed to get the royal assent. But in essence, James’s view of foreign policy prevailed. Diplomacy with Spain was preferable to the cost and hazards of military confrontation with occupying Habsburg forces, for the English had no regular army of their own. Any Protestant crusade would have to wait (145).

In 1624, after Charles’s dramatic but fruitless dash with Buckingham to Madrid had at least exposed the hollowness of Spanish interest in bringing about the release even of the Lower Palatinate, on the Rhine, which had fallen to Spinola’s troops in 1620, James himself first publicly proposed to Parliament that supply should be appropriated to specific defensive purposes, which might precede a war, and his ministers made accountable to the Commons for the way it was spent; but the Commons had toyed with this arrangement in 1621, and may well have suggested it to James in 1624 (28). For the possibility of war remained the central issue; and although no fewer than thirty-five public acts and thirty-eight private ones were passed in 1624, which might suggest a Parliament with its mind on domestic matters, most had been prepared for the royal assent in 1621, and scarcely needed further discussion (140, cf. 178). There were important tactical and procedural lessons here for Charles, if he could see them. As Tom Cogswell has shown, the Commons were less supine and irrelevant in the face of war than revisionists have sometimes supposed (69, 70, also 120). While there was no crude bargaining for redress of grievances before supply, of the kind Whig historians once assumed, James’s experiences nevertheless demonstrated that there existed an intangible but powerful relationship between the two which it ill behove a king to ignore.

However important its role, Parliament was, even during the 1620s when five general elections were held, comparatively seldom in session. It had little claim to be regarded as part of the King’s regular administration. Much more central to his affairs, as revisionist historians have pointed out, were the Court and the Privy Council. James’s lengthy experience of direct participation in government in Scotland through his Chamber there led him in 1603 to amplify the role of the Bedchamber within the Household and to try to make it the centrepiece of his rule over his two kingdoms (77). It was an imaginative idea, but it meant grafting Scottish practice onto the more formal structure favoured by Elizabeth I, and was only partially successful. Early problems over the continuing preponderance of Scots among its members and restricted access to the King for English ministers gave way in time to problems over the influence of Buckingham, who, with Prince Charles, used the Bedchamber as a base from which to press on James their distinctive views on foreign policy. Buckingham kept his critics from the King so effectively that by late 1624 there was visible unrest within the Privy Council at the selective nature of the advice taken. One of its senior members, the hispanophile Earl of Arundel, protested to Charles in January 1625 at the way he and others were being excluded from royal counsels, complaining that while they could see what was happening they had no knowledge of how or why decisions had been arrived at (145). Buckingham thus began to seem to courtiers like Arundel and the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Pembroke, to have too large a part not just in dispensing the King’s patronage but also in deciding the nature of his policy (147). There was ground here on which parliamentary suspicions might grow.

James was never as familiar a figure at administrative meetings of his English Privy Council as he had been at its Scottish counterpart; but he attended rather more often than Elizabeth had ever done, and took a particular interest in matters of trade and commerce – now a source of much of his revenue – and in both 1616 and 1620 presided on half a dozen occasions (1). With Sir Francis Bacon, he seems to have believed that he had a duty to lend majesty to its proceedings, but not so often that his councillors felt inhibited and ceased to debate freely (43). As Bacon’s own papers show, the Council and the common law judges who rode the assize circuits twice each year were capable of setting exacting standards of performance under pressure from the King, who expected straight answers about the country’s problems and encouraged his officials to do the same. As early as 1607 he was boasting that he had dealt personally with his common law judges more often than his predecessors had done; and even though he clashed with them over their attitude to the prerogative (equity) and ecclesiastical courts, he also encouraged them to take a wider responsibility for the condition of England (29, 43). Even in the early 1620s, when he was once supposed to be losing his grip, James with his Council launched into an extensive series of enquiries into persistent financial and commercial problems by commissions which included not only councillors but also MPs and City merchants (72, 139).

In his handling of the Church of England, James showed he had learned in Scotland the benefits of argument and discussion in reaching acceptable decisions; and, scholar that he also was, he did not shy from entertaining views other than his own. His Church of England was a broad one and, until the Thirty Years’ War brought its tensions, contained fairly comfortably within it a wide range of Protestant opinion either side of his own deliberately less well-defined one. His renewed attempts at a Spanish marriage for Charles, however, once more stirred anti-popish elements in the Church, and caused James to shift his favours at Court away from his rigidly Calvinist primate, George Abbot, towards other clergy, anti-Calvinist (or, more loosely, Arminian), who were prepared to accept such a match, a process helped by the deaths of the two most influential courtly Calvinists, James Montagu, Bishop of Winchester (1618) and John King, Bishop of London (1621) (91, 92). He inclined more noticeably towards an ambitious group of anti-Calvinist clergy, gathered nearby around Bishop Neile at Durham House. He also advanced another old enemy of Abbot, John Williams, to the see of Lincoln and then to the office of Lord Keeper (213).

In this changing context, Richard Montagu, royal chaplain, Canon of Windsor and on the fringe of the Durham House circle, began to make a name for himself. In 1624, he published A New Gagg for an Old Goose, which was calculated to appeal to James in his present circumstances, while undermining the Calvinist position within the Church. He was aware of James’s pride in his role as a Christian peacemaker and in his belief in the apostolic catholicity of the Church of England, but argued that James’s criticism of Rome for failing to put its doctrinal house in order would sound better if he had done the same to the Church of England. In Montagu’s eyes, there were very few major differences in doctrine between the two churches; but the most obtrusive was one central to orthodox Calvinist belief: the relationship between predestination*, grace and free will, the Calvinist interpretations of which he regarded as both puritan and schismatic. Within a year, in the face of Abbot-inspired rumblings at Court and in Parliament, Montagu published the shrewdly entitled Appello Caesarem (1625), a work James himself licensed for the press. In this Montagu pushed still further the case for regarding Calvinism as an open door to subversion (9...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION TO THE SERIES
• Part One: The Background
• Part Two: Analysis – The War Years, 1625–1629
• Part Three: Analysis – Personal Rule, 1629–1640
• Part Four: Assessment
• Part Five: Documents
• GLOSSARY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX