James I, oil on canvas by Daniel Mytens, 1621; in the National Portrait Gallery, London.Photos.com/Jupiterimages
But James I was viewed with suspicion by his new subjects. Centuries of hostility between the two nations had created deep enmities, and these could be seen in English descriptions of the king. In them he was characterized as hunchbacked and ugly, with a tongue too large for his mouth and a speech impediment that obscured his words. It was said that he drank to excess and spewed upon his filthy clothing. It was also rumoured that he was homosexual and that he took advantage of the young boys brought to service at court. This caricature, which has long dominated the popular view of James I, was largely the work of disappointed English office seekers whose pique clouded their observations and the judgments of generations of historians.
In fact, James showed his abilities from the first. In the counties through which he passed on his way to London, he lavished royal bounty upon the elites who had been starved for honours during Elizabeth’s parsimonious reign. He knighted hundreds as he went, enjoying the bountiful entertainments that formed such a contrast with his indigent homeland. He would never forget these first encounters with his English subjects, “their eyes flaming nothing but sparkles of affection.” On his progress James also received a petition, putatively signed by a thousand ministers, calling his attention to the unfinished business of church reform. Triple monarchy
James had one overriding ambition: to create a single unified monarchy out of the congeries of territories he now found himself ruling. He wanted a union not only of the crown but of the kingdoms. He made it plain to his first Parliament that he wanted a single name for this new single kingdom: he wanted to be king not of England, Scotland, and Ireland but of Great Britain, and that is what he put on his seals and on his coins. He wanted common citizenship, the end of trade barriers, and gradual movement toward a union of laws, of institutions, and of churches, although he knew this could not be achieved overnight. The chauvinism of too many English elite, however, meant he was not to achieve all of his goals. A common coinage, a common flag, the abolition of hostile laws, and a joint Anglo-Scottish plantation of Ulster were all he was able to manage. Even free trade between the kingdoms was prevented by the amateur lawyers in the English House of Commons. Having failed to promote union by legislation, he tried to promote it by stealth, creating a pan-British court and royal household, elevating Scots to the English peerage and Englishmen to the Scottish and Irish peerage, rewarding those who intermarried across borders, and seeking to remove from each of the churches those features objectionable to members of the other national churches. Progress was negligible and, under his son Charles I, went into reverse. Religious policy
The Millenary Petition (1603) initiated a debate over the religious establishment that James intended to defend. The king called a number of his leading bishops to hold a formal disputation with the reformers. The Hampton Court Conference (1604) saw the king in his element. He took a personal role in the debate and made clear that he hoped to find a place in his church for moderates of all stripes. It was only extremists that he intended to “harry from the land,” those who, unlike the supporters of the Millenary Petition, sought to tear down the established church. The king responded favourably to the call for creating a better-educated and better-paid clergy and referred several doctrinal matters to the consideration of convocation. But only a few of the points raised by the petitioners found their way into the revised canons of 1604. In fact, the most important result of the conference was the establishment of a commission to provide an authorized English translation of the Bible, the King James Version (1611).
Bible: King James frontispieceFrontispiece of the King James Version of the Bible, engraving by Cornelius Boel, 1611.Rare Book and Manuscript Library/University of Pennsylvania
Indeed, James’s hope was that moderates of all persuasions, Roman Catholic and Protestant alike, might dwell together in his church. He offered to preside at a general council of all the Christian churches—Catholic and Protestant—to seek a general reconciliation. Liberals in all churches took his offer seriously. He sought to find a formula for suspending or ameliorating the laws against Catholics if they would take a binding oath of political obedience. Most Catholics were attracted by the offer, but James’s plans took a tremendous knock when an unrepresentative group of Catholics, disappointed that this son of a Catholic queen had not immediately restored Catholic liberties, plotted to kill him, his family, and his leading supporters by blowing up the Houses of Parliament in the course of a state opening, using gunpowder secreted in a cellar immediately beneath the House of Lords. The failure of the Gunpowder Plot (1605) led to reprisals against Catholics and prevented James from going any further than exhibiting humane leniency toward them in the later years of his reign. Nevertheless, James’s ecumenical outlook did much to defuse religious conflict and led to 20 years of relative peace within the English church.
Members of the Gunpowder Plot.Photos.com/Thinkstock
Finance and politics
To a king whose annual budget in Scotland was barely £50,000, England looked like the land of milk and honey. But in fact James I inherited serious financial problems, which his own liberality quickly compounded. Elizabeth had left a debt of more than £400,000, and James, with a wife and two sons, had much larger household expenses than the unmarried queen. Land and duties from customs were the major sources of royal revenue, and it was James’s good fortune that the latter increased dramatically after the judges ruled in Bate’s case (1606) that the king could make impositions on imported commodities without the consent of Parliament. Two years later, under the direction of James’s able minister Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, impositions were levied on an expanded list of goods, and a revised book of rates was issued in 1608 that increased the level of duties. By these measures customs revenues grew by £70,000 per year.
Salisbury, Robert Cecil, 1st earl ofRobert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury.Photos.com/Jupiterimages
But even this windfall was not enough to stem the effects of inflation on the one hand and James’s own free spending on the other. By 1606 royal debt was more than £600,000, and the crown’s financial ministers had turned their attention to prerogative income from wardships, purveyance, and the discovery of concealed lands (i.e., crown lands on which rents and dues were not being paid). The revival and rationalization of these ancient rights created an outcry. As early as 1604 Salisbury was examining proposals to commute these fiscal rights into an annual sum to be raised by a land tax. By 1610 negotiations began for the Great Contract between the king and his taxpaying subjects that aimed to raise £200,000 a year. But at the last moment both royal officials and leaders of the House of Commons backed away from the deal, the government believing that the sum was too low and the leaders of the Commons that a land tax was too unpopular. The failure of the Great Contract drove Salisbury to squeeze even more revenue out of the king’s feudal rights, including the sale of titles. This policy violated the spirit of principles about property and personal liberty held by the governing classes and, along with impositions, was identified as a grievance during James’s first Parliaments.