The Cradle King (41 page)

The fourth session of James’s first Parliament opened on 9 February 1610 and, six days later, Salisbury first presented the King’s case, which he elaborated over the course of the following weeks. The Parliament had been called for two reasons – first, to authorise the creation of Prince Henry as Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, and second, ‘to demand some supply of treasure’. The first, a popular move, was clearly a sweetener for the second. A quick fix was not enough. Instead of a simple subsidy, the Crown needed a consistent source of revenue. Salisbury acknowledged that the need for a subsidy called Parliament into existence, and this subsidy provided Parliament with the chance to importune for grievances: Salisbury could hardly expect the Commons to give up their only hold on the King. Instead, he proposed what became known as ‘the Great Contract’. The Commons would grant a permanent annual revenue of £200,000 ‘for the maintenance of the King, the Queen, the Prince, the Duke [of York, Charles], and Lady Elizabeth’ in return for which James would abandon certain of his more controversial rights, including wardship and purveyance; he would exempt English shires from jurisdiction of the Council of Wales; and he would protect those who purchased crown lands against any losses brought by technical flaws in their titles – all matters of pressing concern to the Lower House.
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On 21 March 1610, James addressed Lords and Commons in a two-hour speech in which, he said, he made them a present ‘a fair and a crystal mirror’ through which ‘you may see the heart of your King’. He started with a further iteration of his familiar philosophy of monarchy: that ‘kings are justly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth’. ‘The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth,’ he pronounced, ‘for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called gods.’ After all, ‘in the Scriptures kings are called gods, and so their powers after a certain relation compared to the divine power. Kings are also compared to fathers of families, for the king is truly
parens patriae,
the politic father of his people. And lastly, kings are compared to the head of this microcosm of the body of man.’

The analogy was quite proper, James continued, warming to his theme. Kings were justly called gods because they exercised a ‘resemblance of divine power upon earth’. Just as God had certain powers, so did kings: ‘they make and unmake their subjects; they have the power of raising, and casting down; of life, and of death, judges over all their subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only. They have power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the chess – a pawn to take a bishop or a knight – and cry up or down any of their subjects, as they do their money. And to the king is due both the affection of the soul and the service of the body of his subjects.’ However, the King had a duty to use this power in the right way, in the way ‘ordained by God,
ad aedificationem, non ad destructionem
[for constructive, not destructive ends]’ just as it would be ‘a foolish father that would disinherit or destroy his children without a cause, or leave off the careful education of them’ or ‘an idle head that would in place of physic so poison or phlebotomise the body as might breed a dangerous distemper or destruction thereof’, a return to his persona of physician to the body politic.

Moving to the question of Common Law, James outlined its flaws in three areas that needed to be redressed: the language in which it was expressed (medieval ‘Law French’); its reliance on reports rather than grounds or maxims, when reports were often no more than opinions of the judge or reporter; and its inclusion of contradictory laws, precedents and reports. These, he said, he wanted remedied by ‘some golden law or act of Parliament’. He knew that they would want to hear his opinion concerning prohibitions: ‘I am not ignorant that I have been thought to be an enemy to all prohibitions, and an utter stayer to them.’ To the contrary, he did not oppose prohibitions in general, but when he saw courts not observe their own limits, but ‘the swelling and overflowing of prohibitions in a far greater abundance than ever before, every court striving to bring in most moulture [toll money paid to a mill owner] to their own mill, by multitudes of causes’, then he wanted to restrict each court to its own bounds. This need for restraint made him think of the Commons – and to deliver them a lecture on the manner in which grievances should be selected, pruned and presented, rather than ‘all thrust up in a sack together, rather like pasquils, than any lawful complaints’.

Finally, he admitted that he would not have called Parliament without ‘great cause’. To see how great his wants were, they just had to see what he had bestowed so liberally amongst them. ‘It may be thought,’ he continued, ‘I have given much amongst Scottish men. Indeed if I had not been liberal in rewarding some of my old servants of that nation, ye could never have had reason to expect my thankfulness towards any of you that are more lately become my subjects, if I had been ingrate to the old. And yet ye will find, that I have dealt twice as much amongst Englishmen as I have done to Scottish men.’ James put his case for a subsidy. His expenses since coming to the throne had been massive, but ‘that Christmas and open tide’, when he had to extend his prodigality, ‘is ended’. Moreover, unlike other ‘barren’ princes, he had provided the realm with ‘a fruitful progency and the creation of this gentleman’, pointing to Henry, standing close by him. He asked the Commons to follow his advice: ‘the greatest neglect of my words that can be is to let it lie dead and not follow my advice.’
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As the Commons began their usual parade of grievances, they came to impositions. This struck a nerve with James. Surely to debate impositions was
de facto
to question the King’s prerogative to levy them? He could not let this pass in silence, and on 21 May he came to the Lower House to put his case again. As one MP wrote, James ‘put us in mind of the long time we had spent in matters impertinent (being about 14 weeks)’, and then launched into ‘a long speech’ in which he informed members that, while they might discuss possible abuses in the collection of impositions, he would not tolerate general discussion of his power to exact them in the first place. But James clearly knew this was a sticking point, because he also offered a compromise. If they ceased to challenge any existing impositions, he would undertake not to levy any more without first obtaining the consent of Parliament. However, the Commons would have to take his word on this, because he refused to ‘bind himself or his posterity’.
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James could scarcely have devised a more tactless speech. According to John Chamberlain it ‘bred generally much discontent to see our monarchical power and royal prerogative strained so high and made so transcendent every way’, provoking ‘many bold passages’ in the Commons, ‘and amongst the rest a wish that this speech might never come to print’.
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(True to form, James ensured it did, placing it proudly in his 1617
Workes.
) Members protested that they were not calling into question the King’s prerogative, merely needing to know its limitations; at the same time they asserted their privilege of free debate, and asked permission to continue their debate on impositions. Realising that he had stepped over some invisible line of parliamentary tolerance, James wisely backtracked, and allowed the Commons to debate impositions as they pleased. A four-day discussion followed in which the House came to the conclusion that, without the consent of Parliament, impositions must be illegal.

On 17 July Salisbury brought the Commons and the King to a tentative agreement, although there was some haggling over the exact sum: Parliament offered £180,000 and the King asked for £220,000, with a compromise of £200,000 agreed. James was oddly upbeat about the arrangement, even managing a lame joke: the Commons’ first offer of ‘nine score thousand pounds’ he hadn’t liked, he said, because nine was the number of the muses or the poets, and they were always beggars. Eleven would be good because that was the number of Apostles when Judas was away. He’d be happy enough with ten score, since there were ten commandments.
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Once this was settled Parliament moved on to present their grievances in a document so long that James allegedly quipped he could use it as a tapestry: on reading it, he made a few odd concessions, but on those issues he considered to be matters of personal principle – those of prerogative and the Church – he was not able to waver. This was the state of affairs when Parliament was prorogued on 23 July.
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When the Parliament reconvened for its fifth session on 16 October, relations between King and Commons quickly disintegrated. Each put pressure on the terms of Salisbury’s ‘Great Contract’, and it crumbled away, leaving the Lord Treasurer still pushing for finance, without any bargaining chips and without the King, who had disappeared again to Royston. Even when Salisbury did manage to revive part of the Contract negotiations, James would not bite. News of the Commons’ actions upset him and increased his intransigence. Sir Thomas Lake wrote to the Lord Treasurer to let him know that ‘His Highness wisheth your lordship to call to mind that he hath now had patience with this assembly these seven years, and from them received more disgraces, censures and ignominies than ever prince did endure. He followeth your lordship’s advices in having patience, hoping for better issue. He cannot have asinine patience, he is not made of that mettle that is ever to be held in suspense and to receive nothing but stripes, neither doth he conceive that your lordships are so insensible of those indignities that you can advise any longer endurance.’
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James met with representatives on 31 October at Whitehall, but to little effect, and the Parliament limped on through November. He ignored Salisbury’s pleas for him to come to London to consult on parliamentary matters late in the month. For James, the travel and the inevitably difficult meeting with his Council held no allure. As far as he was concerned, the only matters to be decided concerned how and when to dissolve the Parliament, and how to punish that ‘lewd fellow’ who in a speech had compared him to King Joram, the evil King of the Jews. ‘Ye see,’ he wrote to his Lord Treasurer, ‘there is no more trust to be laid upon this rotten reed of Egypt.’
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James suggested that the subsidy question should be put to the vote, and the Commons threatened with dissolution; when this was averted, on 29 November James ordered Parliament to be adjourned until 6 December. On that day the Lord Chancellor informed the members that, since Christmas was approaching, the King’s pleasure was that they should ‘go to their houses and keep hospitality … and not lie in London or Westminster’.
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The following day, James stormed to his Privy Council that ‘we are sure no house save the house of Hell could have found so many [complaints] as they have already done’.
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While the members were still holidaying in the country, James dissolved Parliament on 31 December 1610.

Salisbury felt completely undermined by his sovereign, and told him so. ‘You will please so to dispose of me or suffer me to be treated as you shall think may best agree with your service; for when I resolved to serve your Majesty as I have done (in a time of want, of practice, and in a place of envy) I searched my heart and found it well resolved to suffer for such a master all the incidents to such a condition.’
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James pretended to be surprised and wounded. ‘My little beagle,’ he wrote as familiarly as ever, ‘I wonder what should make you to conceit so the alteration or diminishing of my favour towards you … I am sure I never gave you any such occasion, and all that know me do know that I never use to change my affection from any man except the cause be printed on his forehead. It is true that I have found that by the perturbations of your mind, ye have broken forth in more passionate and strange discourses these two last sessions of Parliament than ever ye were wont to do; wherein for pity of your great burden I forbore to admonish you … But ye may be sure if ever I had found any ground of jealousy of your faith and honesty, I would never have concealed it from you.’ Still, James could not resist a further dig at the Treasurer: ‘Your greatest error hath been that ye ever expected to draw honey out of gall, being a little blinded with the self-love of your own counsel in holding together of this parliament, whereof all men were despaired (as I have oft told you) but yourself alone.’
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Salisbury’s reply, although larded with the requisite compliments, was unusually direct: ‘I am not a little grieved at my hard fortune when I look back at that rock whereupon I ran, if your Majesty’s mislike of my passion and indiscreet freedom to so great a King had wrought also upon your Majesty any such alteration as might have kept you from observing likewise how far I was, notwithstanding my errors, from failing in the least duties which I owe your Majesty.’
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Something vital had been lost between James and Salisbury: amongst his senior councillors, the King now turned to Suffolk, Northampton, Worcester or Shrewsbury for advice. As for the little beagle, the 1610 Parliament left him broken. ‘I have seen this Parliament to an end,’ he wrote to Sir Thomas Lake, ‘whereof the many vexations have so overtaken one another as I know not to what to resemble them so well as to the plagues of Job.’
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The plagues led to a further decline in the Lord Treasurer’s health, and serious illnesses (‘a continual ague, or, as some will have it, a double tertain, with a great pain in his head and much sweating’) afflicted him during the winter of 1611–12. Despite the cooling in their political relations, James visited him frequently in February of 1612 (Anna was said to visit every other day) and was concerned enough to give personal instructions to Salisbury’s physicians, and to command ‘all men for four days to forbear to speak to his Lordship upon any business’.
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By March, he seemed to have rallied slightly, but in the following month Salisbury gave up his attempts to govern. He died at Marlborough on 24 May 1612, returning from taking the supposedly restorative waters at Bath. Public reaction was remarkably vicious, with a plethora of libels and verses simultaneously ridiculing the man and celebrating his death. Many played on his small stature and hunched back: ‘Here lies great Salisbury though little of stature, | A monster of mischief, ambitious of nature’; ‘At Hatfield near Hertford, there is a coffin, | A heart-griping harpy, of shape like a dolphin.’
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Northampton spoke of the demise of ‘the little man for which so many rejoice and so few do as much as seem to be sorry’.
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John Chamberlain concurred: ‘I never knew so great a man so soon and so generally censured.’
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