The Cradle King (31 page)

When challenged, James cited his health as the reason for hunting – it allowed him to escape both the unhealthy environs of London, and the sedentary life it entailed. Two days after the Christmas festivities finished at court in 1605, for example, James took off for Royston. He wrote to his Privy Council to tell them ‘that it is the only means to maintain his health, which being the health and welfare of us all, he desires them to undertake the charge and burden of affairs, and foresee that he be not interrupted nor troubled with too much business’.
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The new Venetian ambassador Nicolo Molin elaborated how James had explained that, after having been nearly three weeks in London, he found ‘this sedentary life’ very prejudicial to his health. In Scotland, he had been able to spend much time in the country, ‘and in hard exercise’; the forced repose down south ‘robs him of his appetite and breeds melancholy and a thousand other ills’. Since his health was paramount, he informed the Council, he would come to London ‘but seldom’, spending most of the time hunting in the country. According to Molin, James went on to conclude ‘by announcing that he will approve all their resolutions. In this way the King has virtually given full and absolute authority to the Council, and has begun to put his plan in practice, for many who went to him with petitions and grievances have been told to go to the Council, for they are fully authorized to deal with all business public and private.’
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‘I shall never take longer vacancy from them,’ he told Cecil to assure his Council, ‘for the necessary maintenance of my health, than other kings will consume upon their physical diets and going to their whores.’
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James may have imagined that he had struck a perfect trade-off: the Privy Council would be given a free hand, and he would be allowed to regain his health. But in practice, things did not work out so simply. As the Earl of Worcester, one of the four councillors who made up James’s inner sanctum of government, reported in May 1605, James had been ‘very ill’ with a heavy cold since coming to the country, thanks to ‘the sharpness of the air and wind’. Indeed, everyday the King went hunting ‘he taketh a new cold; for, being hot with riding a long chase, he sitteth in the open air and drinketh, which cannot but continue, if not increase, a new cold’. If his health did not bother him, then his subjects did. Worcester reported how James had been out hunting near Thetford, but ‘was driven out of the field with press of company, which came to see him’. The King, he wrote, ‘took no great delight’ in the intrusion, and ‘came home, and played at cards’. Sir William Woodhouse, a local dignitary, was ordered to devise a proclamation ‘that none shall presume to come to him on hunting days, but those that come to see him, or prefer petitions, shall do it going forth, or coming home’.
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More importantly, it soon became apparent that the Council was not confident of its power to bypass the King and was forced constantly to attempt to win the King’s attention while he was on hunting trips – no mean feat. Worcester, attending the hunting crew at Royston in December 1604, complained to his fellow councillor Shrewsbury that

I think I have not had two hours of twenty-four of rest but Sundays, for in the morning we are on horseback by eight, and so continue in full career from the death of one hare to another, until four at night; by that time I find at my lodging sometimes one, most commonly two packets of letters, all which must be answered before I sleep, for here is none of the Council but myself, no, not a Clerk of the Council nor Privy Signet, so that an ordinary warrant for post horse must pass my own hand, my own secretary being sick at London.
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James’s absences thus caused huge problems for his principal councillors, especially since he often refused point blank to deal with any official paperwork. It was not long before even Cecil was lamenting the change of regime from that of Elizabeth, which took on a retrospective halcyon glow: ‘I wish I waited now in her presence-chamber, with ease at my food, and rest in my bed. I am pushed from the shore of comfort, and know not where the winds and waves of a court will bear me.’
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While the Privy Council encountered administrative problems with the King’s absences, James’s hunting became increasingly notorious among the wider public. An early sign of this occurred in December 1604 when one of James’s ‘special hounds’, Jowler, went missing. When he mysteriously reappeared among the other hounds the following day, Jowler was sporting a paper around his neck. The paper read, ‘Good Mr Jowler, we pray you speak to the King (for he hears you everyday, and so doth he not us) that it will please His Majesty to go back to London, for else the country will be undone; all our provision is spent already, and we are not able to entertain him longer.’ James took the ingenious petition ‘for a jest’, but before long the tone of public complaint soured.
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The Venetian ambassador Molin recorded how James’s trips were ‘the cause of indescribable ill-humour among the King’s subjects, who in their needs and troubles find themselves cut off from their natural sovereign, and forced to go before the Council, which is full of rivalry and discord, and frequently is guided more by personal interest than by justice and duty’.
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By May 1606, the people were making their feelings felt more forcibly. ‘The people desire to see their sovereign,’ wrote another Venetian envoy, Zorzi Giustinian. ‘The discontent has reached such a pitch that the other day there was affixed to the door of the Privy Council a general complaint of the King, alleging that his excessive kindness leaves his subjects a prey to the cupidity of his ministers.’ While the complaint was only what the ambassador called ‘a paternal warning not to give his subjects further cause for acting so that he should have to complain of them’, James read it ‘with some annoyance’.
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While those at court condemned his absence, those near him in the country mourned his presence. The royal trampling of local farmers’ fields was a constant source of contention. One Thetford farmer, ‘highly offended at the liberty his Majesty took in riding over his corn, in the transport of his passion threatened to bring an action of trespass against the King’, a threat that led to a permanent withdrawal of royal favour from the town.
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Samuel Calvert was grateful when the weather denied the King ‘his common exercise’ and therefore ‘somewhat the ordinary complaints of poor country farmers to endure continual wrong, by the hunting spoils, and misgovernment of the unruly train’.
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The Venetian ambassador Molin noted that ‘whenever he goes a-hunting the crops are mostly ruined’.
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Even Godfrey Goodman, chaplain to Queen Anna, singled out hunting as an evil in a 1616 sermon, identifying the damage done to the poor tenants of farmland: ‘the highways cannot always contain them, but over the hedges and ditches [they go]; here begins the cry and the curse of the poor tenant, who sits at a hard rent, and sees his corn spoiled’.
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In December 1604, these murmurings reached the King in a more formal complaint. Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, wrote to Cecil charging James with neglecting his duties, undue extravagance and an overliberal use of various royal privileges. At length, he came to the subject of the King’s hunting: ‘as one that honoureth, and loveth his most excellent Majesty with all my heart, I wish less wasting of the treasure of the realm, and more moderation in the lawful exercise of hunting both that poor men’s corn may be less spoiled and other [of] his Majesty’s subjects more spared’,
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While carefully admitting that hunting was technically ‘lawful’, Hutton gave voice to the complaint of James’s people that their crops were being ruined by the King and his entourage galloping across their fields. When James read Hutton’s letter, Worcester recorded, ‘He was merry at the first but when he came to the wasting of the treasure and the immoderate exercise of hunting began to alter countenance and said it was the foolishest letter that ever he read.’
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Knowing in advance what the King’s reaction would be, Cecil had already drafted a firm response: ‘For your last point in your letter concerning hunting,’ he wrote to Hutton, ‘this shall be my conclusion: that it was a praise in the good Emperor Trajan to be disposed to such manlike and active recreations; so ought it to be a joy to us to behold our King of so able a constitution, promising so long life, and blessed with so plentiful a posterity, as hath freed our minds from all those fears which had besieged this potent monarchy, for lack of public declaration of his lineal and lawful succession to the same, whilst it pleased God to continue to the fullness of days our late sovereign of famous memory’.
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James praised Cecil for this response: ‘I am thoroughly pleased with your answer,’ he wrote, ‘and specially concerning my hunting ye have answered it according to my heart’s desire, for a scornful, answerless answer became best such a senseless proposition.’
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Complaints about James’s hunting were almost always complaints about James’s style of government – or, more pertinently, his failure to govern effectively because of his physical absence from court. At the same time, with what became a characteristic perverse delight in accentuating those traits that most annoyed those around him, James adopted hunting as the overarching metaphor for his activities. In March 1605, he defined his kingly activities as the hunting of ‘witches, prophets, puritans, dead cats and hares’. Time was measured by the successfully tracked quarry: James signed off, ‘so going to bed, after the death of six hares, a pair of fowls, and a heron’.
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His new favourites were those who distinguished themselves at the hunt, not at court or in government. It was no accident that Sir Philip Herbert, the first Englishman to be admitted to the Bedchamber, was remarked, in the historian Clarendon’s words, for ‘his skill, and indefatigable industry in hunting’, and that he ‘pretended to no other qualifications than to understand horses and dogs very well’.
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Continuing the hunting metaphor, Cecil was to James, almost invariably, ‘my little beagle’.
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Thirty-five surviving letters from King to secretary open with the greeting, and in them James elaborated on the theme, praising his ‘little cankered beagle’, ‘my patient beagle’, the ‘King’s best beagle if he hunt well now in the hard ways’, ‘the little beagle that lies at home by the fire’.
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James loved to embarrass his councillors with epithets and nicknames: he also had a ‘fat Chancellor’, a ‘little, saucy Constable’, a ‘tall, black and cat-faced Keeper’, who together comprised a ‘trinity of knaves’.
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Cecil himself shifted moniker ‘from Beagle to Tom Derry, from Tom Derry to Parrot’:
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when he balked at being dubbed by the King ‘my little fool’, Worcester reminded him that he was also known as ‘a parrot-monger, a monkey-monger, and twenty other names’.
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Despite his annoyance, Cecil, like the good councillor he was, played along with his master’s name-games, dutifully referring to himself as James’s beagle, as when he protested to Sir Thomas Lake that the King’s ‘monkey loves him not better than his beagle, nor his Great Commissioner in Scotland more than his little Secretary’.
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While James was off hunting in the country, his Queen consolidated a much more cosmopolitan life. Anna took over Greenwich Palace and then Somerset House in the Strand, which she renovated and renamed as Denmark House. By about 1607, the royal couple were rarely in residence together. The King, wrote the courtier Anthony Weldon, ‘was ever best when furthest from his Queen’. Bishop Goodman, Anna’s chaplain, added that ‘The King of himself was a very chaste man, and there was little in the Queen to make him uxorious; yet they did love as well as man and wife could do, not conversing together.’
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Others targeted the distance between the couple for political ends: sometime after 1605, James took action against a libeller who had made ‘villainous speeches’ against him, the Queen and Prince Henry. Although from James’s letter on the subject, the exact accusations are unclear, it seems that the libeller was accusing Anna of having been unfaithful to her husband, perhaps suggesting that Henry was illegitimate. He also cast doubt on James’s ‘pedigree’, perhaps repeating the libel that the King was ‘Davy’s son’; and apparently also imagined that Henry would ‘renounce the kingdom of England’: as James said, if he did so, the prince would be Richard II, ‘successor to Henry VI [in fact, to Edward III], and not to me.’
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