The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences

The Accession of James I Historical and Cultural Consequences

Edited by

Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer and Jason Lawrence

The Accession of James I

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The Accession of James I Historical and Cultural Consequences Edited by

Glenn Burgess Rowland Wymer and

Jason Lawrence

Selection, editorial matter, and Introduction © Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer and Jason Lawrence 2006 All other chapters © contributors 2006 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403948991 hardback ISBN-10: 1403948992 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The accession of James I : historical and cultural consequences /edited by Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer, and Jason Lawrence. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1403948992 (cloth) 1. James I, King of England, 15661625. 2. Great Britain“History“ James I, 16031625. 3. Monarchy“Great Britain“History“ 17th century. 4. Great Britain“Civilization“17th century. 5. Great Britain“Politics and government“16031625. 6. Great Britain“ Kings and rulers. I. Burgess, Glenn, 1961 II. Wymer, Rowland. III. Lawrence, Jason, 1969 DA391.A185 2006 2006041732 941.06 1“dc22 10 9 15 14

8 7 13 12

6 5 11 10

4 3 2 1 09 08 07 06

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

In memory of Professor Conrad Russell

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Contents

Acknowledgements

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Notes on Contributors

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Introduction Glenn Burgess, Jason Lawrence, and Rowland Wymer 1 1603: The End of English National Sovereignty Conrad Russell 2 ‘Representing the awefull authoritie of soveraigne Majestie’: Monarchs and Mayors in Anthony Munday’s The Triumphes of Re-united Britania Tracey Hill 3 The Jacobean Union Controversy and King Lear Philip Schwyzer

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1

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4 Radical Britain: David Hume of Godscroft and the Challenge to the Jacobean British Vision Arthur Williamson

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5 The Happier Marriage Partner: The Impact of the Union of the Crowns on Scotland Jenny Wormald

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6 London or the World? The Paradox of Culture in (post-) Jacobean Scotland Roderick J. Lyall

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7 ‘Twice done and then done double’: Equivocation and the Catholic Recusant Hostess in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Matthew Baynham

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8 The Romans in Britain, 1603–1614 John Kerrigan

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9 Rex Pacificus, Robert Cecil, and the 1604 Peace with Spain Pauline Croft

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10 1603 and the Discourse of Favouritism Curtis Perry

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11 The Essex Myth in Jacobean England Maureen King

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12 The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke’s British Jurisprudence Daniel J. Hulsebosch

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Index

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Acknowledgements The editors would like to record their thanks to the British Academy, whose funding contributed to the preparation of the volume, to the University of Hull, which also provided support, to Dr Jane Kingsley-Smith for her assistance in the initial stages, and to Lynsey McCulloch, who compiled the index. The book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Conrad Russell. We are grateful to Professor Russell’s family, who have assisted us in making it possible to include his essay in the book, and to Dr Kenneth Fincham for his work in preparing the chapter for publication.

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Notes on Contributors Matthew Baynham read Law at Brasenose College, Oxford, and Theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, before entering the Anglican ministry. After 15 years of parish ministry, he studied for his M.Phil. at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham before moving to chaplaincy in higher education. He is at present Associate Chaplain at the University of Liverpool and Senior Resident Tutor at Liverpool Hope University College. Glenn Burgess taught from 1988 to 1994 at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. He is currently Professor of History and Head of Department at the University of Hull. His publications include The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (1992) and Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (1996). Pauline Croft is Professor of Early Modern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published widely on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Britain: her most recent book is King James (Palgrave Macmillan 2003). Tracey Hill is Principal Lecturer and Subject Leader in English Literature at Bath Spa University. Her research interests are in the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cultural history, specialising in the works of Anthony Munday and in the literary culture of early modern London. She is the author of Anthony Munday and Civic Culture (2004) and a number of articles on Munday, The Booke of Sir Thomas More, and Renaissance history plays; she has also edited two collections of essays. Daniel J. Hulsebosch is a Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He received his A.B. from Colgate University, a J.D. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is the author of Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830 (2005), as well as several articles on the legal and constitutional history of the British Empire and the early United States. John Kerrigan is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College. Among his publications are Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996), which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (2001), and a study of seventeenth-century British–Irish anglophone literature in relation to nation-building and state formation, Archipelagic English (2006). x

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Maureen King teaches early modern literature at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She has published articles on various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topics, as well as on fantasy and science fiction. Jason Lawrence is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. He has written on Samuel Daniel, Shakespeare, and John Marston, and his book ‘Who the Devil taught thee so much Italian?’: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England was published in 2005. Roderick J. Lyall is Emeritus Professor of Literatures in English at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He previously taught at Massey University (NZ) and the University of Glasgow, where he was Head of the Department of Scottish Literature from 1982 to 1994. He has published widely on medieval and early modern Scottish texts; his study of Alexander Montgomerie (d. 1598) is scheduled to be published in 2006. Curtis Perry is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. In addition to articles on a variety of topics, he is the author of The Making of Jacobean Culture (1997) and editor of Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (2001). His book Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England is scheduled to be published in early 2006. Conrad Russell (the 5th Earl Russell) was Professor of British History at King’s College London until his retirement in 2002. He had previously taught at Bedford College, University of London, and at Yale University, and was Astor Professor of British History, University College London, from 1984 to 1990. His major works include Parliaments and English Politics 1621–1629 (1979), his Ford Lectures published as The Causes of the English Civil War (1990) and The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (1991), and his collected essays Unrevolutionary England, 1603–1642 (1990). He was honoured with a festschrift edited by Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake, Politics, Religion and Popularity, published in 2002. Professor Russell died in October 2004, while this book was being prepared for publication. Philip Schwyzer is Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (2004), and his current research focuses on archaeology and early modern literature. Arthur Williamson is Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento. He has written extensively about early modern Scottish and British political thought. Most recently he has published George Buchanan The Political Poetry (2000), The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (2003), both

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with Paul McGinnis, and Shaping the Stuart World, 1603–1714: The Atlantic Connection (2005), with Allan Macinnes. His study of Western eschatology Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Shaping of the Modern World is slated to appear in 2006. Jenny Wormald is an honorary fellow of Edinburgh University. She was previously Fellow and Tutor in History, St Hilda’s College, Oxford; before that she was a Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Glasgow. She has been a British Academy Reader in the Humanities, and a Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. She has published widely on late-medieval and early-modern Scottish and British history. At the time of writing, she is working on a book on James VI and I. Rowland Wymer is Head of the Department of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, having previously taught for many years at the University of Hull. His publications include Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (1986), Webster and Ford (1995), and Derek Jarman (2005).

Introduction Glenn Burgess, Jason Lawrence, and Rowland Wymer

At about 3 a.m. on 24 March 1603 Queen Elizabeth I died, and an hour later at Richmond, her successor, James VI of Scotland, was proclaimed king of England, France, and Ireland. Robert Cecil read the proclamation at Whitehall at 10 a.m., and over the next few days it was repeated across the whole land.1 In Hull, after the proclamation was read, ‘the King’s health was drank, liquor given to the populace, and the whole day spent in ringing of bells, bonfires, and such other demonstrations of joy as are usual on similar occasions’.2 The news of Elizabeth’s death was carried from Richmond to the new king by Sir Robert Carey, who reached James at Holyrood on the night of 26 March.3 The king had waited a long time for this moment, and was determined to savour the good fortune that he had so assiduously cultivated in secret correspondence with Robert Cecil and others.4 James was careful not to arrive in London before the late queen’s funeral on 28 April. He left Edinburgh on 4 April, and arrived in London over a month later on 7 May. Along the way he received petitions, revelled in the hospitality of his new subjects and, in his delight, knighted a fair number of them.5 In one early tally, of the 2323 knights created by James, about 900 were created in the first year of his reign.6 Lawrence Stone suggests that 906 men were knighted in the first four months alone.7 For all that they had prepared for his accession, James’s new English subjects had only a limited understanding of their king, and rumours abounded about what they might expect from him. Individuals manoeuvred for favour; Catholics and puritans alike lived in the hope, perhaps even in the expectation, that James would act to further their interests. As David Calderwood put it, ‘the formalists, the Papists, and the sincere professors, had all their own hopes’ invested in James.8 The miseries of the 1590s, during which an aging queen ruled over a country suffering from famine, disease, and growing problems of crime and vagrancy, while living under the imminent threat of Spanish invasion, only increased the anticipation of the new Jacobean age.9 There can be little doubt that, for some of those who lived through it, the accession of James in 1603 was to be welcomed as both a culmination of prophetic and historical developments, and an opportunity to lay the foundations for a better British future. The propaganda campaign that had accompanied Protector Somerset’s pursuit of a military conquest of Scotland in the late 1540s had generated a strongly Protestant and providential reading of the opportunity that existed to bring into being a united Britain, and themes from this campaign persisted into the early seventeenth century. The later sixteenth-century Scottish reformers, though, developed this unionist xiii

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vision in ways that removed it from the close association that it had in the 1540s with English imperialism (a vision that had found its few initial Scottish supporters mainly amongst strongly Protestant Scottish exiles in England).10 This contrast between an English ‘imperialistic’ understanding of the possibilities of union and a Scottish ‘confederalist’ one was to have a long history.11 The union of crowns in 1603 was certainly welcomed in Protestant and providential terms, but it also posed a new question. Union of some sort had happened: How was it to be understood? What opportunities did it create? Many people provided the answers to these questions. Chief among them was, of course, the king himself, who saw that 1603 presented him and his subjects with the opportunity for bringing about changes of the greatest significance. He was keen to grasp that opportunity. The union of crowns was to be but a prelude for something altogether more far-reaching. Precisely what it was that James hoped to achieve by the union of the Scottish and English crowns is rather harder to say.12 More important to him, perhaps, than any precise set of proposals was a general sense that without some further steps to cement the union, it would remain unstable and liable to dissolution. His approach, and that of his propagandists, was both to talk up the areas of convergence that already existed between England and Scotland and to find ways of nudging both countries along a path of further convergence. This is, perhaps, reflected in the vagueness of his language. His first public statement declared that his well-disposed subjects shared with him a wish ‘that the sayd happy Union should bee perfected’.13 He went on, And in the meane time till the sayd Union be established with the due solemnitie aforesayd, his Majestie doth hereby repute, hold, and esteeme, and commands all his Highnes Subjects to repute, hold, and esteeme both the two Realmes as presently united, and as one Realme and Kingdome, and the Subjects of both the Realmes as one people, brethren and members of one body.14 It was making his subjects believe this that was important for James, and much more important than any particular policy. It was unfortunate for James, though, that some of the things he thought essential to achieving his goal – the adoption of the name of Great Britain and the naturalization of Scots in England – aroused intense opposition, as Conrad Russell demonstrates in his essay. James told his first English parliament on 19 March 1604 that ‘I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife.’ Pointedly, he asked them: ‘I hope therefore no man will be so unreasonable as to thinke that I that am a Christian King under the Gospel, should be a Polygamist and husband to two wives.’15 His MPs seemed, though, to prefer the thought of a polygamous king to the thought of themselves forming a single body with the Scots. By 1607, James had developed a clear sense of what he wanted,

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though even this was articulated only in support of the relatively moderate proposals put together by the Commissioners for Union in 1604: I desire a perfect Union of Lawes and persons, and such a Naturalizing as may make one body of both Kingdomes under mee your King. That I and my posterities (if it so please God) may rule over you to the worlds ende.16 Even here, security and the perpetuation of the union were the prevalent concerns. James’s plans were supported by a chorus of politicians, clergymen, and civil lawyers; but the chorus did not seem to produce sympathetic echoes elsewhere in the political nation. Nonetheless, within Scotland there were those who, like their king, possessed a genuinely ‘British’ vision. At least one man greeted 1603 as a moment of opportunity, a Machiavellian occasione. David Hume of Godscroft, rejecting the prevailing fear of innovation, commented: It might be deemed doubtful whether all innovation is dangerous and ought to be avoided. Aren’t some kinds of innovation necessary? Not of course when we have achieved perfection, but sometimes it’s necessary for old practices to be recalled and things to be restored to what they were originally (which is, after all, a kind of innovation), especially if the deviations are of long standing and sanctioned by tradition.17 Portrayed by Arthur Williamson as an acolyte of George Buchanan, and a man who wanted to erect a form of quasi-republicanism in Britain, Hume’s key concern appears to have been to spread a strict jure divino Presbyterian religious uniformity in England, and to ensure that no tolerance for other faiths was allowed. He emphasized, like so many others by this time, that a prince could not count on the loyalty of subjects unless he shared their religion.18 Whatever we might decide about his supposed ‘quasi-republicanism’, Hume was no anti-monarchist; but he was aware that monarchy alone was not an adequate foundation for stabilizing the new British polity: And there is indeed, I say, one king – and let it be perpetual. Furthermore as he [?] says, Let the sun pay heed and the moon bear witness: may this king’s posterity hold the sceptre as long as the sun and the moon illuminate day and night. Let me not think there is a single good citizen, a single good man (either Scottish or English) who doesn’t hold that determination as dear as he does his own life.

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All the same, however great this may be, it’s still just one bond of union. Ought we to entrust so great a thing to just one bond? Doesn’t the king himself wish for something better?19 His recipe for what was needed centred on ‘love’, the bonds of affection that bound a people together and prevented civil discord, of which religious uniformity strictly enforced seems to have been the chief component. He was not, for example, interested in legal uniformity, and did not propose tampering with laws of inheritance or any laws ‘relating to the possession and acquisition of property’.20 Hume was aware that consideration was being given to steps that would bring English and Scottish law closer, but in the end this was ‘irrelevant’ and ‘it doesn’t matter whether all the laws are ever brought into complete conformity’.21 Hume was an inverted image of James himself. Both attached great significance to the opportunity of stabilizing a new state in 1603, but one from a civic humanist perspective and the other from that of divine-right kingship. Whereas the most obvious feature of Hume’s proposals was his wish to see an intolerant and exclusive Presbyterian church established throughout Britain, James in 1604 enunciated the principle ‘no bishop, no king’. He might have said this in England at Hampton Court in 1604, but its implementation was felt rather more heavily on the other side of the border.22 However, for most, certainly in England, 1603 was less an opportunity to be taken and more a threat against which the body politic needed protection. King James and David Hume saw opportunities: many saw threats. Change was to be resisted and not embraced. At least in the short term, there is some evidence that it was successfully resisted, as this collection of essays helps to show. Jenny Wormald’s contribution to this collection stresses the degree of continuity across 1603 in Scottish history. James’s proposals for further union were emasculated by the English parliament, and produced little. For England, Pauline Croft uses the image of the supertanker, a vessel ‘ploughing on in the same direction even after the engines have been switched off’, in explaining the continuities in English history. In her account, the ‘Jacobean’ peace with Spain of 1604 was rather less Jacobean than we have supposed. James merely completed a process of peacemaking initiated under Elizabeth. While contemporaries had so many different views about what should have happened, the historian is tempted to wonder which of them might have been right. Was the accession an event of great or of little consequence in the development of English or British history? One way of answering the question available to the historian might be to say that 1603 was a key event in at least two of the narratives that have served to give meaningful shape to early modern English history. One story has it that the 1603 accession of the supposedly ‘absolutist’ Stuart kings gave the English nation an opportunity to defend their freedoms and rights from oppression, and thus served to make England the birthplace of liberalism in theory and in practice. A second

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story, prominent in the historical scholarship since the mid-1980s, stresses instead a story that links 1603 into a sequence of dates (1536/1540, 1603, 1707, 1800/1801) that sketch the construction of a highly peculiar modern state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, at its height in the nineteenth century, modified by the creation of Eire in 1921, and now the dubious beneficiary of Prime Minister Tony Blair’s strangely half-baked experiments in devolution. These are important narratives, each playing a formative role in shaping the self-understanding of both the English and the British peoples. They make it clear that asking questions about 1603 is not a matter of idle or antiquarian curiosity, but of pressing concern for anyone interested in the identity of England and of Britain. The 400th anniversary of the Stuart accession, which these essays were written to mark, is an appropriate point at which to take stock of what modern England or Great Britain might owe to the historical and dynastic accidents that brought James VI, king of Scots, to London as the successor of Elizabeth I. It is also an appropriate point to reflect on the way 1603 continues to act as a crucial marker in English literary history, dividing the continuously evolving forms of poetry and drama into two apparently discrete periods – ‘Elizabethan’ and ‘Jacobean’ – and whether the date has a similar importance in relation to Scottish culture. In the case of some literary forms, the notion that 24 March 1603 brought about an immediate discursive shift is entirely plausible. The rhetoric appropriate to the praise of an aging virgin queen clearly would not serve for James and a particular problem of address arose for panegyric poets from the fact that the new king was himself a writer with claims to literary authority.23 In the case of the professional drama, the argument that 1603 marked a decisive change is much more problematic, despite the entrenched connotations of the label ‘Jacobean’ in theatrical history. The significant shift towards satire and tragedy had already taken place in the previous four years and the notion that Jacobean plays staged during the first decade of James’s reign are responding to specifically Jacobean forms of court corruption is extremely debatable. There is a demonstrable continuity with Elizabethan forms of anti-court rhetoric, such as the attacks on favouritism which Curtis Perry discusses, and also a clear desire to imitate commercially successful Elizabethan plays such as Hamlet, with its vivid allusions to a hidden ulcer at the heart of the state, ‘something rotten’ which necessitates the ‘wild justice’ of revenge. Both Shakespeare and Jonson were, in fact, more favourably disposed to the new king and his court than they had been towards Elizabeth during her declining years. Jonson, benefiting from the greater toleration of Catholics in the brief Jacobean honeymoon which preceded the Gunpowder Plot, wrote in Epigram 35, ‘We have now no cause / Left us of fear’ and Shakespeare alluded in Sonnet 107 to the ‘most balmy time’ of peace which had followed the eclipse of ‘the mortal moon’, Elizabeth.24 Shakespeare

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had at least two concrete reasons for feeling grateful to James. Even before he reached London, James had signed a warrant ordering the release of Shakespeare’s former patron, the earl of Southampton, from the Tower, where he had been imprisoned since the failed Essex rebellion of 1601. Shortly after reaching London, on 19 May 1603, James acknowledged the importance of Shakespeare’s company by taking them under his own direct patronage and renaming them ‘The King’s Men’. Although the King’s Men sometimes seemed to bite the hand which fed them by staging such savagely satirical works as Middleton’s Revenger’s Tragedy, Shakespeare’s primary response to the new reign did not take the form of an increased, ‘Jacobean’, disillusionment with court life but rather a decision to address his plays to James’s own background and interests in a more direct way than he had ever done with Elizabeth. One obvious feature of this reorientation is the move away from the medieval English history which he had dramatized in the 1590s towards an exploration of the remoter British and Scottish past, in such plays as King Lear, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. Shakespeare, like other Englishmen in 1603, was now forced to answer the question which, a few years previously in Henry V, he had put into the mouth of the Irishman Macmorris – what is my nation? These plays constitute a prolonged reflection upon the problem rather than an answer and they arguably allude to the religious as well as the ethnic divisions within ‘Great Britain’. The essays that follow contribute in various ways to our assessment of the immediate cultural and historical changes which took place in 1603 as well as to our understanding of the relationship between 1603 and the long-term narratives of English and British history. Between the extremes of stubborn continuity and dramatic change lies the complex middle ground. It is a truism, no doubt, to say that all history represents a mixture of change and continuity; but truisms at least have the merit of being true. Thus many of the contributions to this volume explore the balance of this mixture of change and continuity in a number of areas, both historical and cultural, and from them several key themes and questions emerge as central to an assessment of the impact of 1603: • Were the political ideals associated with the new king and his dynasty which were explored in a variety of cultural forms and contexts – ideals of ‘absolutism’, divine-right kingship, and peace – enough to mark the Stuart age as something distinctive from what had gone before? • Did the patterns of court behaviour and cultural patronage change in 1603? Were the style and cultural identity of the Jacobean court in England distinctively different from that of Elizabeth’s or of James VI’s in Scotland? • How did poets and playwrights, both English and Scottish, respond artistically to the new king’s interests, both political and literary, and to any perceived changes in court culture?

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• What did the possibilities and threats of regnal union contribute to conceptions of English, Scottish and, indeed, Welsh identity? How far did it lead to the creation of a British identity? • How did James’s gender identity, that is to say the form of masculinity that he projected, and his sexual orientation, affect the culture of Stuart England? He was very much a man of peace and a man of the word, rather than a man of the sword (his 1604 speech promoted powerfully the peace that flowed from his accession), but was that what a king should be? • In the longer term, what contribution did Sir Edward Coke’s ‘British jurisprudence’, centred on the case of the postnati (1608), with its distinctive account of English liberties and of ‘citizenship’ that would be widely diffused across the British Empire of the eighteenth century, make to colonial American thinking about political liberty and about constitutional relationships within the first British Empire? This book does not answer any of these questions fully, but it throws light on them all, and thus contributes to the discussion we all must have, if we are to understand the possibilities open to us in the present, of Britain’s political and cultural past. The opening essay by the late Conrad Russell focuses immediately on the contentious political and legal debates surrounding the cherished plan of the self-styled ‘King of Great Britain’ for the Union of the Crowns. Russell stresses what is to become a recurrent theme of this collection, a degree of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the king’s Scottish and English subjects in the early years of his reign, particularly with regard to the matter of whether they formed part of one state or two. By contrasting the insular approach of the representatives of the English legal system, such as Sir Edward Coke and Edwin Sandys, with a more expansive ‘comparative dimension normal in Scottish thinking’, exemplified by Sir Thomas Craig, Russell demonstrates how responses to the 1604–1606 report by the Union Commission led to stalemate in the Parliament of 1607. The London-based politicians were anxious about the proposed change of name to ‘Britain’, and especially about the naturalization of those whom they saw as ‘foreign’ subjects in England. The landmark decision in the following year in Calvin’s Case (1608), however, declared that all Scots born after the accession in 1603 (postnati) did have legal rights in England under English Common Law, as they were natural subjects of the King of both Scotland and England. English anxieties about the implications of the Union plan manifested themselves in literary texts and dramatic performances as well as in legal and political debate. Anthony Munday’s The Triumphes of Re-united Britania (1605) has often been regarded as an unproblematic celebration of King James’s accession and his Union project, as it is in Philip Schwyzer’s essay in this volume. Tracey Hill’s revisionist account of this Lord Mayor’s Show, however, persuasively argues that Munday focused on the myth of

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Brutus, derived from the already discredited account of Geoffrey of Monmouth, more out of opportunism than conviction. She accuses the author of instances of ‘strikingly tactless ideological slippage’: for example, in his frequent references to ‘England’ rather than ‘Britain’ in the printed text, seemingly deliberately excluding Scotland in the use of the ancient name ‘Loegria’. Also Brutus himself is seen in the pageant primarily as the legendary founder of the city of London (Troynovant), which he founded prior to Britain itself. Hill argues that this is because Munday wanted to emphasize the civic dimension over matters of national identity in a show, sponsored by the Merchant Taylors’ company, which had to meet the twin demands of celebrating the King and also the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Leonard Holliday. Her essay applies what James Knowles terms ‘a double reading of civic ritual’ to uncover a far more ambivalent attitude towards the Union of Crowns than might initially be inferred from Munday’s text. The following essay on King Lear describes another playwright who is found to be similarly ‘cagey and ambiguous on the union question’. In his opening section, Philip Schwyzer illustrates how much pro-Union literature, exemplified in the work of John Thornborough and William Harbert, established a link between the legendary Britain of Brutus and the modern ‘British’ state, either by means of prophecy or by emphasizing the survival or revival of ancient bloodlines. He then proceeds to demonstrate how Shakespeare in King Lear, performed before the King at court in late 1606, carefully dismantles and discards these ‘cherished tropes of British nationalism’. The play makes a nonsense of foreseeing the future in the Fool’s Merlin prophecy in act 3, scene 2 of the Folio text, and also cuts the strands between the present and the past in its relentless breaking of inter-generational bonds. This is shown most devastatingly in the unprecedented deaths of the British king and his youngest daughter in the final scene. Schwyzer suggests that King Lear’s ‘negative programme’ is not an expression of Shakespeare’s opposition to the Union project per se, but that it is indicative of his scorn for the ‘nostalgic spirit of nationalism’ associated with much contemporary pro-Union literature. This opening group of essays concentrates on the anxieties discernible in a number of specifically English responses to the Union question, but it is a principal aim of this collection to range beyond a purely Anglocentric perspective on the impact of the accession in 1603. The following three essays, therefore, all explore the effects of, and responses to, James’s acquisition of a new kingdom from a Scottish perspective. Arthur Williamson’s account of David Hume’s De unione insulae Britannicae (1605–1606) situates this alternate, radical programme for ‘a civic and reformed British commonwealth’ in a natural continuum from the socially inclusive political philosophies of George Buchanan, with his emphasis on public participation and education, and the writings of Andrew Melville. Hume’s work is read as a republican challenge to the conservative social vision in King James’s own True Lawe

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of Free Monarchies and Basilikon Doron of the late 1590s, outlining a vision of a genuine British Parliament and Church, with equal Scottish and English representation and participation. This vision extended to Hume’s desire to create a truly British people by advocating Anglo-Scottish intermarriage, with English settlers also encouraged to move into remote areas of Scotland. Williamson describes this as part of a ‘profoundly anti-racist’ project for civic colonial administration, although the long-term effects of a similar experiment in social transplantation, following the foundation of the Ulster colony in 1607, might reveal some of the tensions apparently overlooked in Hume’s utopian British vision. Jenny Wormald’s essay investigates the impact of the king’s move to London on the governing of Scotland itself. She raises a fundamental political question, ‘how does a kingdom keep going without a king?’ The answer in the case of Scotland seems to have been extremely efficiently. Wormald argues that Scotland in 1603 was particularly well suited to confronting the problem of absentee kingship, owing to the repeated accession of child monarchs over the past two centuries. There was also a significant continuity of personnel at the Scottish court from the 1590s to the 1620s. This meant that, although the king may have been physically absent, he was still running his government through men whom he knew, and who knew him, well. King James VI had already reached an accommodation with the Scottish Parliament and the Presbyterian Kirk before his move to London in 1603, thereby dealing with the two most pressing concerns of turn-of-the-century Scottish politics. Wormald suggests, however, that it was the king’s desire for greater ‘congruity’ between the churches of England and Scotland that began to unsettle his Scottish subjects, and that the relentless pursuit of this policy by his more Anglocentric son Charles after 1625 had ultimately devastating consequences for both kingdoms. Rod Lyall’s essay considers the dilemma caused by the king’s move to London for a number of Scottish courtier-poets, namely whether to follow James to England in 1603 or to remain in Scotland. He contrasts the examples of Sir William Fowler, Sir William Alexander, and particularly Sir Robert Ayton, all of whom formed part of James’s court in London, with William Drummond, Fowler’s nephew, who chose to spend most of his writing life on his Hawthornden estate near Edinburgh. Where Ayton’s manuscript poetry is shown to reflect a ‘deft, light-hearted libertinism so typical of a certain kind of [English] Cavalier verse’, it was, perhaps ironically, the domiciled Drummond who displayed a more outward-looking European focus in his verse. The latter’s profound engagement with the Petrarchan tradition and modern French and Italian poets, particularly Desportes, Tasso, and Marino, is attested to in both his manuscript reading lists and his own imitative poetry. In this aspect of his work, Drummond was certainly following and developing the poetic interests of James’s own Castalian Band, and especially his uncle Fowler. He was, however, influenced equally by a contemporary English poet, Samuel Daniel, who shared a similarly broad European perspective.

xxii Introduction

Daniel’s rise to prominence as a courtier-poet in the early years of James’s English reign, when he became a Groom of Queen Anne’s Privy Chamber, suggests the need for caution in making too rigid a distinction between Scottish expansiveness and English insularity in terms of their cultural horizons at the start of the seventeenth century. Matthew Baynham’s essay concentrates on Macbeth, the clearest example of an English playwright responding to James’s accession, by choosing and adapting for the stage a story from Holinshed’s Historie of Scotland. Baynham’s principal interest, however, is in the allusions in Shakespeare’s play to the recusant Catholic practice of equivocation. Reacting against recent criticism that has tended to associate these allusions specifically with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and a satirical attack on the Jesuit Henry Garnet, the essay argues that the play might be drawing attention to an earlier point in the history of equivocation, namely the arrest, trial, and execution of the Jesuit priest and poet Robert Southwell in 1595. Baynham suggests that, in addition to the well-known Burning Babe, a second poem by Southwell, New heauen: new warre, is a previously unacknowledged source for Macbeth’s Naked Babe soliloquy, and goes on to question what this conscious use of the Jesuit’s poetry might reveal about Shakespeare’s complex attitudes towards Catholic recusancy in the early years of the seventeenth century. Acknowledging the probability of a personal and literary connection between the two poets and cousins expounded in Richard Wilson’s recent work on Shakespeare’s Catholic background, Baynham’s essay suggests that the allusions to Southwell in Macbeth, along with Shakespeare’s representation of the equivocal character of Rosse, reveal ‘a murmur of real sympathy for the recusant position’ in the play. After the focus on Scottish responses to the 1603 accession and an English dramatic take on Scottish history in these four essays, John Kerrigan offers a further perspective on the formation of seventeenth-century British identity. His essay explores the representation of Wales in four Jacobean plays dealing with the Roman occupation of ancient Britain. These plays treat Wales as a discrete religious and cultural entity, locating in it the site of authentic Britishness, partly due to its history of resistance against the powers of imperial Rome. Kerrigan detects two distinctive patterns emerging in plays by Rowley, Fletcher, Armin, and Shakespeare: the first he describes as a ‘historical telescoping’ and syncretic combination of mythical stories by the playwrights, as they attempt to negotiate the ‘archipelagic politics’ of the early Jacobean period. In his reading, William Rowley’s A Shoo-maker a Gentleman, performed at the Red Bull theatre in around 1608, shows ‘popular theatre reaching an accommodation with the politics of 1603’, which had to look beyond ‘a purely English perspective’. This is also demonstrated in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (c. 1610), which is described as ‘a work about AngloWelsh Britain turning Scottish at a decisive moment’, when Shakespeare uses Holinshed’s Scottish Historie in his account of the unlikely British victory

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against Roman forces. After this victory, however, in a truce with no historical foundation, King Cymbeline agrees to continue paying tribute to the Roman emperor. This is an example of the second recurring pattern in these plays, by which the dramatists permit their British characters to achieve some kind of final political accommodation with the imperial powers. Kerrigan concludes by suggesting that this dramatic trope reflects the pressing need for the new British state in the early seventeenth century to view itself in relation to the wider powers of continental Europe, rather than simply in terms of negotiating the complex question of its own national identity. Pauline Croft’s essay on early ‘Jacobean’ foreign policy focuses on a specific example of exactly this type of accommodation with a hostile European power, Spain. Croft argues, however, that the prolonged negotiations with Spain, leading to the signing of a peace treaty in August 1604, in fact constituted ‘the last chapter of Elizabethan foreign policy’, and a personal triumph for the pragmatic secretary of state Robert Cecil, rather than the newly crowned Rex Pacificus. Indeed King James chose to spend most of his time during the Somerset House conference hunting in the Midlands, and failed to impress the chief Spanish negotiator Frias even when he was present. The king himself acknowledged Cecil’s pivotal role in securing the treaty by immediately awarding him the title Viscount Cranborne. By demonstrating the importance of the Anglo-Spanish negotiations that took place between 1598 and 1601 to the treaty signed in 1604, Croft highlights another principal theme of this collection of essays: the strong sense of continuity between the Elizabethan and Jacobean reigns, in terms of both politics and literary tropes. In her analysis, the peace with Spain is seen as an inevitable consequence of the Anglo-Irish treaty of Mellifont, finally signed by the rebellious earl of Tyrone on 30 March 1603, having been nervelessly negotiated by Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, even as unconfirmed reports of Elizabeth’s death intensified. The queen had actually died almost a week earlier, ironically turning this last significant act of Elizabethan foreign diplomacy, again largely engineered by Cecil, into the first Jacobean one. The signing of a peace treaty with England’s traditional Catholic enemy, Spain, did not endear King James to all of his new subjects. Croft suggests that there was still a bellicose faction in England in 1604 intent on returning to the aggressive anti-Spanish policies advocated by the earl of Essex in the late 1590s, prior to his ill-judged rebellion and subsequent execution in 1601. Despite the central role of Cecil in negotiating the treaty with Spain, historical accounts of James’s reign have frequently associated these pacifist policies with the king’s perceived effeminacy. This is the starting point for Curtis Perry’s consideration of the discourse of political favouritism in Jacobean England. Perry suggests that in seventeenth-century libels James’s homosexual desire for his intimate favourites was viewed in terms of a lack of sexual self-control, which illustrated the potential dangers of an unchecked royal will by associating erotic intemperance with political

xxiv Introduction

misrule. This ‘unofficial language of complaint’ also permeated the Jacobean stage, where court corruption was directly linked to the malign influence of royal favourites in Fletcher’s The Loyal Subject and Massinger’s The Duke of Milan, tellingly both performed after the Overbury trial of 1616. Despite the damaging effects on the king’s own prestige of Somerset’s involvement in Overbury’s murder and the subsequent rise of Buckingham, Perry argues that such anxiety about royal favourites was neither exclusively Jacobean nor specifically homophobic. He describes the libellous Leicester’s Commonwealth, printed in 1584, as ‘the ur-text of the early modern discourse of favouritism’, and demonstrates how the same examples of corrupt favouritism were cited in both the Elizabethan and Stuart reigns. Thus, Sir Francis Hubert’s verse history of Edward II, begun in the 1590s, was only completed and printed in the late 1620s, at the height of Buckingham’s influence. The recurrent examples of corrupt royal favourites are seen to challenge a more positive image of intimate (male) friendship as a means of providing trustworthy royal counsel. Perry concludes with an analysis of George Chapman’s Tragedie of Chabot, which is tentatively assigned to 1614 (significantly before the Overbury trial), as a ‘semi-allegorical commentary on the problem of favouritism’ at James’s court, filtered through a French setting. Maureen King’s essay explores posthumous literary representations throughout the Jacobean reign of Queen Elizabeth’s last great royal favourite, Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, executed after his disastrous insurrection of February 1601. King suggests that James’s accession was ‘a pivotal moment’ in the partial rehabilitation of Essex’s wounded name, as the king received the earl’s twelve-year-old son at court and also released the last imprisoned co-conspirator, the earl of Southampton, in the early months of his reign. The simultaneous appearance in print of works sympathetic to Devereux, like Richard Williams’s poem ‘The Life and Death of Essex’, would certainly have been impossible with Elizabeth still on the throne. It was, however, possible to push this historical revisionism too far: Robert Pricket’s claim in his poem Honors Fame in Triumph Riding, printed in 1604, that Essex was ‘no Traytor’ led to the poet’s immediate imprisonment. Shortly after Southampton’s release, Essex’s bitter enemy Sir Walter Ralegh was arrested on charges of treason, and his antipathy to the late earl was cited against him at his trial in November 1603, and again at his execution in 1618. Many proEssex works, like the anonymous ‘Sir Walter Rauleigh’s stabb’, focus on this antagonism between Devereux and Ralegh. Despite the king’s role in Essex’s posthumous rehabilitation, accounts of his life gradually came to emphasize the earl’s anti-Spanish militancy, with particular reference to the Cadiz expedition of 1596, as a site of potential opposition to James’s pacifist foreign policy. King traces a ‘specific tone of political disquiet’ that developed from William Harbert’s Englands Sorrowe, or a Farewell to Essex (1606), through Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britannia, dedicated to Prince Henry in 1612,

Introduction xxv

to Gervase Markham’s Honour in his Perfection, printed in 1624, as the king’s highly unpopular plan to negotiate a marriage alliance with Spain stalled. Many of the essays in this collection treat the 1603 accession as a starting point for a wider consideration of the historical, political, and cultural consequences of James’s reign in England, Scotland and, to a lesser extent, Wales. The final essay in the volume, Daniel Hulsebosch’s account of Sir Edward Coke’s ‘British’ jurisprudence, expands these horizons still further by exploring the impact of legal decisions made in early seventeenth-century England on the political and personal rights of settlers in early colonial America. Coke was later celebrated in American legal folklore as a proto-Revolutionary thinker, but Hulsebosch explains that his legal focus was almost exclusively on the English nation. One of the most pressing questions that English law had to address in the early years of James’s reign was whether common law rights could be applied in territories beyond England itself, specifically Scotland in the first instance. Resistance to the naturalization of the king’s Scottish subjects expressed in the English Parliament of 1607, as highlighted in the opening essay by Conrad Russell, was effectively overcome by the legal decision in Calvin’s Case of 1608. Scots born after James’s accession to the English throne were found to owe ‘ligeance’ to their king as subjects rather than as aliens in England, granting them full legal rights as property owners under Common Law, thus allowing a greater mobility in the new ‘British’ kingdom. It is the obiter dicta for this case recorded in Coke’s Institutes of the Laws of England that can be seen to transfer what Hulsebosch describes as ‘core English liberties’ to new colonial settlements by providing a framework for an ‘imperial constitution’. By defining fundamental legal rights of emigrant settlers, such as property tenure and rule by the ‘consent of parliament’, in colonies such as Ulster and Virginia (also known as ‘New Britain’), Coke expanded aspects of the jurisdiction of English Common Law to the furthest reaches of the British empire. The great English jurist also unwittingly provided Revolutionary America with a legal justification for its desire for home rule in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It seems a fitting conclusion to the themes of this collection that a legal decision made in the immediate wake of King James I’s accession to the English throne in 1603 should have had such momentous repercussions across the Atlantic almost two centuries later.

Notes 1. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds, Stuart Royal Proclamations, Volume 1: Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 1–2; John Nichols, ed., The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First (London: Society of Antiquaries, 4 vols, 1828), vol. 1, pp. 25–31. 2. Nichols, Progresses, vol. 1, p. 30n.

xxvi Introduction 3. Ibid., pp. 33–5; A. J. Loomie, ‘Carey, Robert, First Earl of Monmouth (1560– 1639)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4656, accessed 5 April 2005). 4. John Bruce, ed., Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in England (London: Royal Historical Society, 1861). The correspondence has recently been analysed by Michèle Vignaux in ‘The Succession and Related Issues through the Correspondence of Elizabeth, James, and Robert Cecil’, in JeanChristophe Mayer, ed., The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III, 2004), ch. 3. 5. The story of James’s progress south, and a preliminary list of those he knighted on the way, is in The True Narration of the Entertainment of His Royall Majestie, from the Time of His Departure from Edenbrough. Till His Receiving at London (London, 1603); also reprinted in Nichols, Progresses, vol. 1, pp. 55–120. 6. John Philpott, A Perfect Collection or Catalogue of all Knights Batchelaurs Made by King James (London, 1660), sig. A3v and passim. 7. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, abridged ed. 1967), p. 41. 8. David Calderwood, quoted in Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), p. 186. The best known of the petitions to reach James on his journey south was the puritan Millenary Petition. 9. John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For an important new account of James’s assumption of power in England, see Diana Newton, The Making of the Jacobean Regime: James VI and I and the Government of England, 1603–1605 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005). 10. Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1979); Roger A. Mason, ‘The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism’, in Mason, ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 7; also reprinted in Mason, Kingship and Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998), ch. 9; Marcus Merriman and Jenny Wormald, ‘The High Road from Scotland’, in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds, Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995), ch. 7. 11. On ‘confederalism’, see the remarks of Alan Macinnes, ‘Regal Union for Britain 1603–1638’, in Glenn Burgess, ed., The New British History: Founding a Modern State 1603–1715 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), esp. pp. 53–4; also Macinnes, The British Revolution 1629–1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). An examination of key terms is in John Robertson, ‘Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern European Political Order’, in Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire? Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 1. For a useful overview, see Keith M. Brown, Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603–1715 (London: Macmillan, 1992). 12. On the difficulties, see Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603– 1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), pp. 163–6. 13. Larkin and Hughes, eds, Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. 1, p. 19. 14. Ibid. 15. J. P. Somerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 136.

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16. Ibid., p. 161. 17. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson, eds, The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 99. 18. Ibid., p. 231. 19. Ibid., pp. 145–7. 20. Ibid., p. 201. 21. Ibid., p. 205. 22. See for example Maurice Lee Jr, Great Britain’s Solomon: James VI and I in His Three Kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), ch. 6. 23. See Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 1. On the difference 1603 did, or did not, make to James’s own poetry, see Jane Rickard, ‘From Scotland to England: The Poetic Strategies of James VI and I’, Renaissance Forum 7 (Winter 2004) (http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v7/rickard.htm). This is one of six essays which make up a special double issue focusing on some of the consequences of the accession of James I. Jane Rickard’s book James VI and I: Authorship and Authority is forthcoming from Manchester University Press. 24. For Jonson’s attitudes to Elizabeth and James, see Blair Worden, ‘Ben Jonson and the Monarchy’, in Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer, eds, Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 71–90. For Shakespeare’s relationship with James, see Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, The King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1995).

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1 1603: The End of English National Sovereignty Conrad Russell

Where by divers sundry old authentic histories and chronicles it is manifestly declared and expressed that this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and king having the dignity and royal estate of the imperial crown of the same, unto whom a body politic, compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in terms and by names of spiritualty and temporalty, be bounden and owe to bear next to God a natural and humble obedience.1 Ever since March 1603, the repetition of this Cromwellian creed has carried with it the voice of James Stewart saying with the antiphonal quality of a pantomime, ‘oh, no, it isn’t’. Ever since March 1603, it has been necessary to face the charge that the King of England himself was a foreign authority. Moreover, so far from England being an empire, it has had to share its rule with another sovereign state governed with it by a common authority. That state has reasserted its sovereignty as recently as 1999,2 and there is no clear evidence for the view that it was extinguished in the international treaty of 1707, any more than it was in the Treaty of Rome. Ever since March 1603, England has no longer been an only child. As one who has not only read the Union debates of 1603–1607 but also taken part in the devolution debates of 1997–1999, I think I can say that the English have yet to absorb the implications of what happened in March 1603. I can recall, after taking part in a Parliamentary Question based on the premise that the British hallmark had been ‘a British institution for 800 years’, having great difficulty in explaining to one of our most senior and distinguished peers that the House of Lords had not been a British institution for 800 years. It was only after I had explained to him that the earl of Mar and Lord Kinloss, whose descendants were as close friends as their ancestors, had only been allowed to take seats in the Westminster House of Lords after obtaining private acts of naturalization as Englishmen, that the penny finally and painfully dropped.3 1

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1603: The End of English National Sovereignty

Since the English sense of their national identity was so strongly tied to their sense of legislative sovereignty, it is not surprising that some of the bitterest intellectual battles of the Union debate were fought out over the issue of naturalization, during the session of 1606–1608. These debates arose on the report of the English and Scottish Commissioners for the Union. This report had been complete by the end of 1604, but the session of 1605–1606 avoided debating it through a long and inconclusive debate on purveyance, and with some assistance from Guy Fawkes. There was clearly a widespread desire not to debate this issue during the session of 1606–1607 also. The report of the Commissioners included four proposals, each embodied in a draft bill. The first was for the abolition of hostile laws, the second for the abolition of the separate legal status of the borders, the third for a level-playing field in commerce, and the fourth for mutual naturalization for those who were born after 24 March 1603, and thus were natural born subjects of James VI and I.4 The level-playing field in commerce was resisted by the Scots, since they were unwilling to give up their commercial privileges in France. The first two were unpopular with the English, but the overwhelming weight of English hostility was concentrated on the fourth, the proposals for mutual naturalization. It is citizenship which defines a nation, and the debates of 1607 polarized that debate about as acutely as it could be polarized. In the process, the debate raised constitutional questions as far reaching as any raised under the early Stuarts. The fact that they made the debate on the Militia Ordinance in 1642 necessary was among their minor consequences.5 The king and his law officers took the position which a dynastic state must take – that allegiance follows simply from subjection to the person of the king. It is not in any way personal or contractual: a person is born with it as he may be born with a snub nose. According to Attorney General Hobart, on 18 February 1607, ‘the king hath allegiance, not the kingdom’. Solicitor General Doderidge immediately backed him up: ‘a king of two, by descent, through several bodies politic, are supported by one body natural. To the body natural, supporting the body politic: we are tied to the person’.6 To many English gentlemen, who instinctively identified allegiance with law, and therefore with limits, this notion of a purely personal subjection was offensive. Sir Maurice Berkeley two days later said, ‘these laws written in the blood of our ancestors. Never believe, that these laws should admit such inconveniences, as the participation under one personal subjection.’7 Sir Roger Owen, with that excessive exhibition of loyalty to the English shown by many of the Welsh participants in the debate, argued that the Scots could be naturalized if they were subject to our laws – they would have met the Eltonian condition of subjection to a uniform sovereign power.8 Those who cited the fact of union with Ireland and Berwick delicately underlined the point that this union was the result of subjection by conquest.9 Holt underlined the point further by saying the law was the soul of the kingdom.

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Sandys, as usual, put the point most clearly. In his proposal for the perfect Union, he said: ‘our question is, whether this be already wrought by his Majesty’s coming hether, or to be made by us: in which question we hold, that unions of kingdoms are not made by law, but by act express’.10 Thomas Hedley, perhaps afraid James might answer this question by the union of the Parliaments, saw fit to raise the West Lothian question: ‘and whether the Scotts will yelde a subsidie by p[ar]liament to defend England I make doubt’.11 One way or another, the English intended to hang onto their legislative sovereignty, and take as little notice of the Scottish presence as they possibly could. In this clinging to their ignorance, they proved almost totally successful until 1707, and surprisingly successful thereafter. Perhaps the most successful English device for avoiding noticing what had happened to them is what Tracey Hill, in another essay in this book, has referred to as ‘ideological slippage’. The central manoeuvre is to speak British, but think English, often lapsing before the argument is complete into speaking English as well. Tracey Hill is writing on Anthony Munday’s The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, which was written for the Lord Mayor’s Show of 1605, and in response to pressure to celebrate the antiquity of Britain. Like Macbeth, written at a very similar date, it does not altogether succeed. Loegria, his fictional name for Britain, he tells us was enlarged first by the prowess of the Romans, and then by ‘our own’ (meaning English) conquests. These, he says, established ‘the principall boundes between us and Scotland’. Britain has turned into England very fast indeed.12 Such thought was already common in seventeenth-century England, and even in royalty. Ambassadors do not use titles at random, and there is one occasion in 1640 when the French Ambassador reports that Morton and Traquair have spoken to the King of Great Britain ‘and the King of England replied’.13 This story concerns the genesis of the Anglo-Scottish war of 1640. Such thought patterns are still common in England. In the Norway debate of 1940, when Leo Amery called out to Arthur Greenwood ‘speak for England’, he forgot that England was not the name of the power which had to decide whether to declare war on Germany. Perhaps one of the most remarkable examples comes from John Major in 1994: ‘this British nation has a monarchy founded by the Kings of Wessex over 1100 years ago, a Parliament and Universities formed over 700 years ago’.14 This is the Parliament in which the Scots we have been discussing in this essay could not sit without a prior act of naturalization. Perhaps A. A. Milne put it best: This calm and pleasant spot belongs to Pooh. Oh, bother, I forgot! It’s Piglet’s too. When all these devices were not enough to save the English from noticing that they had become part of a union, they fell back on race with a vigour which showed that no union of hearts and minds had taken place. Apart

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from the standard references to ‘beggarly Scots’,15 Sir John Holles claimed that ‘ther is danger that the whole nation cum not flocking in upon us, so as we shall be sterved forth of our own possession’ and Francis Bacon expressed fear of ‘a deluge of Scotts’.16 This does nothing to increase Francis Bacon’s reputation for arithmetic. From 24 March 1603 to the present day, the English have been overcome by confusion in attempting to understand the significance of what they had done. It is the major finding of this essay, hammered out in the perusal of notes I had read many times before, that this confusion is understandable and forgivable because it is in the nature of the material itself. It appears within hours of the beginning of the reign, in the accession proclamation of 24 March 1603, which declares that ‘the Imperiall Crowne of these realmes aforesaid are now absolutely wholly and solely come to the high and mighty prince, James the sixt king of Scotland’.17 It is of course necessary to remember that those who wrote out this proclamation had been up all night, and had it been an isolated document I might have ignored it, or at the most filed it for further reference as needed. However, it has been borne in upon me while I have been preparing this essay that the crucial ambiguity over whether James ruled over one body or two pervades the whole of the official literature of the subject, for much the same reason as it does that of the European Union. Perhaps we should follow Jenny Wormald’s famous article ‘Two Kings or One?’ with another on ‘Two States or one?’ For the description of the king’s dominions as ‘one body’, I might cite Salisbury writing to Dunfermline, Salisbury’s secretary Thomas Wilson, Lord Chancellor Ellesmere and James on numerous occasions. In James’s words, ‘little brooks lose their names by running and fall into great rivers’.18 On the other side, among many others, we can cite Justice Walmsley, Sir Edwin Sandys, Attorney General Coke, Nicholas Fuller and innumerable others.19 There is of course a right answer to this question, as there is to the famous question ‘which came first, the hen or the egg?’ The answer is the egg. Hens were the result of a long process of evolution, and their ancestors had been hatching out of eggs since the days of the dinosaurs. Similarly, the ‘one body’ which was created or almost created in 1707 was the result of a very long process of evolution. In 1603, in its unevolved state, it still had two crowns, two coronations, two Privy Councils, two Parliaments, two laws, two churches and a border. To present such a creature as ‘one body’ is fanciful. The interesting question, then, is why James, who was not unintelligent, felt so strong an urge to pretend otherwise. I believe the answer to this question is the law of succession. In Tudor England, which at least in this had an ascending theory of power, it was a cardinal principle that the determining authority in succession was an Act of Parliament. In 1602, the governing law was 35 H.8 c.1, which gave Henry VIII authority to dispose of the crown by will. For avoidance of doubt, the Treason Act of 1571, 13 Eliz c.1, in

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Section 4, laid down that it was treason to deny that Parliament should have power to determine the succession. These Acts created just one problem for James: if they were valid, he was not king. This was why it was so vital to James to assert that succession passed by lineal hereditary right, all Acts of Parliament and other exercises in law notwithstanding. It was to assert this principle that James wrote the Trew Law of Free Monarchies. It is James’s principle which is expressed in the 1604 Act of Recognition (1 Jac.1 c.1). The Act asserts that wee being bounden thereto both by the lawes of God and man doe recognize and acknowledge that immediately upon the dissolution and decease of Elizabeth late queen of England, the imperiall crowne of the realme of England – did by inherent birthright and lawfull and undoubted succession descend and come to your most excellent Majesty. The Parliament had no authority in this process whatsoever: the Act recognizes a fait accompli. In this James prevailed. On the day George VI died in 1952, I was walking outside Windsor Castle, and heard the heralds proclaiming ‘the king is dead: long live the Queen’. In that moment, they proclaimed the victory of James Stuart over Henry Tudor. Yet having won this victory, James had become its prisoner. Having so comprehensively denied the authority of an Act of Parliament in the matter of the succession, James was then debarred from using an Act of Parliament to adjust the laws of succession of his two kingdoms to each other. Unless he could do that, the likelihood that the Union he had brought about would be temporary was very great indeed. In 1604, the death of four people would have been enough to end the Union. One fire, or even the plagues of 1603, could easily have done this. In the end, in the reign of Queen Anne, it was the possibility of two divergent successions which made the full union of 1707 necessary. James wanted, in Sir Thomas Craig’s words, to unite his two kingdoms ‘indissolubly’.20 The point was spotted. On 25 April 1604, Bacon’s committee report listed among the objections to the Union: ‘the mortality of the king’s offspring, which though the king shall by these Parlements of England and Scotland ty both the kingdoms to the lines of the kings of England, yet it is certain that this subject is beyond the power of a Parlement’.21 Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the most expert rubbers of salt in wounds in the whole House, remarked that ‘this House hath translated the Crown from one line to another, which it could not do’.22 The only way James could make his beloved Union permanent was by somehow turning his two kingdoms into one body, so that they would only have a single succession. This was why it was necessary for James to create one body of Great Britain. The only question was how. In attempting this task, James was facing a legal and political tradition which had an attachment to the notion of unitary legislative sovereignty

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which was, and remains, unique in Europe. In the words of one English M.P., possibly Sir Edwin Sandys, ‘we cannot be other than we are, being English was cannot be Brytaines’.23 I have argued elsewhere that this Eltonian attachment to uniform omnicompetent legislative sovereignty never became as universal as Elton supposed, and never monopolized English thinking.24 It was a way of thinking James simply did not understand and indeed it is not clear that he even accepted that it existed. He showed, in his speech to Parliament in 1607, among many other places, that the idea that it was impossible to have one state with several systems of law was simply incomprehensible to him. It was his misfortune that he came to England at a moment when this Eltonian way of thinking was probably stronger than it has been at any time before or since. This is because that way of thinking was constructed in order to oppose what it saw as a usurped foreign jurisdiction, and to claim the autonomy of English law against outside interference. The end of a fifteen-year war which was commonly presented as against outside papal interference was therefore a moment at which this way of thinking was constantly on the surface and ready to be drawn upon. In most of the rest of Europe, as Craig pointed out, the idea of a state containing more than one system of law would have barely given rise to comment. His tour d’horizon on difference of laws is impressive. He begins with England, and points out that its laws were derived from the separate laws of Wessex, the Danelaw and Mercia, and ‘to this day England is subject to laws which are not of uniform origin’. He touched on such legal particularities as Kentish gavelkind tenure, a flourishing offence against Eltonian principle. In France, probably the nearest thing mainland Europe knew to a unitary state, he remarked that Normandy, Aquitaine and Brittany had their own laws and customs. He said that in France, the Low Countries (in Belgio), Naples, Sicily, Aragon, Castile and Portugal there were different laws and customs in different provinces. In Germany, Saxony, Bavaria and Austria retained their own laws and customs. In Scotland, the Orkneys had been governed by Norse law until 1587. In the Union of Kalmar, each kingdom retained its own laws and offices, and no laws or taxes were binding without the assent of the Parliament of that country. These conditions still obtained between Denmark and Norway, as they also did between Poland and Lithuania. The same was true in the Spanish monarchy and Portugal. In English France in the fifteenth century, French laws had been preserved by the Treaty of Troyes. Brittany enjoyed its own laws, with no appeal to Paris, and Spain had left each of its kingdoms to enjoy its own laws and liberties, ‘the Spanish king being well aware that by no other method can he hold his dominions in peace’.25 Craig was not aiming at unity of laws, but at what he called ‘harmony’ between them. Craig was the Jean Monnet of the British Union. As one of the Commissioners for Union appointed at the end of the parliamentary session of 1604, he was in a good position to do the necessary thinking.

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His work illustrates a point made in a different context by Keith Brown – that while English unionists tended to think in terms of conquest, the Scots supporters of Union tended to think in a much more federal context, and saw Spain and the Dutch as useful models.26 They could also have thought of autonomous states under the common umbrella of the Holy Roman Empire, of which, then as now, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was a conspicuous example. Lord Chancellor Fyvie remarked in a letter to Cecil that he was reading a book on the relations between Spain and Portugal.27 All this illustrates a comparative dimension normal in Scottish thinking, but almost totally absent from English thinking save for an occasional line from Francis Bacon. It certainly makes Coke’s remark that ‘I never read of any union of divided kingdoms, and therefore I conceive it to be without precedent’ appear to be nothing more than a confession of ignorance.28 Where the leading Scots were ignorant was in dealing with the intellectual peculiarities of the English. The thinking of Coke, Fuller and Sandys seems to have been entirely incomprehensible to them. James and his little team also suffered from a bewildering uncertainty of aim, probably caused by the fact that their objective was not to pursue any particular model of union, but to get round their own self-imposed obstacle to fixing the succession by the natural method of Acts of the English and Scottish Parliaments. There were probably two things which were really essential to James’s approach to Union. One was the change of name, and the other was some form of common citizenship or naturalization. It was unfortunate for James that of all his ideas, these were probably the two which raised the most far-reaching and passionate objections from among the English. There is much to be learnt from the extreme variation in the different concepts of Union in which these two points were from time to time embedded. In May 1604, the French Ambassador reported that James said he was facing such extreme violence and disobedience in Parliament that he thought they were comforted and assisted by some of his Council, especially on the Union, to which they would not consent, whatever complaints, threats or fury he levelled at them. He said he would change the name by his own authority, without desiring their consent.29 In his proclamation of 20 October, he was as good as his word. It was the most extreme point James reached. He begins by referring to one Imperial Crown, and says that God has shown his approval by ‘so many palpable signs and arguments as hee that seeth them not is blinde’. He says ‘union    is the worke of God and nature, and whereto the workes of force or policie cannot attaine’. He claims that immediately upon his accession some laws, such as escuage (scutage) and naturalization ‘are ipso facto expired’. The proclamation took the names of England and Scotland out of his regal style, and proclaimed him as King of Great Britain. It is possible to read this as setting up a union so complete that it rendered all the constitutional machinery of England and Scotland redundant. Nothing he did gave

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his English critics more ammunition. It purported to leave James, as the sole ‘British’ institution in existence, in almost absolute control of the government of both countries.30 It is no wonder that Sir George More, who occasionally tried to give mild support to the king, referred to ‘the cross of the King’s proclamation’.31 If the king could change his state and repeal his laws without asking anyone’s consent, there was very little he could not do. A rather milder version was put forward in the report of the Commissioners for Union, set up at the end of the Parliament of 1604, who reported to the session of 1606. In Craig’s words, this contemplates the fusion of two sovereign states into a single realm.    In a union of that character, we look for a more inviolable and binding bond, transcending any treaty or conditions of peace, a tie of such a nature that any internal disagreement thereafter arising must be deemed sedition or civil war.32 This is the version imagined by James in his speech of 1607, in which a single state need not be accompanied by full and detailed union of law. Overall union in the whole is compatible with every variation in the parts. The weak point is that everyone may fear that his beloved Palatinate of Chester, privileges of Oxford or whatever it may be, will ultimately disappear in a welter of harmonization. It gave the English room for easy pickings. The same applies to the Treaty of Rome vision of ‘ever closer union’ which dominated the report of the 1604 Commissioners. In their words, the blessed union already begun and inherent in his Majesty’s royal blood and person    may effectually proceed, not only to a further conjunction and mereness [sic] of mutual love and friendship between all the subjects and people united together under one dominion and natural sovereign, but such a uniformity in all things else, as may give a full perfection to that complete union of both kingdoms, which is most heartily desired for the common good of the same.33 It is the same ideal expressed with vivid simplicity by James in the words: ‘a childe without a beard is not imperfect’.34 There are further notes of the European Union in a ‘never again’ rejection of war between the kingdoms. This was probably the chief attraction of Union to the Cecils, and had been since the reign of Edward VI, but in the Instrument of Union produced by the Commissioners it appears only in the Scottish version. It calls for them to be ‘unseparablie conjoint’ ‘to the warldis end’.35 There is no sign here of the English belief that no parliament can bind its successors. A glance at some of the nationalism of the speeches of Nicholas Fuller and others may provide a clue to why it does not appear in the English version. The mildest form

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of all, which envisages a Britain of nation states, describes it as ‘being like leagues between princes’, a negotiation between sovereign states of England and Scotland which remain as separate as before.36 These proposals are so protean that it is hard to see any central constitutional objective save the desire that all the advocates of Union expressed, that the two kingdoms should be ‘one body’, and hard to see any motive for that save to make them eligible for a single law of succession. It was the absence of this single law, and even more the absence of a sovereign power to make it, which made the English, or at least the overwhelming majority of their Parliamentary and legal representatives, insist that England and Scotland remain two bodies and not one. In the words of the Commons at the conference of 26 February 1607, ‘there is no subordination of the crowne of Scotland to the crowne of England, but they stand as distinct and entire souveranities’.37 This introduction of the notion of subordination into the discussion of unity follows naturally from taking sovereignty as the starting point, and the identification of sovereignty with subordination to England is typical of what the Scots have learnt to call ‘the awkward neighbour’. In the words of Thomas Wentworth, Peter’s son, ‘Scotland aliena republica. Two distinct kingdoms. Two commonweals. They acknowledge no crown, no king, no sovereignty, but that of Scotland: we none, but that of England. Not rex angliae et Scotiae, but rex Angliae et rex Scotiae – reges’.38 Justice Foster, in Calvin’s Case, said: ‘England and Scotland are two nations. As two nations, so two peoples, so two lawes.’39 This identification of the state with the nation and the laws is distinctively English: Professor Levack has remarked that the English common law was the only fully national system of law in Europe at the time.40 When it was far from clear that Spain was a nation or that France was a unitary state, and Portugal, which had shared with England the honour of being the only nation states in late mediaeval Europe, was subject to Castile, England was probably the only sovereign nation state in Europe. A pattern of which the English were the only example appeared to the English to be the only pattern. This English view of what had happened was perhaps expressed most clearly by Justice Walmsley in Calvin’s Case: The kingdomes meete in the king but are not therfore united or confounded.    The kingdomes remaine the same still. 2 crownes, 2 scepters, 2 lawes, 2 distinct Parliaments, composed of people, nobilitie and royaltie, which are not mixt nor confounded. No reason therfore to judge the state of the lawe to be altered by the alteracon and change of the person of the prince, for principalitie never dies though the prince may.41 So far as it goes, this analysis is surely correct. Where the weaknesses in English thinking begin to show is when they come to consider ways of changing it. In 1707, when the English for their own safety did wish to change it,

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the necessity soon gave rise to the necessary invention. In 1604, most English thinkers could not conceive of any union less than a full incorporating union. This interestingly remained true of many people when proposals for a more federal form of union were put forward in 1998–1999. These were constantly described as proposals to break or end the Union, as if they were proposals for a total separation. The prevailing creed was still that of Sir Edwin Sandys: ‘a Kingdome is in it selfe indivisible, and can not contayne in it self distinct Kingdomes’.42 Sandys’s proposal in 1604 to go for a perfect union rather than a more federal union was not an exercise in obstruction, though the desire to obstruct was clearly present. It was the only form of union Sandys, a true Eltonian to his fingertips, could understand. He once compared an imperfect union to a knotty piece of wood: it was not suitable for carpentry.43 These Eltonian roots show up particularly clearly in a speech in which Hedley compared Scots to churchmen: ‘if churchmen overthrow law by their privileges, Scots will more’. ‘Lord Burley. As impropriations overthrow the church, incorporations of liberties overthrow the common law.’44 In viewing Scotland as a sort of liberty within the English state, Hedley was showing a caricature of the typical English rejection of political pluralism. Because of their inability to accept a plural state, the English slipped straight from the thought of union to the thought of annexation, and therefore to the model of Wales. The Imperial Chinese used to be able to accept relations with foreign powers only by the fiction that they were tributary and come to recognize the authority of the Emperor. There is something very similar in the English use of Wales as a model for dealings with Scotland. As Sandys bluntly put it: ‘we desire    that the Scottish nation be ruled by our lawes’. Owen wanted them ‘to be subject to our laws’, and Bacon said: ‘I wish the Scottish nation were governed by our lawes’.45 We can multiply such examples almost indefinitely. Edward Hoby gave away the pattern of thought behind this when he expressed ‘the desire of a true unity so it may be with the good of the Mother Crowne of England’.46 This sort of thinking naturally ruffled feathers in Edinburgh, and it was its survival into our time which made the changes of 1999 necessary. However, even now, Tony Blair’s claim in his Edinburgh speech during the election of 1997 that ‘sovereignty remains with me’ resembled Hoby’s thinking too closely for comfort. It is revealing that letters objecting to this were only printed in the Scottish and not the English press. The Tudor roots of this thinking emerge very clearly from a speech by Laurence Hyde on 27 March 1607: The Scottish nation have reserved themselves to continue a free monarchy they have saved their fundamentall lawes, their liberties, priviledges and rights, which being done no perfect union can be had: and I am persuaded that the commons and all the Scottish nation except some few greate

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persons that have liberties unfitt for subjects, as power to pardon treason, felony, murders, manslaughter and other like, would glady yeild to the subjection of our lawes: and in this case stood Wales, whilst the Earles marchers held their great liberties, and powers, and never were united untill by H.8 they were discharged of all such regallities, and made even as wee, thereby participating all priviledges and advantages with us, and are since as good subjects as any of us.47 This was the sort of thinking which annoyed Craig, who constantly commented that English law was not as unique or as indigenous as they thought. James, in desperation, once went along with this thinking, and it would be interesting to know whether this was observed in Edinburgh.48 Probably nothing in all James’s proposals more enraged English lawyers and Parliamentarians than the proposal for a change of name, accompanied as it was by the suggestion that certain laws, including those on naturalization, were void ipso facto by James’s accession. In James’s eyes, this was simply the Scottish principle of desuetude, that laws could lapse by obsolescence without a formal repeal. Speaker Phelips, in his opening speech, warned James that this principle could not be used in England, but James took no notice.49 If one law could be so abrogated, and at James’s choice, what was to stop him abrogating them all? Moreover, they were laws because they were laws of England. If England ceased to exist, then they thought the laws of England did too. Nicholas Fuller warned there would be no more Magna Carta, which is perhaps why there was a bill before the 1604 Commons to confirm Magna Carta.50 When the judges were consulted, they confirmed these fears. In Coke’s words, the judges ‘unanimously resolved (I being then attorney general, and present) that Anglia had lawes, and Scotia had lawes, but this new erected kingdom of Britannia should have no laws’.51 One can follow the judges’ reasoning, but it is hard to resist James’s feeling that they could have judged otherwise if they had wished to do so. In another speech, probably at the conference of 25 February 1607, Coke claimed responsibility for this decision, and used it to develop the theory of the ancient constitution. He said that he was the first that conceived that opinion that the change of the name could not be with any safty eyther to the king or the kingdome.    This land the Brittayns first then the Romaynes then the Brittayns agayne, then the Saxons then the Danes and then the Normans [inhabited] yet none of them had ever changed or extinguished the fundamental lawes of England.    None of all of the native or natural lawes of any of thes dominions were ever extinguished or altered. The king cannot change the natural lawe of a nation. This foundation is a firme foundation.52

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I have never seen anywhere else the concept of the ‘natural law’ of a nation. Coke appears to be claiming that the existence of England rests on nature, not on historical development. Sandys would have objected to Coke’s claim to make the issue his own. It was Sandys who introduced the notion of a conquest, claiming that kingdoms only alter their names by conquest, and saying that the change of name would be ‘the erection of a new kingdome and the extinguishment of the old’. Who would make law for this kingdom? The Parliament of England could not, for it was only a part. So was the Parliament of Scotland. Discreetly, and obscurely, he floated the nightmare of the king, as the only British institution, acquiring a sole legislative power for Britain.53 The Commons resolved to write into the instructions for the Commissioners of the Union a promise by James that he would not change the laws. This was first an obstacle to any further union of English and Scottish law, and second, only an ex gratia limitation based on no right. While it is true that the Union threatened to exalt the king above the law, especially in the idea that naturalization should rest only on subjection to the king and not to the law, it is hard to see why the English in 1604 were in such a panic for their law. No such panic had afflicted the United Provinces, nor Aragon and Castile. One may think James extreme in his accusation that they were ‘spitting in God’s face’,54 but it still remains a mystery why the English were so constantly agitated by fear of the loss of their legislative sovereignty. There was a danger, exacerbated by James’s total lack of legal sense, yet it was surely one to which negotiation could have yielded the answers. There is something here in the culture of England which cries out for understanding. Robin Cook recently put it down to the shock of loss of empire, yet we have it here fully fledged when England had lost no empire save Normandy. If there is a prehistory for these ideas, it would seem to be in the second half of the Hundred Years’ War, during the years from 1361, when the Chancellor first opened Parliament in English, down to the negotiations after Agincourt, when Henry V refused to negotiate in French because he did not understand it, though it was the language in which he was brought up. There is a major mystery in English culture here, but if I am right that the answers lie between 1360 and 1415, I am out of my element, and can make no authoritative contribution to a solution. Like Ellery Queen, I must offer a challenge to my colleagues, but for me, unlike Ellery Queen, the issuing of the challenge does not mean I know the answer. I am at a loss.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to Professor Russell’s family for supplying us with a copy of the typescript of this essay after his death, and for their permission to publish it. Conrad Russell was meticulous in his citations, but died before

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being able to prepare his chapter for the press. We are most grateful to Dr Kenneth Fincham (University of Kent at Canterbury) for checking the quotations and references, and for helping to decipher Conrad’s annotations to his typescript (some of which have, though, defeated all of us).

Notes 1. G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 344. 2. David Steel, House of Lords Official Reports, 17 June 1997, col. 1124. 3. Ibid., 10 February 2000, cols 768–70. 4. Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), pp. 109, 118, 120; D. H. Willson, ed., The Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, 1606–1607 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 289–90. 5. J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 219–20. 6. Journals of the House of Commons [hereafter C.J.], vol. 1, pp. 1015–16. 7. Ibid., p. 1024. 8. H[istorical] M[anuscripts] C[ommission], Report on the Manuscripts of the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, preserved at Montagu House, Whitehall (3 vols, London: HMSO, 1899–1926), vol. 3 , p. 111. 9. C.J., vol. 1, pp. 1013, 1015. 10. Willson, ed., Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, p. 225. 11. T[he] N[ational] A[rchives], SP 14/25/54; C.J., vol. 1, p. 1017. 12. I am grateful to Tracey Hill for showing me a draft of her work. 13. Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637–1642 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 91. 14. Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 11 and n. 7. 15. For example, Willson, ed., Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, p. 203, n. 3. 16. P. R. Seddon, ed., The Letters of Sir John Holles, 1587–1637 (3 vols, Nottingham: Thoroton Society, vols 31, 35 and 36, 1975–1986), vol. 2, p. 322; C.J., vol. 1, p. 184. 17. J. F. Larkin and P. L. Hughes, eds, Stuart Royal Proclamations: Volume 1, Royal Proclamations of King James I, 1603–25 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), p. 1. 18. T.N.A., SP 14/32/60; SP 14/23/62; SP 14/26/76; C.J., vol. 1, p. 143. 19. T.N.A., SP 14/34/10; SP 14/7/63; Sir Edward Coke, The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England (London, 1648), cap. 75, p. 347; C.J., vol. 1, p. 1013. 20. Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus, ed. C. Sanford Terry (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, vol. 60, 1909), p. 227. 21. Seddon, ed., Letters of Sir John Holles, vol. 2, p. 521; C.J., vol. 1, p. 184. 22. C.J., vol. 1, p. 178. 23. Bodleian Library [hereafter Bodl.], Tanner MS 75, fo. 24ff. 24. Conrad Russell, ‘Thomas Cromwell’s Doctrine of Parliamentary Sovereignty’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 7 (1997), 235–46. 25. Craig, De Unione, pp. 297–304. 26. Keith M. Brown, Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603–1715 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 81–2, 186 and other references. There is a much stronger statement in Professor Brown’s original proof text.

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27. H.M.C., Calendar of the Manuscripts of the    Marquess of Salisbury, preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (23 vols, London: HMSO, 1883–1976), vol. 16, p. 345. Fyvie’s point was that customs between Castile and Portugal continued after their union. 28. Coke, Fourth Part of the Institutes, cap. 75, p. 347. 29. T.N.A., PRO 31/3/37, fo. 112 (6 May 1604). 30. Larkin and Hughes, eds, Stuart Royal Proclamations, pp. 94–7. 31. C.J., vol. 1, p. 1018. 32. Craig, De Unione, p. 282. 33. C.J., vol. 1, p. 318. 34. T.N.A., SP 14/27/14. 35. C.J., vol. 1, p. 319. 36. Bodl., Tanner MS 75, fo. 25 and other references. 37. T.N.A., SP 14/26/66. 38. C.J., vol. 1, p. 1015. 39. T.N.A., SP 14/34/10. 40. Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 18. 41. T.N.A., SP 14/34/10. 42. T.N.A., SP 14/7/63. 43. Willson, ed., Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, p. 238. 44. T.N.A., SP 14/26/54; C.J., vol. 1, p. 1017. 45. Willson, ed., Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, pp. 219, 261; H.M.C., Buccleuch, vol. 3, p. 111; T.N.A., SP 14/26/53, p. 13. 46. Willson, ed., Parliamentary Diary of Robert Bowyer, p. 194. 47. Ibid., p. 244. 48. C.J., vol. 1, p. 315 (November 18 1606). 49. Ibid., p. 146. 50. Ibid., pp. 957, 189. 51. Coke, Fourth Part of the Institutes, cap. 75, p. 347. 52. T.N.A., SP 14/26/24. 53. C.J., vol. 1, p. 178; Bodl., Tanner MS 75, fos 24–5. 54. C.J., vol. 1, p. 194.

2 ‘Representing the awefull authoritie of soveraigne Majestie’: Monarchs and Mayors in Anthony Munday’s The Triumphes of Re-united Britania Tracey Hill

Along with many texts of this type, Anthony Munday’s earliest-surviving Jacobean Lord Mayor’s Show, the 1605 production The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, has received little critical attention to date. On those occasions when Munday’s text is discussed, it is invariably to claim that it celebrated James’s accession in the most enthusiastic and unproblematic fashion: for instance, David Bergeron has argued that the Show would have ‘aid[ed] the political idea of James’s legitimate claim to the English throne’.1 This essay will engage in what James Knowles has called a ‘double reading of civic ritual’ in order to look afresh at the extent to which Munday’s Show would indeed have found favour with the new king.2 Munday’s apparently slight text repays prolonged scrutiny, for it contains a complex negotiation of the implications of the accession, and of the respective glories of the monarchy and the civic oligarchy. Furthermore, it can be seen to signal the way civic attitudes towards the new king were to develop over the remainder of James’s reign. It is perhaps not a coincidence that this – Munday’s most monarchical, and in many respects least typical, Show in terms of its subject matter – is one of the most discussed by critics when they do venture off the well-trodden ground of the stage plays of the period.3 It is also, probably for the same reason, the sole Lord Mayor’s Show selected by Arthur Kinney to sit alongside The Magnificent Entertainment in the recent Renaissance Drama anthology. The underlying thesis of this essay is a revisionist one: contrary to the usual story that the City of London and the metropolitan theatres were constantly at odds during the early modern period, there were in fact numerous points of contact between the two entities which were by no means acrimonious. Probably the most notable connection between the City and the stage is the way in which both dramatists and actors were regularly called upon to play 15

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a part in civic entertainments, even the most high-profile such as the royal entry written by Dekker, Jonson and Middleton to celebrate James’s accession. Indeed, as Bergeron notes, the City Corporation and its constituent livery companies would not have taken any risks with a show performed before the monarch and his family – clearly they thought it best to call in the professionals.4 Thus, for example, Edward Alleyn, the chief actor of the company which had until recently been known as the Admiral’s Men (for whom Munday wrote extensively in the 1590s and early 1600s), performed the role of ‘Genius Urbis’ (the Genius of the City) in the royal entry into London. The annual Lord Mayor’s Show was a particularly important means of bridging any apparent ‘gap’ between the stage and the City as writers such as Munday, Webster, Dekker, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood produced work for both these forms of theatre.5 These annual entertainments demonstrate that the City’s opposition to all that the theatre stood for was rather more contingent than some have allowed.6 There are further connections, too. Literary critics tend not to regard civic pageantry as an equivalent form of theatre to the professional stage, despite the regular participation of playwrights and actors. Bergeron’s view is typical: he instances the use of famous players for civic entertainments such as James’s 1604 royal entry to demonstrate that ‘the usual distinctions between the professional theatre    and the amateurish street theatre do not obtain [but rather] the line that ordinarily separates the two is blurred, if not erased’.7 It is his terms ‘usual’ and ‘ordinarily’ that I would take issue with: such an apparently temporary ‘erasure’ of this supposed ‘line’ should give us cause to re-examine what we think we know about these very ‘distinctions’. Bergeron himself concedes as much when he ponders Richard Burbage’s participation in Munday’s civic entertainment written for Prince Henry in 1610, Londons Love. He writes: our minds may need some adjustment to think of one who created the roles of Hamlet and Lear    at the Globe also busying himself along the Thames in this slight, undramatic role of Amphion    there may have been more diversity in the actor’s career    than we normally think of.8 When, in his role as Amphion, Burbage addresses Prince Henry ‘on behalfe of Londons Lord Ma[y]or, his worthie Brethreren, and this goodly Fleete of well affected Cittizens’, the actor himself is speaking of and to his own civic community – he is not a marginal and threatening outsider in the City’s eyes as Steven Mullaney, for one, has claimed of players.9 Helen Moore has argued more recently that ‘celebratory drama’ such as the Lord Mayor’s Show, and the fact that writers such as Jonson and Munday moved across various forms of literary production ‘forces a reassessment of  such traditional boundaries as “courtly” and “popular” ’.10 There is as yet a consensus that the accession of James I, who was relatively uninterested in such entertainments compared to Elizabeth, saw, in Janette

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Dillon’s words, ‘urban pageantry [thrive]    in increasing isolation from the court    leaving a space in which the lord mayor’s show, with its sole focus on London, could flourish’.11 These Shows, Theodore Leinwand has noted, ‘mark the City apart from the Court as well as from the Country’.12 The increasing ostentatiousness and self-confidence of the Lord Mayor’s Show is probably not unrelated to the fact that London’s wealth and population were on the rise throughout this period; indeed, the City’s finances (especially those of its most powerful twelve ‘great’ livery companies) were often in a more healthy state than the sovereign’s.13 London’s in-house pageantry, Gail Kern Paster has argued, contributed to a definition ‘of the city’s sense of self [which was] as satisfying as the court’s’. Furthermore, she continues, this annual reaffirmation of civic virtues implicitly ‘challeng[ed] the aristocratic assumptions    that birth, courtly graces, and royal favour matter more than anything else’.14 Early in James’s reign, however, city pageantry made some attempt to combine royal and metropolitan concerns. Bergeron writes that, along with James’s royal entry into London in 1604, Munday’s 1605 Lord Mayor’s Show The Triumphes of Re-united Britania has a ‘timely’ focus on the new monarch and that its theme of national unity was likely to appeal to him.15 My view is that is fortunate that James reportedly found such entertainments wearisome, for had he been a witness to Munday’s pageant he might not have found it entirely to his liking. Pleasing the monarch was not Munday’s usual mode in his works sponsored by the City, as over the next twenty years his Shows and civic productions became more and more focused on civic and guild history rather than a wider national history. Bergeron suggests further that this might indicate that Munday ‘joined the increasing ranks of those disillusioned with James by the end of his first decade in England’.16 As a specific instance, Munday’s 1611 Lord Mayor’s Show Chruso-thriambos has been regarded by Leah Marcus as showing an ‘implied criticism of the king’ despite the expected attendance of Queen Anna. Marcus claims that Chruso-thriambos demonstrates ‘an assertion of independence from the king’ on the part of the Goldsmiths, one of the City’s most powerful livery companies, in the face of James’s attempt to underscore his royal prerogative through appropriating the Goldsmiths’ traditional ritual of the trial of the Pyx.17 As James’s reign wore on, Marcus argues, there ensued what she calls a ‘competitive interaction’ between the court masque and civic pageantry which might be described as a ‘rivalry’; Glynne Wickham has even called the relationship between the two artistic forms ‘aggressive’.18 Such a retrospective historical narrative should be treated with some caution, however, for Munday himself made the point in his 1633 edition of Stow’s Survey of London that in 1609 ‘the Lord Maiors Shews, long left off, were now revived againe by order from the King’.19 Retrospectively, Richard Dutton has also warned that ‘there is no clear evidence of such a polarisation in the Jacobean period’.20

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Nevertheless, it is safe to say that Munday’s own career shows a marked orientation towards the City from the turn of the seventeenth century onwards. As well as Jonson’s evident contempt for Munday, exemplified in the figure of the ‘pageant poet’ Antonio Balladino in The Case is Altered, the careers of these two writers, who might be said to personify such a ‘rivalry’, do show a marked divergence at this point. Initially, their careers moved in tandem, as both writers had worked for Henslowe at the Rose in the late 1590s and at the Fortune in the early years of the seventeenth century. Subsequently, in 1604 they might have collaborated on (or, more likely, were both considered for the commission of) a no-longer extant Lord Mayor’s Show, which constituted Jonson’s only recorded foray into this genre.21 By 1605, however, their career paths had separated, for this was also the year that saw Jonson’s first court masque, The Masque of Blackness.22 Indeed, Dutton points out that in Jonson’s collected Works ‘he was clearly at pains to disassociate his public image    from    pageantry’ by ‘attempt[ing] to disguise [the] provenance’ of his civic texts.23 As Munday was a writer whose career regularly demonstrates his willingness to exploit any chance that came his way, it is not all that surprising that The Triumphes of Re-united Britania attempted to trade explicitly on James’s accession and the union of nations that the king hoped his reign would bring about.24 Indeed, the first line of the printed text gestures towards Munday’s opportunism, as well as insinuating from the outset that the topic was a contingent one not entered into with any great enthusiasm on his part. He writes: ‘Because our present conceit reacheth unto the antiquitie of Brytaine    I thought it not unnecessary (being thereto earnestly solicited) to speake somewhat concerning the estate of this our Countrey’.25 Although it is true to say, as Bergeron states, that ‘no other Lord Mayor’s Show’ – let alone one by Munday – ‘so consciously, explicitly, and unrelentingly refers to the sovereign’, I would dispute his assertion that as a consequence ‘most of the show is a grand compliment to [ James]’.26 One cannot in fact characterise Munday’s 1605 pageant as wholly or unproblematically concerned for its royal guest. Despite some passages of conventional historiography (the Brute myth, for instance) which are, notably, only to be found within the speeches that formed part of the pageant itself, there are other moments of strikingly tactless ideological slippage. Certainly, Munday’s text is not simply ‘his way of casting his eye towards the court’, as Bergeron puts it, especially since, despite what Bergeron implies, Munday’s commission to write the entertainment for Prince Henry, Londons Love, six years later, did not come from that quarter anyway, but rather from the City Corporation.27 The printed form of a Lord Mayor’s Show was generally produced by the writer of the Show as a commemorative text for the members of the sponsoring livery company (although such texts were not actually dedicated to civic dignitaries until 1612). They were only occasionally entered in the Stationers’ Register and there is little to suggest that they were sold to the general

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public.28 The Merchant Taylors’ Company are therefore quite probably the referent of those whom Munday relates to have ‘earnestly solicited’ him to write a general history of Britain as a preface to his account of the pageants themselves.29 This phrase certainly shares the tenor of a number of Munday’s other texts where he represents himself as having been persuaded into writing something specific (such as the request, via some unnamed ‘gentleman’, from the Bishop of London that he insert details of ‘Ancient and Moderne Monuments’ into his 1618 edition of Stow’s Survey). The implied readership of the ‘written up’ form of the 1605 Show makes a significant difference, for in the context of a prolegomena that is directed at a more exclusive and less public audience than the original Show, Munday’s attempt to incorporate the king’s point of view has lapsed. Bergeron comments simply that these ‘opening pages    have little to do with the performance of the pageant’; my view is rather that they do have an important relationship, although an uneasy one, to the ensuing report of the Show.30 Counter to the king’s fervent aspiration that the English and Scots should become one people in a ‘perfect union’, when Munday retells the story of the division of the kingdoms in the preliminary section of his text, before the pageants proper begin, he unthinkingly and repeatedly identifies England – in its ancient guise of Loegria – with himself and his implied readership.31 His self-identification with England and Englishness bears out Brian Levack’s assertion that ‘by the end of the sixteenth century    the English people possessed a high degree of national consciousness    [which derived] from participation in a common culture and the use of a common language’.32 Writing, however, in a period when Englishness was supposed to have been supplanted by a sense of Britishness, Munday’s adherence to the old national boundaries is disturbingly anachronistic. ‘The limits of Loegria were enlarged’, he tactlessly relates in his Show, ‘first by the prowesse of the Romanes’ (those famed republicans, of whom more below) ‘then by our owne conquests’. These successful conquests, he goes on to stress, temporarily forgetting that he is supposed to be celebrating a unification of these realms, established ‘the principall boundes between us and Scotland’.33 Equally, when he discusses the evolution of the kingdom through its various incarnations one constant for Munday is that it is ‘our’ country’s name that is in question. In spite of the text’s promise to explore ‘the antiquitie of Brytaine’, it is ‘England’ which appears to be the definitive nation state. Munday’s account thus moves ‘from the very first originall’ condition of ‘this our Countrey’, through its transitory and distant moment as ‘Brytannia’ to arrive, ‘lastlye [at] how she became to be called England’.34 There were less Anglo-centric views: in the same year as Munday’s Show, the Scottish jurist Thomas Craig wrote a defence of James’s unionist policy, which included a more scholarly and objective account of the history of Britain in which Craig was careful to stipulate that in Roman times ‘Britain’ actually referred to ‘the southern part

20

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of the island    below the Roman Wall’, the ‘northern part’ being occupied by ‘Scots and Picts’.35 The ‘southern part’ is, of course, that which Munday calls ‘England’. Munday’s habitual use of ‘we’ and ‘us’ denotes an inclusivity in his readership that actually excludes the newly-united Scots: thus there is another latent ambiguity when he writes that Brute gave to his son Locrine ‘all that part which we know best by the name of England’.36 In this context, therefore, when James is greeted by both the rivers Thamesis and Saverne (Severn) as ‘great Britaines King’, such a name does not unproblematically gesture towards his proclaimed assumption of this title in 1604 and thus compliment the king so much as it might act as a reminder that the English parliament were still refusing to countenance the title and thus sanction an unequivocal union with their Scottish equivalent.37 Munday’s later Show Sidero-Thriambos (1618) reiterates The Triumphes’ interest in British history, but here ‘our Speaker’ is ‘our British Barde’ who speaks in ‘Brittish garbe’.38 It is ironic that in a Show which, unlike the 1605 production, does not explicitly deal with the union, and one that was written fifteen years after James’s accession, Munday belatedly combines the words ‘our’ and ‘British’. To compound the irony, this bard’s ‘Brittish’ mode of speech is in fact recognisably Scottish: for instance, the first line of his speech (which concludes the Show) is ‘Blithe and bonny bin yee aw’.39 The collectivity that Munday alludes to through his consistent choice of pronouns in his earlier Show, in contrast, was more likely to be a civic than a national entity, for one must not lose sight of the important consideration for Munday of the City, the motive force for the Show itself. The Merchant Taylors, one of the City’s most powerful livery companies, were the sponsors of the Show and would have had an eye to its content. Tom Corns writes that this Show demonstrates ‘how alertly metropolitan ideology aligned itself with the emerging themes of the new regime’.40 It certainly differs in this respect to the previous year’s Magnificent Entertainment, where James and his family are the sole focus for the City’s applause and where, as Andy Gordon has commented, the ‘static figures [of the livery companies] are inscribed within a monarchical viewing of the city’. For Dekker, Jonson and their collaborators, Gordon argues, ‘the ceremonial city [is performed] in relation to the presence of the monarch’, not the other way around.41 In Munday’s text, in contrast, the emphasis upon the civic persists regardless of the metaphorical presence of the king, for Sir Leonard Holliday, the new Mayor, is effectively ‘king for the day’. The inherent erasure of the difference between mayor and monarch is demonstrated when Munday refers to the unification of Britain under James as ‘Britannes happy Holi-day’, using exactly the same phraseology as he later applies so repetitively to the new mayor, whose name is directly alluded to here.42 Holliday’s election to the City’s highest office is actually represented as a version of sovereign divine right of the kind James so famously espoused, for Munday, via the figure of Neptune, claims that ‘heaven hath cal’d [the mayor] to his dignity’.43 Once again there

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is slippage between monarch and mayor, for James’s accession, in a more orthodox manner, is described in very similar terms: ‘The hand of heaven did peacefully elect / By mildest grace, to seat on Britaines throne / This second Brute’.44 Kinney remarks that ‘the pageantry moves directly from Brute to James to Sir Leonard Holliday’; the latter, as the true subject of the day’s celebrations, rightly takes pre-eminence.45 Even the Brute legend and its associated mythology are presented with reservations. Munday is clearly conscious that he is drawing on quasihistorical accounts and somewhat randomly mixing ancient British and classical mythology in order to try to establish a convincing coherence for the story of Britain. His preferred sources, for better or worse, are Holinshed’s Chronicles and Geoffrey of Monmouth rather than more accurate historical works such as William Camden’s Britannia.46 Nevetheless, ‘Poesy’, by Munday’s account, has to have its licence. In the ‘Lyon and the Camell’ pageant towards the beginning of the text, Neptune and his Queen Amphitrita are ‘figure[d] Poetically’, but in order to be properly understood in the light of the present occasion they must ‘laye their borrowed formes aside’. The audience and the readership of the Show are thus required to understand these figurations in a dual sense: ‘poetically’, that is in their original guise, and at the same time in the light of their contemporary significance as allegories for James and his new ‘British’ dynasty. Indeed, as one might expect, the latter context has priority, for Munday underlines the way in which these semi-fictional characters have been incorporated into a wider narrative to serve a particular purpose, despite any possible mismatches. The writer, nevertheless, seems uneasy at the literariness of his creation, and tries to justify himself by reiterating his initial excuse that the exigencies of the matter in hand have dictated the content of the Show: the figures ‘speak according to the nature of the present busines in hand, without any imputation of grosness or error’. Once again, it is asserted that ‘the lawes of Poesie grants [sic] such allowance and libertye’.47 Brute himself, presented as James’s eminent ancestor, then goes on to celebrate the way in which ‘rich poesie    tell[s] our former ages Historie’.48 As Dutton comments, Munday’s methodology ‘blur[s] the distinctions between “past/make-believe”’.49 Poesy is not, however, the same as ‘historie’, and such a blurring creates a problem if – as is the case here – a semi-mythical past is being marshalled as historical evidence through the use of metaphor to prove a politically sensitive case. Munday’s additional and predominant concern to reconcile the potentially conflicting interests of gratifying both the new king and the Merchant Taylors results in some awkward moments of transition from a national to a strictly civic frame of historical reference. Dutton has remarked that Munday’s text ‘seems to be pulling in two directions at once    and Munday did not have the ingenuity (or did not recognize the need) to draw these together satisfactorily’.50 My view is that any writer would have struggled to pay equal weight to the competing ideological needs of two such powerful

22

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entities, the City Corporation and the monarchy, and that Munday, with his considerable orientation towards the former, and what was after all a Lord Mayor’s Show to write, tried to give priority wherever possible to the civic sphere. Dekker was subject to the same tensions in The Magnificent Entertainment, where in the face of potential ‘wrestling comment’ from the civic bodies that sponsored the show (and quite feasibly its audience too), he laboured to explain that his repeated claim ‘Troynovant is now no more a city’ was a ‘harmless’ conceit not intended to undermine London’s ancient rights.51 Some early reader of The Triumphes of Re-united Britania evidently noticed Munday’s civic bias, for the Bodleian copy bears the annotation ‘Champion for the City or the City Champion’ on its title page.52 As with other of his Shows, where his attention to the interests of the livery companies that sponsored them can sometimes interfere with historical accuracy, Munday attempts to do justice to both monarchical and metropolitan glory in the same text. One of the show’s main figures, Brutus, performs the dual role of the founder both of Britain and of her capital city ‘New Troy’, which for Munday is Britain’s chief glory since by his account Brutus founded Troynovant before he moved on to ‘alter the name of the Iland’.53 The City of London, in Munday’s version, thereby has a longer lineage than the realm James has now reunited.54 There was also a long tradition of citing the Brutus myth itself as part of the notion of national history favourable to the Tudor dynasty, but as we will see, Munday negotiates the relationship between Tudor and Stuart with some difficulty. Munday tries to steer a course between the conflicting demands of City and Crown, both of which could lay claim to longevity and predominance in their own spheres. For instance, of all the rivers he cites to create a picture of the newly reunited realm, London’s famed Thames remains ‘Queene of all Britanes rivers’; her royal title thus covertly reappropriates absolute power for the City, not the monarch.55 In The Magnificent Entertainment, in contrast, the first device features ‘a person representing Thamesis the River’, who, significantly, lies under the other figures on the pageant, the highest of whom is of course ‘the Britain monarchy’. In further contrast, in Jonson’s part of this royal entertainment ‘Tamesis’ is described as ‘tame’ and ‘sluggish’, and it is clear that compared to the omnipotence of the new king hers are ‘weaker powers’.56 For Munday, however, royal sovereignty is balanced precariously against the interests of the civic oligarchy. As Corns has remarked, Munday ‘is at pains to make associations between the City of London in general (and the sponsoring Merchant Taylors’ Company in particular) and more recent royal patronage’.57 One can even describe these as pained associations. The way in which Munday deals with kings of various historical periods, not just the present one, is a case in point. The text presents a procession of kings, all of whom are subjugated to their various roles of establishing and / or reenforcing the Merchant Taylors’ eminence; indeed, they are only cited at

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all because of their connection with the Company. Their ‘Royal vertues’ therefore derive directly from ‘what great grace each Majesty / Gave to the Marchant-Taylors Company’.58 Despite this text’s ostensible desire to please the current monarch, only seven kings are cited from Edward III onwards because only these seven, apparently, played any significant part in the history of the livery company. In fact, eight previous monarchs had been free of the Merchant Taylors, but Munday, still in 1605 deferential to the Tudor-friendly version of national history, omits the benighted Richard III.59 Of those he does mention, Richard II, for instance, is only noteworthy as a monarch because he ‘grant[ed] [the company] power to haue a Lyverie, / And hold a Feast on saint John Baptist day’.60 In the same fashion, by wearing the livery of the Merchant Taylors in a ‘milde and gracious’ fashion, Henry VI actually gained in stature, for, Munday claims, ‘Princes loose no part of dignity, / In beeing affable, it addes to Maiesty’.61 Munday’s procession of kings, one might note, presents a civically oriented equivalent to the Scottish Stuart line itself with James as its culmination (as dramatised in Macbeth, a near-contemporary text). In this latter context too, the representation of the Stuart dynasty can feature either seven or eight monarchs, depending on whether one includes the controversial figure of Mary Queen of Scots. There is, however, an empty chair in Munday’s pageant of kings, and the characters there present discuss the absence of the current monarch in a strikingly overt way. When ‘Pheme’ (or Fame) says ‘tell me why that seat is unsupplied, / Being with the most eminent and chiefest place, / With State, with Crowne and Scepter dignified?’, her question stays unanswered, for the response is another query: ‘may not Time bestow / an eight[th king], when Heaven shall appoint the same?’ As usual in Munday’s works of this kind, the recourse is to civic history for the answer: Pheme herself finally concludes that according to the Merchant Taylors’ ‘Register’ only ‘seaven Kings have honord this Society’.62 There is therefore at this point a possibility that James may occupy ‘the chiefest place’, but only ‘Time’ will tell. For Fame and Time, Munday’s markers of history, it is the Merchant Taylors’ Company that determines both the past and, by implication, the future. The passing reference to this nameless eighth king is then deflected onto a prolonged digression on the subject of those who actually had contributed something to the Company, such as the ‘fourteene great Dukes’, all of whom are listed. Service to the Merchant Taylors is the dominant concern of Munday’s text, and the message seems to be that James will take his place in the Company’s hall of fame only when he has deigned to recognise them: until that point the vacant chair on the chariot pageant will remain empty. In this respect, Munday’s 1605 Show can be seen as a precursor of his later Goldsmiths’ Show Chruso-thriambos where, Marcus argues, James is not simply excluded as in the earlier Show but rather given ‘a very damaging possible reference’ in the figure of a ‘greedy’ Lydian King modelled on King Midas.63 In fact, the empty chair that Munday represented did stay unused, as James, unlike his

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eldest son, never accepted the freedom of the Merchant Taylors, preferring to be honoured by the more lowly Cordwainers’ Company. Prince Henry was treated rather differently: although on his deathbed and unable to attend on the day, he had space specifically set aside for him in Dekker’s 1612 Lord Mayor’s Show for the Merchant Taylors.64 Through negotiating between civic and royal history in The Triumphes and elsewhere in his work Munday underplays, or even undermines, James’s succession to the throne. In the long list of mayors and other civic dignitaries which concludes Munday’s 1618 edition of Stow’s Survay, the beginning of James’s reign in 1603 is relegated to a marginal comment: ‘This yeere dyed good Q. Elizabeth, and our Sovereign K. James rightly succeeded’.65 The names, dates and notable deeds of the mayors, sheriffs and other London worthies, about whom this section of the text is mostly concerned, are given at least equal prominence: in 1615, for instance, ‘two Brethren Sheriffes and the yonger Brother [were] first chosen’.66 Ambivalence about James’s succession was an issue not only for Munday, for some of the other London pageanters implicitly favoured the Elizabethan reign over that of the new king. Elizabeth is figured as ‘our latest Phoenix’ in Munday’s The Triumphes, suggesting that she has yet to be reborn in the person of her eventual heir, whereas in The Magnificent Entertainment James has indeed become the phoenix. In the latter text, Jonson offers a Latin poem which addresses James as the one whose hoped-for long life will lead to ‘the age of the phoenix’; for Dekker, too, Elizabeth is reborn in the person of James, risen from the ashes of his predecessor to bring about ‘a new spring’.67 Although, as Dutton notes, Dekker (unlike Jonson) ‘refers repeatedly to the dead Queen’, he does so primarily to emphasise that James’s accession marks a continuity with the previous reign.68 For Munday, in contrast, uncertainty and grief mark the transition from the last Tudor to the first Stuart English monarch. Elizabeth, described by Munday as ‘yielding to nature’ ‘did her right resign’ to her successor, suggesting a reluctance, or at least a passivity in the face of a handover made imperative by the queen’s age and infirmity. Munday somewhat artlessly reminds the audience of the anxiety experienced so recently over the identity of Elizabeth’s heir, when, as he puts it, ‘in despaire our hopes lay drooping dead’. The arrival of a successor to the queen did not necessarily resolve the plight of the unhappy English, for the momentous shift in dynasty is represented as a time ‘when giddy expectation was beguilde’. The word ‘beguilde’ leaves it unclear whether or not the accession of the Scottish king was a good thing.69 This ambivalent treatment of James’s accession provides a marked contrast to the way in which Henry VII (the ancestor Elizabeth shared with James) voluntarily handed the Stuart king his sceptre in The Magnificent Entertainment.70 Munday’s text is hardly the ‘graceful bridge between the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras’ that Bergeron claims it to be.71 James’s right to the English throne derived from his Tudor lineage as all present would have known, not least because Munday mentions the fact.

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Indeed, Munday places the emphasis firmly on the continuity of the Tudor line: ‘Scotland yielded out of Tudors race’, as he puts it (reiterating the note of reluctance one can also detect in Elizabeth’s ‘yielding’). James, although ‘a true-born bud’, is presented almost as an usurper, for he ‘sit[s] in Tudors place’. The Show moves towards its end with an apparently reassuring note that James’s reign will create some kind of eternal British paradise. James’s and his descendants’ ability to do so, however, is firmly indicated to be the result of the fact that they represent the continuation of the preceding dynasty, not the new hegemony of the Stuarts. Munday concludes his address to the king with the reminder that ‘we nere want a rose of Tudors tree, / to maintaine Britaines future happinesse, / To the worldes end’.72 The rule of the Stuart dynasty was indeed precarious, for without the full integration of the two kingdoms that was the king’s stated desire there was always the possibility – in both England and Scotland – that another line of succession might supplant James’s.73 With this underlying context in mind, it therefore seems a little naïve to claim, as Bergeron does, that the representation of the legitimacy of the Stuart king as deriving solely from his connection with his Tudor forebears would automatically have been ‘music to James’s ears’.74 Furthermore, at its very end the text returns to its overall agenda of celebrating not the accession of a king but the dignification of a mayor. Munday’s last words are to ‘wish all good to Leonard Holliday’.75 To set Munday’s treatment of the mayor in context it is worth remembering at this point that after the death of a monarch and before the accession of a successor the Lord Mayor of London was the highest-ranking commoner in England. As we have seen, the death of James’s predecessor is explicitly dealt with in Munday’s 1605 pageant and so the mayor’s role in 1603 (‘he closed Ludgate until he received promise that the Lord Treasurer meant to proclaim the King of Scots’, as Bradbrook puts it) is also tacitly present in the text.76 As Munday’s work for the City went on, his confidence in the importance of London’s mayor became still more apparent, even to the extent of the former standing in for the sovereign. As Bergeron comments, in many later Jacobean Lord Mayors’ Shows the mayor supplants the monarch by a ‘process of displacement and substitution’.77 In Metropolis Coronata, his 1615 Show written for the Drapers, his own livery company, Munday relates that ‘the order of march’ of the Show appears even as if it were a Royall Maske, prepared for the marriage of an immortall Deitie, as in the like nature we hold the Lord Maior, to be this day solemnely married to Londons supreame Dignitie, by representing the awefull authoritie of soveraigne Majestie.78 In Munday’s hyberbolic account, London’s ruler takes the place of both monarch and God; both of these are relegated to the status of a metaphor.

26

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In his proper domain, it would appear, the mayor is both a deity and a sovereign. Even in Londons Love, to the Royal Prince Henrie, which was written for no other reason than to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s public entry into the City on the occasion of his investiture in 1610, Munday does not seem entirely comfortable with the task in hand. Once again he addresses a doubled or overdetermined audience, the London citizenry and oligarchy, and Prince Henry, who himself was both a royal prince and since 1607 had been an honorary freeman of the Merchant Taylors.79 Unlike The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, which James did not witness, Londons Love was actually performed in the presence of its protagonist, more in the manner of a Lord Mayor’s Show. Although it seems warmer in tone towards Henry than The Triumphes had been towards his father, Munday’s printed text, like its predecessor in 1605, displays at times a retrospective degree of indifference towards the royal subject. As with The Triumphes, the written version of the 1610 entertainment keeps its civic readership in view, not least in the way that it is dedicated to Thomas Campbell, the current Lord Mayor (for whom Munday himself wrote the inaugural Show the previous autumn). Once again, that part of the text that was produced post-performance shows Munday reverting to his habitual civic mode. He twice reminds his subsequent readership that he and the City Corporation were given ‘very shorte and sudden intelligence’ from which to prepare the entertainment, remarking prosaically that ‘they determined to meet [Henry] in such good manner as the brevitie of time would then permit them’.80 Furthermore, in an echo of the delay enforced on James’s royal entry by the plague in 1603, as well as the briefer three-day postponement of Munday’s own Triumphes of Re-united Britania due to inclement weather, the proposed ‘water Fight & Fireworkes’ which were to form the culmination of the day’s festivities were unaccountably put back to the following week. Munday explains rather dismissively that ‘whether [this delay was] by the violent storme of rayne, or other appointments of his maiestie, I knowe not’; he himself, it is clear, did not witness the performance when it did eventually take place.81 To compound the somewhat grudging note (and with an uncanny prescience given Henry’s own untimely death two years later), Munday concludes his brief survey of the history of Henry’s precedessors as Prince of Wales with some who experienced ‘hard and disaster fortune’, such as ‘Richard the third [whose] Sonne dyed with in three moneths after, as a just judgement of God for his Fathers wickednes’.82 As his historical account of the role of the Prince of Wales indicates, Munday’s civic productions habitually focused on the mediaeval period which, from a vantage point of the Jacobean city, might well have been regarded its heyday. However, Munday and his peers would on occasion go even further back in time in the search for the earliest precursors of the City’s greatness. Chruso-thriambos, for instance, begins by setting the Lord Mayors’

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Shows in an historical context dating back to ‘the ancient Romaines’. Thus Munday informs his readership that the Romans: were the first Creators of Consuls and Senators for publike rule and honorable government    [and who] used yearelie triumphall showes and devises, to grace their severall Inauguration. From which famous and commendable Custome, London    hath    both devised and continued the like love and carefull respect at the Creation of her worthy Consuls and Magistrates.83 The use here and in other works of the same kind of the Roman term ‘triumph’ points up the supposedly ancient lineage of the civic shows; in the same fashion, as we can see, Munday also often called London’s aldermen ‘Senatours’, reaffirming their Roman equivalents.84 Indeed, the original illustrations for Chrysanaleia indicate that some of the figures in the mayor’s procession were dressed in Roman-style attire. As Paster states, ‘the comparison of civic officials to their ancient Roman counterparts’ in civic pageantry is a way ‘of magnifying the importance of the men and the entertainments’.85 Crucially, however, Munday’s use in his pageantry of Roman terminology such as ‘senator’ alludes (in a foretaste of Milton, amongst others) to a republican rather than monarchical form of government, in the context of which London, with its proud independence, could celebrate its self-rule and thus appear largely indifferent to monarchical power. In The Magnificent Entertainment, in contrast, Jonson’s perpetual classicism leads him to celebrate not the inauguration of a senator – a citizen – but rather an emperor: James, in his favoured persona of Caesar, engaged in an act of British empire-building. For Jonson, the monarch is the focus rather than the civic dignitaries and he thus infers imperial rather than republican Roman traditions. In his version of James’s royal entry, however, the more civically minded Stephen Harrison reiterates Munday’s quasi-republican bias, echoing the latter’s words in Metropolis Coronata closely: ‘The Praetorian Dignity is therefore come from the ancient Roman, to invest with Robes of Honor, our Lord Maior of London: Their consuls are our Sheriefes: their Senators our Aldermen’.86 Regardless of Jonson’s preference for the court, the City’s entitlement to nominate its own officials was regularly celebrated in the civic entertainments written by Munday and a number of his contemporaries. Gordon has called London’s much-lauded self-governance ‘the fiction of elective autonomy’, adding that it is ‘a fiction dependent upon repeated performance’.87 A restatement of the City’s longevity and independence was performed in front of its inhabitants on or around the 29th October every year. Regardless of his efforts in this regard, however, Munday’s emphasis upon the historical continuity of the City’s officers and institutions came at a time when these practices were under considerable pressure. In particular,

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‘Representing the awefull authoritie of soveraigne Majestie’

the livery company system was struggling to retain its mediaeval hegemony in the face of uncontrolled economic activity in areas such as Southwark, and the social order that the companies’ hierarchies represented was equally under strain. One would not think so, however, to witness the solemn conservatism with which Munday presents the Mayor, the Aldermen, the livery companies and their responsibilities. Indeed, the bulwark of tradition that he and his fellow pageant-makers shore up is so resolutely self-contained and so assured in its historical lineage that one cannot help but regard the shows as a covert response to their increasing irrelevance, trying to put forward an ideological alternative to the sprawling, unrestrained and fractured reality of London in the early decades of the seventeenth century. In the same way, Garrett Sullivan has argued that Heywood’s I Edward IV presents a London shaped precisely by threats to its geographical and economic integrity, however much it struggles to exclude those threats: ‘the symbolic meaning’ of the City, for Heywood as for the city pageants, ‘resists shifts in spatial practice that underlie the development of suburban industry and the erosion of livery-company influence’.88 The following complaint from the City Corporation to the Privy Council from 1632 expresses the reality of their situation rather more freely than the Lord Mayors’ Shows, showing a consciousness that the ancient privileges of the City (specifically, the economic and social dominance of the free citizen) were becoming increasingly anachronistic: ‘the freedom of London which is heretofore of very great esteem is grown to be of little worth, by reason of the extraordinary enlargement of the suburbs, where great numbers of traders and handicraftsmen do enjoy, without charge, equal benefit with the freemen and citizens of London’.89 King James, too, although for different reasons, had tried with an equal lack of success to limit the expansion of London in 1614.90 As far as civic pageantry is concerned, Corns notes that ‘Munday, by foregrounding continuities, averts the watchers’ gaze from the plain evidence of economic transformations    suggesting that the City carries on much as the City always has carried on – and always will’.91 There is some irony in the fact that the period that saw the zenith of the Lord Mayor’s Show was precisely the one that accelerated the decline of the longstanding civic oligarchy and its twelve great companies. As the seventeenth century wore on, it was not only the monarchy that was never to be the same again.

Acknowledgements This essay has benefited from the generous advice and encouragement of Conrad Russell, who sadly died before its publication and to whose memory it is dedicated. I am also grateful to my colleague Ian Gadd for his comments on drafts. I have modernised ‘i/j’ and ‘u/v’ in quotations from seventeenthcentury texts.

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Notes 1. David Bergeron, ‘Pageants, Politics, and Patrons’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 6 (1993), 139–52: p. 142. James Knowles has critiqued such an ‘unsophisticated’ way of understanding civic pageantry: see ‘The Spectacle of the Realm: Civic Consciousness, Rhetoric and Ritual in Early Modern London’, in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds, Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 157–89: p. 157. 2. Knowles, ‘Spectacle of the Realm’, p. 181. 3. Munday was responsible for more Lord Mayors’ Shows in the Jacobean period than any other writer, seven of which are at least partly extant. For more on Munday’s Shows, see my Anthony Munday and Civic Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), passim. 4. David Bergeron, ‘Actors in English Civic Pageants’, Renaissance Papers (1973), 17–28: pp. 21–2. Boy actors from the children’s companies also performed in this entertainment. Revisiting his theatre days, Munday called upon John Lowin, then a well-known actor in the King’s Men and a member of the Goldsmiths himself, to perform the important speaking role of ‘Leofstane’ in the Goldsmiths’ Show of 1611. See Anthony Munday, Chruso-thriambos. The Triumphs of Gold, ed. J. Pafford (London: J. Pafford, 1962), pp. 13, 54; Emma Denkinger, ‘Actors’ Names in the Registers of St Botolph Aldgate’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 41 (1926), 91–109: pp. 96–7; and David Bergeron, ed., Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday: A Critical Edition (New York and London: Garland, 1985), p. 68. 5. Richard Dutton comments that the influence of the pageants on the professional theatre (and vice versa) ‘has been largely overlooked or ignored’ (Richard Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants [Keele University: Ryburn Publishing, 1995], p. 7). See also Anne Lancashire, London Civic Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 3. 6. For a lengthier treatment of this argument, see William Ingram, The Business of Playing: The Beginnings of the Professional Theatre in Elizabethan London (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), passim. 7. Bergeron, ‘Actors in English Civic Pageants’, p. 22. 8. Ibid., pp. 23–4. 9. Anthony Munday, Londons Love (London, 1610), C4v . See Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 45–51 and passim. 10. Helen Moore, ‘Jonson, Dekker, and the Discourse of Chivalry’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 12 (1999), 121–65: p. 149. 11. Janette Dillon, Theatre, Court and City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 144; see also Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 123–4, and Leah S. Marcus, ‘City Metal and Country Mettle: The Occasion of Ben Jonson’s Golden Age Restored’, in David Bergeron, ed., Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theatre (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 26–47: p. 28. 12. Theodore Leinwand, ‘London Triumphing: The Jacobean Lord Mayor’s Show’, Clio, 11:2 (1982), 137–53: p. 140. 13. As an indication of the wealth of London’s rulers, Leinwand cites the immense figure of nearly one million pounds that was donated by the civic oligarchy to charitable causes during this period (ibid., p. 142).

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‘Representing the awefull authoritie of soveraigne Majestie’

14. Gail Kern Paster, ‘The Idea of London in Masque and Pageant’, in David Bergeron, ed., Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theatre (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 48–64: p. 62. 15. Bergeron, Pageants and Entertainments, p. xiii. 16. Ibid., p. xv; see also Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline (New York: Arno Press, 1980), vol. 2, pp. 28–9. 17. Marcus, ‘City Metal and Country Mettle’, p. 31. See also Bergeron, ‘Pageants, Politics, and Patrons’, p. 140. 18. Marcus, ‘City Metal and Country Mettle’, p. 27; Wickham cited in Paster, ‘The Idea of London’, p. 48. Bergeron expresses doubt that ‘the mood’ between the court and City was quite as ‘sinister as Wickham implies’ (‘Pageants, Politics, and Patrons’, p. 139). 19. John Stow, eds. Anthony Munday et al., The Survey of London (London, 1633), Eee3v . Uncharacteristically modest for once, Munday refrains at this point from reminding his readers that he himself had written the 1609 mayoral show. 20. Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants, p. 5. 21. See Jean Robertson and D. J. Gordon, eds, A Calendar of Dramatic Records in the Books of the Livery Companies of London 1485–1640 (Oxford: The Malone Society, 1954), vol. 3, pp. 61–3. It is unfortunate that Henslowe’s records end in early 1603, for it would be instructive to know whether Munday continued his employment with the Admiral’s Men once they were taken under direct royal patronage as Prince Henry’s Men. 22. See Bergeron, ed., Pageantry in the Shakespearean Theater, p. 3; Bergeron, Pageants and Entertainments, p. xi; and Moore, ‘Jonson, Dekker, and the Discourse of Chivalry’, p. 149. Despite his turn to the court masque at this juncture it should be remembered that Jonson, like Munday, was a London citizen (he had been made free of the Tylers’ and Bricklayers’ Company by patrimony in 1599). 23. Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants, p. 24. 24. In the year of James’s accession, Munday had published A True and Admirable Historie, of a Mayden of Consolens (a text dedicated to another civic company, the Barber Surgeons), which gave an account of a famed young French girl who had reportedly existed without food or drink for more than three years. This text proclaimed on its title page that it was ‘published by the Kings especiall Priviledge’ and in it Munday emphasised the king’s personal interest in the ‘mayden’s’ story: both of these characteristics of this work underline Munday’s opportunism in the early days of James’s reign. It was successful enough to have been reprinted the following year. 25. Anthony Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania (London, 1605), Aiir . 26. Bergeron, Pageants and Entertainments, p. xiii; Bergeron, ‘Anthony Munday: Pageant Poet to the City of London’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 30 (1967), 345–68: p. 351. 27. Bergeron, Pageants and Entertainments, p. xiii. 28. See Robertson and Gordon, eds, A Calendar of Dramatic Records, p. xxxii. 29. See David Bergeron, ‘Stuart Civic Pageants and Textual Performance’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51:1 (1998), 163–83: p. 169. 30. Ibid. 31. Sheila Williams notes that ‘this history is not here shown to have any connection with the pageantry’ (‘The Lord Mayor’s Show in Tudor and Stuart times’, Guildhall Miscellany, 1:10 [1959], 3–18: p. 8).

Tracey Hill 31 32. Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 21. I am grateful to Conrad Russell for this reference. 33. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, A3v –A4r ; my emphasis. When speaking to the English parliament in 1607, King James also referred to England as the ‘conqueror’ of Scotland in a way that Levack calls ‘surprising’ (see Levack, The Formation of the British State, pp. 27–8, 34). 34. Ibid., Aiir ; my emphases. 35. Sir Thomas Craig, De Unione Regnorum Britanniae Tractatus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1909), p. 216. I am grateful to Conrad Russell for this reference. 36. Ibid., sig. A3v ; my emphasis. 37. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, B4v . See also Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants, p. 130. Levack describes the unification between the two kingdoms at the time of Munday’s Show as a ‘watered down union programme’ (The Formation of the British State, p. 8). 38. Anthony Munday, Sidero-Thriambos (London, 1618), Cv –C2r ; my emphases. 39. Ibid., C2v . 40. Tom Corns, ‘Literature and London’, in David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller, eds, The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 544–64: p. 549. 41. Andrew Gordon, ‘Performing London: The Map and the City in Ceremony’, in Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein, eds, Literature, Mapping, and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 69–88: p. 78. 42. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, B4r . 43. Ibid., Ciiiv . 44. Ibid., Biiiv . 45. Arthur Kinney, ed., Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 372. Coincidentally, Leonard Holliday, the new mayor, had a role to play in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot only a few days after his inauguration and Munday’s Show (see M. C. Bradbrook, ‘The Politics of Pageantry’, in Antony Coleman and Antony Hammond, eds, Poetry and Drama 1570–1700 [London: Methuen, 1981], pp. 60–75: p. 68). 46. See Richard Dutton, ‘King Lear, The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia and “The Matter of Britain” ’, Literature and History, 12:2 (1986), 139–51: pp. 144–5. 47. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, sig. Br ; my emphasis. See also Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants, p. 125. 48. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, Biiir–v . 49. Dutton, ‘King Lear, The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia and “The Matter of Britain” ’, p. 143. 50. Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants, p. 3. 51. Ibid., p. 73. See also Dillon, Theatre, Court and City, p. 143; and Bradbrook, ‘The Politics of Pageantry’, pp. 65–6. 52. See Kinney, ed., Renaissance Drama, p. 370. 53. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, A3v . 54. See also Paster, ‘The Idea of London’, pp. 54–5. 55. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, B2r . For further commentary on the importance of the Thames in civic pageantry, see Knowles, ‘Spectacle of the Realm’, pp. 166–8. 56. Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants, pp. 36, 49. Andrew Gordon has noted that John Norden’s 1600 map of London features the barge used in the Lord Mayor’s

32

57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82.

‘Representing the awefull authoritie of soveraigne Majestie’ Show rather than the royal barge, as is the case in the Braun and Hogenberg map. He argues that, like Munday’s Show, Norden’s map, with its aldermen very much in the foreground, ‘suggests a deliberate displacement of the monarchic presence in favour of a reference to    an autonomous mercantile civic space’ (‘Performing London’, p. 81). Corns, ‘Literature and London’, p. 550. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, Ciir-v . Dekker repeated Munday’s citation of these seven kings in Troia-Nova Triumphans in 1612, another Merchant Taylors’ Show, but by 1624 in The Monuments of Honour Webster felt able to list all eight, including Richard III, although he does comment that Richard was a ‘bad man’ (see Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, p. 209). Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, Cv . Ibid. Ibid., Ciir . Marcus, ‘City Metal and Country Mettle’, p. 32. Not realising that it indicates Henry’s membership of the Company, Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky calls this aspect of Dekker’s Show ‘odd’ (‘The Triumphes of Golde: Economic Authority in the Jacobean Lord Mayor’s Show’, English Literary History, 60 (1993), 879–98: p. 896 n. 26). As a result, he confuses what he calls ‘the resurrection trope’, as used by Munday in Chruso-thriambos and Chrysanaleia, with this specific reference to kings who have recognised the Merchant Taylors. John Stow, The Survay of London, ed. Anthony Munday (London, 1618), sig. Ppp6r . Ibid., sig. Ppp7r . Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants, pp. 65, 71–2. Ibid., p. 24. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, Ciiir . The Magnificent Entertainment, in Dutton, ed., Jacobean Civic Pageants, p. 53. David Bergeron, English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642 (London: Arnold, 1971), p. 144. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, Ciiir ; my emphasis. See Levack, The Formation of the British State, p. 5. Bergeron, Pageants and Entertainments, p. xiv. See also Bergeron, ‘Pageants, Politics, and Patrons’, p. 146. Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, Civr . Bradbrook, ‘The Politics of Pageantry’, p. 63. Bergeron, ‘Pageants, Politics, and Patrons’, p. 147. Anthony Munday, Metropolis Coronata (London, 1615), B4v ; my emphasis. In relation to another civic work, Middleton’s 1621 Honourable Entertainments, Knowles has commented that ‘a source of potential conflict’ between the City and the court is transmuted into ‘an act of “Loue” ’ (‘Spectacle of the Realm’, p. 182). James himself, coincidentally, called the would-be British state a ‘union of love’ between England and Scotland (see Levack, The Formation of the British State, p. 4). Munday, Londons Love, B2v . Ibid., D2r . The proposed royal entry for Charles I in 1626 never took place at all: after an initial delay caused by an outbreak of plague, Charles declared that all such civic pageantry should cease (see Bergeron, ‘Pageants, Politics, and Patrons’, p. 150). Ibid., B2r .

Tracey Hill 33 83. Anthony Munday, Chruso-thriambos (London, 1611), A3r . See also LobanovRostovsky, ‘The Triumphes of Golde’, p. 881; and Gordon Kipling, ‘Triumphal Drama: Form in English Civic Pageantry’, Renaissance Drama, 7 (1977), 37–56: p. 39. 84. See, for example, the dedication to George Bolles and his ‘Brethren-Senatours’ in Munday’s 1618 Survay (Stow, The Survay of London, ed. Munday, §2r ). 85. Paster, ‘The Idea of London’, p. 56. John Meagher has asserted, rather more critically, that the description of the Corporation as a Senate was an ‘affectation’ on the part of the City (‘The London Lord Mayor’s Show of 1590’, English Literary Renaissance, 3 (1973), 94–104: p. 102). 86. Stephen Harrison, The Arches of Triumph, cited in Kipling, ‘Triumphal Drama’, p. 41. See also Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), pp. 33–5, 43–50; and Knowles, ‘Spectacle of the Realm’, p. 167. 87. Gordon, ‘Performing London’, p. 81. 88. Garrett Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 211–12. 89. Cited in I. J. Doolittle, The City of London and Its Livery Companies (Dorchester: The Gavin Press, 1982), p. 6. 90. In the 1630s the Privy Council tried to establish the ‘Incorporation of Westminster’, which would have taken over the City Corporation’s previous economic autonomy over freemen and trade, and would also have included the extant liberties. The proposed new system of governance was disputed and more or less defunct by 1640 (see Francis Sheppard, London: A History [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998], p. 191). 91. Corns, ‘Literature and London’, p. 551.

3 The Jacobean Union Controversy and King Lear Philip Schwyzer

In hindsight, James VI and I’s drive to transform his Scottish and English kingdoms into a unitary realm of Great Britain appears hopelessly premature. The campaign for full political union following the union of the crowns in 1603 foundered early in the face of determined opposition and obstruction by patriotic parliamentarians on both sides of the border. Another century would be required before such ‘little’ nationalist attitudes had softened sufficiently for the peoples of this island to embark on the collective, inclusive project of ‘forging the nation’.1 Yet within the terms of the Jacobean debate, Britain was not understood as a new idea – an innovation to be either embraced or eschewed – but rather as a very old one – an ancient and long-dormant entity which might or might not be susceptible to revival. Proclaiming his desire to see a perfect union between his kingdoms under ‘the true and ancient name which God and time have imposed upon this isle, extant and received in histories    and other records of great antiquitie’, James adopted the royal style of ‘King of Great Britain’.2 The histories and ancient records on which James and his supporters based their case were a collection of medieval legends, largely received from Geoffrey of Monmouth, involving the Trojan settler Brutus, King Arthur, and Cadwallader, last king of the Britons. That these legends were, and were known to be, almost entirely false created some difficulty for the unionist position, but this was in fact largely beside the point.3 The real question under political and literary debate in 1603–1606 was not the veracity of Geoffrey but whether it was possible to re-establish a living link with the dead and vanished past.

I. Figures of Union In the first years of his reign, James was determined to push a legislative programme for the full union of the kingdoms through the (increasingly recalcitrant) parliaments of England and Scotland. The unionist campaign was pursued in the courts and the debating chamber, but also in print and 34

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on public and private stages. The years 1603–1606 saw the production of numerous tracts, poems, genealogies, pageants, plays, and miscellaneous pieces in support of the king’s British policy.4 Much of this propaganda was less concerned with presenting a political case for union, than with the rather more challenging task of encouraging people to start thinking of themselves as Britons, inhabiting a British nation. Some writers went so far as to suggest that the terms ‘Scottish’ and ‘English’ should be forgotten – if the peoples were to be distinguished at all, it must be as ‘North Britons’ and ‘South Britons’. In The Joiefull and Blessed Reuniting the two mighty and famous kingdomes, England & Scotland into their ancient name of great Brittaine (1605), John Thornborough denounced the very name of England as a ‘Badge of slaverie’, recalling as it did the Britons’ temporary submission to foreign invaders.5 As the Welsh epigrammatist John Owen rejoiced, pithily and prematurely: Tecum participant in nomine Scotus & Anglus, Iam tu non solus, Walle, Britannus eris.6 As Thornborough’s title, The Joiefull and Blessed Reuniting, indicates, union propaganda laid great stress on the idea that union was not an innovation, but rather a restoration of Britain’s primordial and proper condition – its condition, that is, at the time of its foundation by Brutus (c.1100 BC), and also in the era of King Arthur (c. AD 500). James was hailed by more than one writer as a ‘second Brute’.7 The theme of union as a restoration of Britain’s ancient condition is especially prominent in the popular, poetic, and dramatic contributions to the union campaign, more so than in the tracts and treatises addressed to the two parliaments by the likes of Sir Francis Bacon and Sir Thomas Craig (neither of whom had much use for Brutus or his brethren). But it is one task to persuade a parliament to enact various commercial and legal reforms, and quite another to persuade ordinary people to start thinking and identifying as Britons. For those writers pursuing the latter goal, only one argument in favour of union really mattered: that the accession of James I heralded the restoration of British antiquity. While the large majority of the popular and poetic contributions to the campaign are united in seeing the union of England and Scotland as the reunion of Britain, there is some division over whether the re-emergence of Britain in the seventeenth century is to be considered a matter of survival or of revival. From the survivalist perspective, Britain has never really been away. Common Britishness has always been the truth, though it has gone unrecognized while the false names of Scottish and English reigned. Now at last it has re-emerged into the light, in the greatest of all recognition scenes. From the revivalist perspective, Britain really did die, not long after King Arthur did; but now King James, with the aid of divine agency, has miraculously revived it from the dead. The central figures associated with

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The Jacobean Union Controversy and King Lear

the revival theme are thus ghosts and resurrection. The key figures of the survival theme are bloodlines and prophecy. John Thornborough, bishop of Bristol, brought deeper learning and a vaster stock of Latin phrases to his work than did most of his fellow propagandists, but he shared fully in their figurative propensities. The metaphors, allusions, and analogies that spill forth in super-abundance from every page of The Joiefull and Blessed Reuniting offer a compact introduction to the Jacobean unionist lexicon. In his determination to leave no trope unturned, Thornborough manages to suggest that the restoration of Britain is at once a matter of survival and of revival, of lineal descent and miraculous rebirth: How joyful it is for us to acknowledge one another Britaines, as it was for them brethren in the Comedy, which after so long time came to knowledge one of another    yet may both English and Scottish rejoice, because    all of their legitimate children are all now of one name, and one bloud, become, and born again Britaines, as it were by a Pithagorical Palingenesia, even twice Brittaines. To the objection that the English have no blood relationship with the ancient Britons, Thornborough’s answer seems to be, ‘they do now’. Although the doctrine of ‘Pithagorical Palingenesia’ as a solution to the problem of a British race won few adherents, most writers on union were at any rate far less concerned with the blood of the common people than with the blood of their new king.8 Admirers of James I and his unionist programme made regular and adoring reference to the new monarch’s British blood (inherited through his Tudor ancestors, but also through Banquo’s son Fleance, who had produced an heir with a Welsh princess). Almost as soon as the new king came to throne, the Welsh parson George Owen Harry drew up his (royally sanctioned) Genealogy of the High and Mighty Monarch, James, by the grace of God, King of great Brittayne, &c. with his lineall descent from Noah, by divers direct lynes to Brutus, first Inhabiter of this Ile of Brittayne; and from him to Cadwalader, the last King of the Brittish bloud; and from thence, sundry wayes to his Majesty.9 The titular reference to Cadwallader is an implicit reminder of the old prophecy, which in Geoffrey of Monmouth is delivered by an angel to Cadwallader, that at some unspecified future time the Britons would be restored to rule over the island. In the middle ages, the prophecy had been thought to herald some sort of Welsh reconquista. Now, its true significance was revealed in the person of a king of British descent reigning over all of Britain. Harry’s fellow Welshman William Harbert took up this theme in A Prophesie of Cadwallader, Last King of the Britaines (1604), rejoicing that James had fulfilled to perfection the angel’s promise: ‘A present salve hath cured a pensive sore, / Britaine is now, what Britaine was of yore.’10 Pursuing the theme of Britain’s improbable survival, Jacobean writers drew upon and struggled to rejuvenate hoary medieval discourses of pedigree and

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prophecy. In a similar way, exponents of the revival theme had the task of transforming a rather tired and tiresome Tudor genre, the spectral complaint, into a vehicle for propaganda. Rather than lamenting their unfortunate falls, like ghosts in the Elizabethan Mirror for Magistrates tradition, the ghosts and revenants who populate Jacobean union writing celebrate their miraculous resurrection. In Munday’s Triumphes of Re-united Britania, Brutus himself appears, fresh from the grave: See, after so long slumbering in our tombs Such multitudes of years, rich poesy That does revive us to fill up these rooms And tell our former ages history (The better to record Brute’s memory) Turns now our accents to another key, To tell old Britain’s new-born happy day.11 There are two separate resurrections heralded here: that of Brutus and his kin, who are awakened from death to appear in Munday’s pageant, and that of Britain itself. Technically, it is only the first of these that is attributable to the power of ‘rich poesy’, but the inevitable suggestion is that Britain’s rebirth springs from the same cause, indeed from the very ‘telling’ that takes place in the pageant. Munday’s implicit boast here is that poetry can do what royal proclamations and parliamentary wrangling have so far been unable to achieve, that is, bring ancient Britain back to life. It is language rather than legislation that must forge the links between the present and the ancient past. The most remarkable ghost to be conjured in the unionist campaign is the wailing spirit of Britain in William Harbert’s ‘The Lamentation of Britaine’ (1606). In an opening which owes much to Spenser’s Ruines of Time, Harbert encounters Britain’s ghost adrift on the Severn, ‘in boat with broken oare’, lamenting her fall and arguing the case for union: ‘of three warlike Nations to empile / One Monarchy.’12 Unlike Hamlet’s ghost, Britain does not demand mere remembrance or even revenge, but genuine resurrection – a resurrection accomplished at the end of the poem by James himself. Before that, however, Britain addresses herself to her ungrateful offspring: Oh where is Britaine? Britaine where is shee? What? smothered in forgetful sepulcher? Exilde from mans reviving memorie? Oh no, let England like a childe prefer That well knowne title of her ancester: I know the neighbour sisters of this Ile Will greatly glory in so good a stile.13

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The Jacobean Union Controversy and King Lear

For Harbert, as for Thornborough, Munday, and others, British history is a family drama. The story of Brutus and his three sons was invoked time and time again by contributors to the unionist campaign. Harbert simply transposes the tale from a dynastic to a topographical register, making it the story of Britain and her three daughters.14 The new conceit is obvious enough, and no doubt did not cost him much in the way of contemplation. Yet, if one takes time to think them through, the implications of this twist on the tale are remarkable and disturbing. If England is not already an incorporated part of Britain’s body, but rather a child born out of that body, then how can she and her sisters conceivably pay their debt to the importunate ghost? What can it mean for ‘three warlike nations to empile one monarchy’ if not for these daughters to be consumed back into the body of their mother? Britain seems to have forgotten ‘how great and small, how all must die’, and to be bent on reversing the natural succession of generations. The plaintive ghost reveals herself at last as a predatory ghoul, breaking forth from her sepulchre to devour the living.

II. ‘Thou’lt never come again’: Refusing restoration in King Lear

The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighboured, pitied, and relieved, As thou. (1.1.116–20)15 If Britain’s daughter England were given a chance in Harbert’s poem to respond to her mother’s regressive and cannibalistic fantasies, she might choose words like these. In King Lear, however, these lines are not given to an imperiled daughter addressing a predatory parent, but are instead hurled by a parent (who is king of Britain) at his ‘sometime daughter’ (on whom he had intended to devolve the realm England). Lear’s words to Cordelia inevitably rebound on himself, revealing him as an unnatural parent bent on consuming his daughter’s dowry – her topographical substance – back into the body from which it came. (A moment later, however, he instructs his two sons-in-law to ‘digest’ [1.1.126] Cordelia’s portion.) The author of King Lear (1605–6) may or may not have been able to consult Englands Sorrowe (1606), but it is not in Harbert’s work alone that the British question becomes tied up with generational themes and intimations of cannibalism – witness James’s own troubling description of England and Scotland as ‘two twins bred in one belly’.16 Lear’s terrible words, then, may well be read as reflecting not

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only on familial relations, but on ‘the division of the kingdom’ (1.1.3–4). If so, they are but one reflection of the play’s deeply troubled relation to the union question. That the Jacobean debate over British union bears some relation to King Lear is beyond question, and Shakespeare’s play has often been regarded as some sort of contribution – albeit a wary and pessimistic one – to the unionist campaign.17 The enduring habit of reading King Lear as a unionist work rests above all on the evident parallel between Lear’s division of Britain between his three daughters and Brutus’s division of the island between his three sons. What was, according to British nationalists, a mistake for Brutus, and later for his successor Gorboduc, must surely also have been a mistake for Lear. Yet nowhere in the play is the division of the kingdoms identified as the cause of the tragedy; Lear’s political error, as the Fool and others see it, has not been to divvy up his realm among his children, but to suppose that he could retain his title and paternal prerogatives after doing so. Lear’s stubbornness on this point recalls Britain’s ghoulish hankering after her ‘well knowne title’ in Harbert’s poem; and, indeed, the royal ‘name’ (1.1.134) Lear insists on retaining is presumably the very title revived by James I, ‘King of Great Britain’. Whilst none of Lear’s heirs will ever succeed to this title, neither can they, while it is borne by Lear, regard themselves as governors of distinct and integral nations. Lear’s retention of the ‘name’ of Britain seems designed to keep the daughter-kingdoms in cannibalistic confinement, incorporated and digested within the paternal body. No wonder their feelings for him are less than filial. Lear’s mistake, in other words, may not lie in the letting go, but in the holding on; not too much devolution, but not enough. King Lear, then, can be read as anti-unionist drama, subversively celebrating the division of Britain into England, Scotland and, Wales as a natural, inevitable, and irreversible historical process. This is not, of course, the only reading of the play’s politics, nor the most obvious one – if it were, the King’s Men would surely not have dared to bring the play to court for the Christmas season of 1606. The point I wish to emphasize, however, is not that Lear is anti-union, but that the play is so cagey and ambiguous on the union question that it admits of flatly contradictory readings – something that could hardly be said of contemporary works like A Prophesie of Cadwallader or The Triumphes of Re-united Britania. What is most significant and surprising in Lear, in other words, is not what it has to say about Britain, but what it stubbornly fails to say. Rather than exploiting the cherished tropes of British nationalism, for either loyal or subversive purposes, the play methodically empties them out and discards them. Having witnessed how these tropes figured in the unionist campaign, let us now see how they figure – or fail to figure – in Shakespeare’s play. The word ‘British’ occurs only three times in the Quarto text of King Lear (and just twice in the Folio), and the word ‘Britain’ is never uttered at all. (By contrast, forms of these words occur more than twenty times in both

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the anonymous Elizabethan King Leir, and in Shakespeare’s own Cymbeline). Of the three instances of ‘British’, two refer to the forces led by Edmund and Albany against Cordelia and Lear (4.3.21 and Q scene 20.238 [F has ‘English’ at 4.5.242]). The other occurs in a snatch of old song recited by Edgar as Poor Tom: ‘Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man’ (3.4.164–5). All three references are rather troubling for British nationalism, those involving Edmund and the army because they seem to associate Britishness with illegitimacy, treachery, and parricide, and Edgar’s song because it comes across as an awkwardly self-conscious and perhaps self-consciously awkward substitution of the traditional ‘English’ for the more politically correct ‘British’.18 Here at last is that precious substance, British blood, extolled by Thornborough, Harry, Harbert, and others. Unfortunately, the blood of the hapless Briton in the song provides him with an identity only inasmuch as it exposes him as prey. The anonymous Briton’s experience is one that Edgar, along with many characters in this play, come to appreciate all too well as they discover that the ties of blood exist only to be spurned, denied, manipulated, or betrayed. Wherever ‘blood’ is invoked in the play to signify the bond between generations, it signals the breaking of that bond. Banishing his youngest daughter, Lear declares, ‘Here I disclaim all my paternal care, / Propinquity and property of blood’ (1.1.111–12). Later, cursing his eldest, he complains ‘thou art my flesh, my blood, my daughter – / Or rather    A plague-sore or embossèd carbuncle, / In my corrupted blood’ (2.2.386–90). Gloucester, in a similar vein, will declare, ‘I had a son, / Now outlawed from my blood’ (3.4.149–50) and inform Lear that ‘Our flesh and blood, my lord, is grown so vile / That it doth hate what gets it’ (3.4.128–9). The only character in the play who acknowledges feeling the tug of blood is Edmund, who piously insists that ‘the conflict be sore between [my loyalty] and my blood’ (3.5.19–20), even as he works his father’s ruin. There is in fact no bond of blood in the play that is not broken by either a parent or a child. Far from forming a chain across time, blood in King Lear seems incapable of sustaining a link even between two generations. The utter failure of blood to provide a bridge between the present and the past is witnessed in the extinction of the royal bloodline at the close of the play. The king is dead, as are all of his daughters, none of whom have left children. With Lear’s dynasty extinct, the kingdom seems fated to pass into the hands of the minor nobility.19 The first audiences would doubtless have been astonished as well as dismayed by the death of Cordelia, which runs against all of Shakespeare’s sources. Still, her demise in the play, however senselessly tragic, is genealogically insignificant, for the chronicles reported that she died by her own hand and childless a few years later. Far more disturbing for those who had bothered to peruse their monarch’s ancestry would have been the death without issue of Regan and Cornwall. According to Harry’s 1604 Genealogy, ‘Ragan’ and Henwyn, Duke of Cornwall, were

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James Stuart’s direct ancestors.20 Indeed, their union was of more than average significance, for it was through them that the bloodlines of Locrine, first king of England, and Camber, first ruler of Wales, were reunited. It is not only James’s descent from Brutus but the presumption that England and Wales should have a common ruler that is called into question by the untimely deaths of Cornwall and Regan. Few members of early audiences, perhaps not even James himself, would have been so well versed in genealogical lore as to recognize the full implications of these particular deaths. But what no one could have missed is that the utter extinction of the royal house makes nonsense of James’s claim to be a second Brute, nonsense of the prophecy that the blood of Brutus would one day return to the throne. This is to say that the play’s withering contempt for every effort to draw connections between the present and the past extends not only to genealogy, but also to prophecy. While there is naturally no mention in the play of the angel’s prophecy to Cadwallader, there is, in the Folio at any rate, a prophecy of Merlin, recited by the Fool alone on the storm-racked heath: I’ll speak a prophecy ere I go: When priests are more in word than matter; When brewers mar their malt with water; When nobles are their tailors’ tutors; No heretics burn’d, but wenches’ suitors; When every case in law is right; No squire in debt, nor no poor knight; When slanders do not live in tongues; Nor cutpurses come not to throngs; When usurers tell their gold i’ the field; And bawds and whores do churches build; Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion: Then comes the time, who lives to see’t, That going shall be used with feet. This prophecy Merlin shall make; for I live before his time. (3.2.79–94) These lines, individually and collectively, have long challenged the ingenuity of critics (or at least of those who will consent to attribute them to Shakespeare). The conditions enumerated here are a curious mixture of the already fulfilled (80–3) and the unfulfillable (84–9), while the conclusion contrives to mingle the apocalyptic (‘great confusion’) with the utterly banal (‘going shall be used with feet’). Certain predictions, notably that about heretics burned or otherwise, have attracted debate as to which period in

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James’s reign they could best be held to apply.21 Like modern scholars, the play’s first audiences would have been inclined to discover if they could in the prophecy a specifically Jacobean application. There is an inevitable narcissism attached to the condition of living in the present, a narcissism expressed in the assumption that when people in the past looked to the future, they were looking forward to ‘us’. For various reasons, this historical narcissism was especially pronounced in Shakespeare’s era. Just as Protestant exegetes found the fulfilment of scriptural figures in the events of their own times, so the theatre was in the habit of flattering its audiences by confirming that they were the object of national history. Where prophecies of future national bliss occur in history plays, as in The Misfortunes of Arthur or Henry VIII, they invariably refer to the Elizabethan or Jacobean present. Near the midpoint of the play, when Lear’s and Britain’s fortunes appear to be at their nadir, and the question of redemption hangs heavy in the air, the natural assumption is that the Fool’s prophecy will refer forward to the ( Jacobean) restoration of Britain. However, the Fool is not making a prophecy about the redemption of Britain, nor even about the state of Britain in the early seventeenth century. He is prophesying about sixth-century Britain, about Merlin. The last line is not an afterthought or a joking aside to the audience. It is the prophecy, and, in a sense, the whole of the prophecy. An editor could make this point clearer by setting lines 81–94, that is, the whole of the rhyming section, within quotation marks. For the Fool is not in fact predicting anything about brewers, heretics, or the fate of Albion; he is simply predicting that some twelve centuries after his own era, Merlin will make this series of predictions. In the future, there will be prophecy. Whereas the ‘normal’ relationship between prophecy’s two temporalities is one of satisfying reciprocity – as the prophecy points forward to its fulfilment, so the event by which it is fulfilled points back to the original prophecy in confirmation – the Fool’s prophecy points forward only to another forward-pointing arrow. There is a deep joke here, but not the joke that is usually perceived, that is, a bald parody of Merlinic vaticination. The joke lies in the way that the Jacobean audience is tricked into revealing itself as both credulous and narcissistic. The whole passage is a trap designed to expose the narcissism of the living in general, and the fatuity of the Jacobean union project in particular. It is not only faith in prophecy that is undercut by the Fool’s joke, but something deeper and still more fundamental to nationalism: the assumption that one’s own era is the object and the end of history. King Lear is remarkably thorough in its dismantling of the figurative technologies of the union campaign. There is no means left open by which the past can reach forward to touch the present, either through bloodlines or by prophecy. Even the possibility that the past might persist in spectral form, haunting the present, is disallowed. There are no ghosts in the world of King Lear, and no second comings. ‘Speaking to the dead’ in this play means precisely that, speaking to those who never do and never can reply. The simplest

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and hardest truth in the play is spoken by a dying man to a dead woman: ‘Thou’lt come no more. / Never, never, never, never, never’ (5.3.282–3). It is not simply that there happen to be no ghosts in this play – though that itself distinguishes Lear from a good many of the major tragedies. The world of Lear is not only ghostless, it is exorcised. True, the spectre of spectrality, the possibility of encountering and speaking with the dead, is raised several times in the play. Lear and others repeatedly mistake the living for the dead, and the dead for the living.22 Yet just as the invocation of blood invariably signals the breaking of familial bonds, so the identification of ghosts in the play is invariably an error, arising out of an inability or unwillingness to grasp the forms that life can take. Fleeing from the cave in which he has encountered the hideous ‘Poor Tom’, the terrified Fool believes he has seen ‘a spirit’ (3.4.38, 3.4.41). Lear himself, awakening from his madness to a meeting he has both dreamt of and dreaded, imagines both he and his daughter are dead: LEAR You do me wrong to take me out o’th’ grave Thou art a soul in bliss, but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead. CORDELIA Sir, do you know me? LEAR You are a spirit, I know. Where did you die? (4.7.43–7) While Lear is wrong in supposing that he must be in Hell or Purgatory, his words convey a terrible truth: that the torments suffered by some among the living are as great as anything we can imagine of the punishments to come. It is a truth recognized by Kent at the end of the play, as Edgar desperately imitates Lear’s own error in attempting to revive a dead body: Vex not his ghost. O, let him pass. He hates him That would upon the rack of this tough world Stretch him out longer. (5.3.288–90) Generations of medieval and early modern theologians had debated whether or not ghosts might return to the world of the living, and, if so, whence and in what form. With devastating simplicity, Kent overturns the most fundamental assumption behind these debates. The questions of whether ghosts can or cannot return is moot. Knowing what they do of life, the dead would not wish to come back. The play ends with a man gazing with ineffable longing at a beautiful dead body. An audience doubly primed by the testimony of chronicles

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and unionist discourse would have every reason to expect even at this late moment that the corpse of Cordelia would arise and speak. When were history and poesy so clearly united in their demands? Lear himself, in his last moments, seems to imagine that his gaze and his desire have succeeded in recreating Pygmalion’s miracle: ‘Look on her. Look, her lips. / Look there, look there’ (5.3.309–10). Yet there is no resurrection, and Lear’s delusion has fatal consequences. The longing for reunion with the dead will be fulfilled, but only by another death. So far, I have been discussing King Lear almost entirely in terms of its denials, undoings, and evacuations. This cannot, clearly, be the whole story – only a Dadaist would construct an aesthetic object solely on the basis of refusals. Yet what I shall term King Lear’s negative programme, its rebuttal of British unionism through the systematic dismantling of its cherished tropes of survival and revival, runs to the very heart of the tragedy. In the plotting and writing of the play, Shakespeare omitted no opportunity to cut the strands between the present and the past. This applies even to the earliest choice he must have made, that, in defiance of every source, Lear and Cordelia would die. It was the logic of the negative programme, in other words, that required the play to be a tragedy, not the logic of tragedy that necessitated the negative programme. (After all, many tragedies – Hamlet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar – insist on precisely those links between the present and the past that Lear denies.) Shakespeare, I argue, set about writing King Lear having set himself the rule that his play would permit no relationship across the deeps of time, no connection between the audience and antiquity – none of those effects, in other words, which are so skilfully deployed in a play like Henry V to allow the audience to participate with their forebears in the national story. In light of this, it is easy to imagine King Lear taking the form of a purely antiquarian (in the modern sense) exercise – a worthy and dull representation of a past world utterly divorced from present concerns and sensibilities. Shakespeare could have made it boring. Instead, he made it unbearable. The paradox is that while Lear allows for no connection between the living and the dead, it offers a deeper and more shattering experience of communion than any previous history play. This at least has been the verdict of centuries of audiences and (especially) readers. ‘While we read it’, wrote Charles Lamb, ‘we see not Lear, but we are Lear, – we are in his mind’.23 More recent critics have described the play’s disturbingly intimate engagement with the mind of the reader or audience member in terms of ‘presence’, of ‘grasping contact’, and even of literal communion, a dramatic ‘sacrament’ in which we ‘participate’.24 We are sundered from the world of Lear by an unbridgeable gap, yet we also experience that world as uncannily close – much, much too close for comfort. What makes King Lear such a drastically different play from a patriotic history like Henry V is not the absence of communion so much as the absence of

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community. This is a play without memories and without children, without a meaningful past or an imaginable future. We cannot relate to the world of Lear because there is no vantage point for us to relate from. The communion Lear can offer us is thus not a relationship transcending time, a clasping of hands across the gulf between the present and the past, but only a participation in the play’s own irrecoverable and anguished ‘now’. As Stanley Cavell perceives, such joining can take place only through the acceptance – rather than the defiance – of disjunction: We are not in, and cannot put ourselves in, the presence of the characters; but we are in, or can put ourselves in, their present. It is in making their present ours, their moments as they occur, that we complete our acknowledgment of them. But this requires making their present theirs.25 What is happening ‘now’ in King Lear is almost always, from the first act to the last, loss. Loss arrives in a crushing multitude of forms: rejection, severance, denial, blindness, madness, death. But the special terror of loss in Lear arises less from the fact that it is so unremitting than from the fact that it is never final. The lost object is never allowed to recede into the past, where it might become a memory, an object of nostalgia. Rather, loss remains the eternal condition of the present, an experience Lear articulates when he says ‘now she’s gone forever’ (5.3.244). The identification of ‘now’ with ‘forever’ is predicated on identifying both with the moment in which ‘she’s [just] gone’. ‘Now’ contains an eternity of bereavement, and the time in which the first pangs of bereavement are felt will never cease to be ‘now’. This then is the nature of the trans-historical communion in which Lear allows us to participate, one eternally confined within the moment of loss itself.26 Performed in the court of the self-styled ‘King of Great Britain’ at the height of the unionist campaign, King Lear is remarkable for its refusal to be borne along on the tide of British nationalist propaganda. Structured by its negative programme, the play undercuts and annuls the most fundamental assumptions of pro-union works like Thornborough’s Joiefull and Blessed Reuniting and Munday’s Triumphes of Re-united Britania. Yet it would be unwarranted to conclude on this basis that the play expresses Shakespeare’s fundamental opposition to the union of the kingdoms. There is, notably, no trace of anti-Scottish sentiment in the play. (Albany, the sole presumed Scot, is a virtuous if unglamorous character.) There is no hint of resistance to the naturalization of Scots born after the union, or the dropping of customs barriers, issues actually debated in Parliament in 1606. Lear has no apparent quarrel, in short, with the political case for union, as argued by the likes of Bacon and Craig. The problem is not so much with Britain as with those who insist on looking for it in the wrong place, namely the past. The real object of the play’s dark and withering scorn is not union per se, but something at once older and more enduring, the nostalgic spirit of nationalism.

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Notes A somewhat different version of this chapter appears as the final chapter of my book, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 1. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 2. Cited in Jenny Wormald, ‘James VI, James I and the Identity of Britain’, in The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds (London: Macmillan, 1996). See also S. T. Bindoff, ‘The Stuarts and Their Style’, HER, 60 (1945), 192–216. 3. If, by the first decade of the seventeenth century, most scholars and statesmen were eager to forget that they had ever placed their faith in the discredited Geoffrey of Monmouth, popular belief in the British History was as yet undiminished. The shows staged in favour of union in fact depend on fairly detailed popular knowledge of Geoffrey’s tales; see Richard Dutton, ‘King Lear, The Triumphs of Reunited Britannia, and the “Matter of Britain” ’, Literature and History, 12 (1986), 137–51. On the survival of Geoffrey’s tales (especially those involving giants and the founding of cities) in the popular imagination, even into the eighteenth century, see D. R. Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture, 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 311, 315–16, 325–31. 4. The literature on union is discussed by Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland, 1603–1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), pp. 33–55; and D. R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 55–64. See also Brian P. Levack, The Formation of the British State: England, Scotland, and the Union, 1603–1707 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 5. John Thornborough, The Joiefull and Blessed Reuniting (Oxford, 1605), p. 45. 6. John Owen, Epigrammatum Libri Tres (London, 1606), p. 64. The epigram was translated by Robert Hayman in 1626 as ‘Wales, Scotland, England, now are joynd in one: / Henceforth Wales is not Brittany alone’ (Robert Hayman, Quodlibets [London, 1628], p. 18). The alteration in sense is slight but significant, with the English suggesting appropriation (of Britishness) rather than vindication (of Wales). 7. The Poems of William Harbert, of Glamorgan, in Miscellanies of the Fuller Worthies Library, A. B. Grosart, ed. (Blackburn, 1870), vol. 1, p. 88; Anthony Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania, in Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday, David M. Bergeron, ed. (New York: Garland, 1985), p. 9. 8. For some who could not swallow the theory of ‘Pithagorical Palingenesia’, the creation of a British people united by blood remained a consummation devoutly to be wished. As John Davies of Hereford has the English tell the Scots (in a poem addressed to the Prince of Wales on behalf of the Welsh people), ‘Give us your Daughters, and take ours in marage, / That, Blouds so mixte, may make one flesh, and bloud’ (John Davies, ‘Microcosmos’, in The Complete Works of John Davies of Hereford, ed. A. B. Grosart [Edinburgh: Printed For Private Circulation, 1878], vol. 1, p. 11 [separately paginated]). 9. George Owen Harry, The Genealogy of the High and Mighty Monarch, James (London, 1604), p. 6. 10. Harbert, Poems, p. 88.

Philip Schwyzer 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

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Munday, The Triumphes of Re-united Britania. William Harbert, Englands Sorrowe, or A Farewell to Essex (London, 1606), B1r , G3r . Ibid., G3r . There is some precedent for this twist in Munday’s Triumphes of Re-united Britania, in which Brutus is described as wedded to the ‘imperial lady’ Britain, and his three sons are accompanied by female representations of England, Scotland, and Wales. These nymphs are not, however, specified to be Britain’s daughters – no doubt because Munday was aware of the unsettling implications of incest and cannibalism this would raise. Except where otherwise noted, all references are to The Tragedy of King Lear (i.e., the Folio text) in The Norton Shakespeare. Significant divergences between Folio and Quarto texts will be noted where relevant. Michael J. Enright, ‘King James and his Island: An Archaic Kingship Belief?’, Scottish Historical Review, 55 (1976), 34. See, for example, Christopher Wortham, ‘Shakespeare, James I and the Matter of Britain’, English: The Journal of the English Association, 45 (1996), 97–122. In early performances, the line may have invited a joke on Jacobean political correctness; on the verge of saying ‘English’, Edgar catches himself and pronounces the new approved term with audible irony. See Andrew Gurr, ‘Headgear as a Paralinguistic Signifier in King Lear’, Shakespeare Survey, 55 (2002), 43–52. See Harry, The Genealogy of the High and Mighty Monarch, James (1604), (b)2r . A compliment to James has been seen in the elevation of the Duke of Albany – a title associated with the Stuarts – to shared governance of the realm at the end of the play. But the compliment is at best only partial compensation for the gratuitous extinction of James’s ancestors. See John Kerrigan, ‘Revision, Adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear’, in The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear, Gary Taylor and Michael Warren, eds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 221–7; and Gary Taylor, ‘King Lear: The Date and Authorship of the Folio Version’, in the same book, pp. 382–5. Here I draw upon the discussion of ghosts in Lear in Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Charles Lamb, ‘On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, Considered with Reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation’, in Miscellaneous Prose, V. Lucas, ed. (London: Methuen, 1912), p. 124. Stanley Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear’, in Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays by Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 39–124; John J. Joughin, ‘Lear’s Afterlife’, Shakespeare Survey, 55 (2002), 67–81; Richard C. McCoy, ‘ “Look upon me, Sir”: Relationships in King Lear’, Representations, 81 (2003), 46–60. Cavell, ‘The Avoidance of Love’, p. 108. The dramatic and syntactical techniques by which Shakespeare expands the final moment of loss to almost unbearable length are analysed by Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

4 Radical Britain: David Hume of Godscroft and the Challenge to the Jacobean British Vision Arthur Williamson

I want humanity and the passion for the public good    – Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, 17571 In November 1585 the Scottish Presbyterian leadership, both lay and clerical, returned from England to their native land where they mounted a successful coup that at long last overthrew the conservative regime of James Stewart, earl of Arran. Theirs had been an activist exile, involving religious and political issues in both realms. In the spring of 1584 they had attempted a coup in Scotland. Activism on this scale was possible because the Scots had found in the south powerful protectors and supporters. Among them were leading English reformers and notably John Field, as well as the political figures Philip Sidney, Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, William Davison, and – most important – the Queen’s influential secretary, Francis Walsingham. There too the Scots actively participated in the great challenge of 1584 to Elizabethan religious conservatism. English and Scot alike saw all these events, quite explicitly, as ‘the common cause’, all part of a pan-British struggle. The death of the radical Scottish minister James Lawson in October 1584 led to a huge funeral in London, attended by some 500 people, in what can only be regarded as a massive demonstration of solidarity from elements within the London and court elites. Now, to be sure, the story of this Scottish involvement in the English reform movement and of English support for the Scottish Presbyterians has been recounted long ago by Patrick Collinson and Gordon Donaldson in their histories of the British churches in the sixteenth century.2 But in fact considerably more was going on than simply a conflict over ecclesiology, dogma, or a church ‘but halfly reformed’. Shortly after his return to Scotland, David Hume of Godscroft, one of the leading lay Presbyterian intellectuals, wrote two Latin poems to Walsingham, a kind 48

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of thank-you note to the man who had labored so crucially and so tirelessly in their cause at a time of crisis. The poems are revealing. Hume not only celebrated the Secretary as a promoter of sincere religion. No less was Walsingham the ‘refuge, haven, and good guardian’ (‘praesidium, portus, dulce patrocinium’) of the Muses. For Hume – and doubtless for the Englishman as well – the triumph of ‘vera pietas’ (with its range of meanings, both spiritual and social) linked inextricably and prominently with the triumph of learning and culture. As he phrased it, Devotee of the muses, and of genuine piety, / Refuge, haven, and good guardian, / What shall we ask on your behalf / Which would be worthy of you and your devoted piety? / What good wishes would balance your great desserts? 

















Be as devoted to the muses as they are to you. / As for piety, may it remain with you, / And continue with you, a welcome presence, as long as you live.3 This interweaving of piety, poetry, and, inevitably, politics involved patterns of thought that extend well beyond the boundaries of narrow ecclesiastical history. Such patterns reached back at least a generation and derived from a range of quite disparate sources.4 The essay that follows will review some of these sources, the tradition that formed from them, and the alternate, radical Britain proposed by this line of thought at the 1603 regnal union. Perhaps no single intellect from the British Isles had greater impact on the political culture of the later sixteenth century than did George Buchanan. And surely no work of his proved more influential than did the De jure regni apud Scotos: Dialogus. From its first writing in 1567 the De jure regni was immediately recognized as an extraordinarily radical tract, perhaps, as it has seemed, both then and now, one of the most radical of the entire sixteenth century. Written to justify the overthrow of Mary Stewart in that year, it provoked at least three major replies before seeing print. During the next two centuries it would be the most frequently banned book in Scotland, and one of the most commonly proscribed books throughout Europe. With its highly articulated notions of civic life and its remarkably wide vision of public participation and direct action in political society, the De jure regni soon achieved canonical status within what today is commonly called the Atlantic republican tradition.5 Yet the De jure regni’s radicalism extends further than its portrayal of a politics that either exhilarated or dismayed so many contemporaries. Much of the argument in the tract is anchored in an almost boundless commitment

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to the efficacy of education and public discourse. Education, learning, and culture underwrote citizenship, and education could overcome virtually any obstacle. In Scotland these obstacles were seen as formidable in the extreme. For literally millennia, deep-seated European tradition deriving from both biblical and classical sources regarded the north as the region of the primitive, the barbaric, the bestial, the satanic. This great commonplace appeared in virtually every European language; it informed a vast range of writing. It shaped thinking in both England and France. As Scotland occupied still more northerly reaches of the globe and was more emphatically defined by its location, the effects there were all the greater. Indeed, sixteenth-century Scots of every political and religious persuasion found themselves exercised to the point of obsession as to whether civilization could be sustained within their cold and remote country. Could it be discovered in the past, could it be created in the future? In addition, within Scotland itself, the further north one went the more the great truism seemed to be borne out, for there in the north one encountered the militarized kin-structures of the Highlands, regions populated with fierce predators and lawless primitives. Even so, the Highlands, it must be stressed, did not embody the problem, but merely typified it. The issue was never simply the Highland line. It was always Scotland itself.6 Huge obstacles, massive disadvantages, an extraordinary burden, to be sure, and yet despite it all, Buchanan declared, Scotland could change: If they [the Scots] were to make even the slightest effort, they would put an end to the notion that in the colder parts of the world men are so far removed from letters, learning, and every cultural pursuit as they are from the sun. Nature may have bestowed nimbler wits and keener minds on the Africans, Egyptians, and many other peoples, but it has not so utterly condemned any nation as to deprive it of all access to virtue and renown. The great humanist could think of no more telling testimony to human capability than his own experience. He was, after all, ‘a man of modest ability and almost no resources’. Still worse, he had been ‘born in an uncultured age’ – by which he apparently meant a world at once warlike, priest-ridden, and superstitious.7 Again and again in his writings we find him noting ‘the infelicity of our birth’, an event that had taken place up in ‘the British mountains    among a rude people’. Later, he says, he faced discrimination in the sense that he had difficulty establishing his credibility: because of his obscure, dark origins, the learned ‘scarcely and rarely    [paid] me heed’. But, for all that, Buchanan still had ‘achieved something in my struggle against [these] unfavorable circumstances’.8 And in fact so could every man. Precisely for this reason, as Buchanan explained at length in the dialogue that followed these remarks, a civic and civilized society became possible even in so inauspicious a climate.

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Buchanan went further. 1567–1568 was a moment of extraordinary optimism and great hope. Young Thomas Maitland, the other character in the dialogue to whom Buchanan played interlocutor, would not have to face obstacles like those that Buchanan himself had needed to overcome. Revolutionary Scotland would not only create a civic world, but, integral to it, a cultured one. Here was something truly radical: men could build a new society that would tap into human capability and universalize Buchanan’s achievement. Revolution would inherently stimulate learning. Such a world required intimacy with antique values; reform required the liberation provided by scripture; both required a politico-moral ‘pietas’ needed to undergird civilization. Civic life, the highest form of human association, realized humanity’s potential and purpose. At its core lay moral judgments that both determined the public good and defined the individual. Consequently an ignorant citizen could only be a contradiction in terms. Worse still, an ignorant citizen could only prove spiritually lacking. Redemption, for Buchanan, embodied a political act. The soteriological merged with the civic. Both civilization and salvation required the citizen. Buchanan’s dialogue therefore projected a cultural flowering. And so it proved, at least briefly.9 But who in fact comprised the active, articulate citizens who could make such moral decisions, manifest virtue, and achieve civilization? Manifestly, they were not everyone. Buchanan, a true revolutionary, always feared the tyranny of custom, and his distrust of the ‘imperta multitudo’ derived from their blinkered conservatism rather than any unbridled radicalism. Further, the poor could only focus their energies on the immediate concern for personal survival rather than the larger issues that framed the social agenda. Yet at his most radical – in the De jure regni of late 1567 – the social range of the citizens is remarkably wide, potentially limitless. For citizenship did not arise from title, or blood, or even property. It came simply from the capacity to listen to argument and take direct action. Just this had happened on a large scale during the 1559–1560 revolution against Mary of Guise and the French, for then the ‘populus’ from many social ranks had pursued the common good in the shires, with the Lords of the Congregation, at the Reformation Parliament. Buchanan, a sometime Professor of Greek, was deeply influenced by Aristotle’s Politics and the Athenian experience, more so than is usually recognized. He appears to have envisioned the Scottish commonwealth as a kind of gigantic polis where selfless aristocrats restrained their narrow interests and personal passions to rule on behalf of the public good – and brought the nation with them by the force of argument. The ideal seems to have been nothing less than the classical ekklesia, the assembly of adult male citizens who had the ultimate decision-making power in the Greek state.10 Citizens were those who behaved like citizens. Even as Buchanan became less confident of human political capacity in the wake of the 1569–1573 civil war, his long-standing commitment to legitimate law as self-imposed law remained unshaken. The power of education never came into question. Civilization and salvation required no less.

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Buchanan’s immediate intellectual successor would be his young friend and confidante, the minister Andrew Melville. Today, this might seem odd. For the past three decades Melville has been vilified consistently in conservative and Catholic revisionist historiography.11 Yet Buchanan and Melville shared much in common. Both were leading educators and educational reformers, both university professors. Both would serve as moderators of the Church of Scotland. Both would become Scotland’s leading court poets. Most important, Melville adopted Buchanan’s central political values. These values are evident even at the high point of royal and Presbyterian cooperation during the early 1590s. Melville’s Latin poem celebrating the coronation of the king’s new bride, Anne of Denmark, in 1590 stressed the volitional dimension of rulership: if, on the one hand, the people needed to consider and be convinced by right reason, yet, on the other, ‘how much more desirable and blessed is it in a kingdom not to be compelled!’ Who could possibly believe ‘that his citizens [cives] are given over to him rather than he to them?’ The notion that the king stood beyond the law constituted a hellish disease directly comparable to syphilis. Here was a state poem. Published officially in Edinburgh, it was a declaration intended to ‘sail overseas’ to the world.12 No less did Melville endorse Buchanan’s severe moralism and its revolutionary imperative. He would see through the press Buchanan’s great history of Scotland, the Rerum Scoticarum Historia. But Melville also did more. He placed Buchanan’s civic-morality within a linear apocalyptic vision of the Scottish and British past. And he did this not in a political tract nor in a theological treatise, but in patriotic Latin poetry. The most notable of which would be his abortive national epic, known today as the ‘Gathelus’.13 The medieval story from which it derived was straightforward enough, known to virtually all Scots and to many throughout the British Isles.14 Gathelus, son of the Athenian king Cecrops, was so high-spirited that his heroic ambition could not find expression within the confines of Attica. Migrating to Egypt with his aristocratic friends, he entered the pharaoh’s service. There he won a major victory against the invading Nubians and was rewarded with the hand of the pharaoh’s daughter, Scota. All presumably would be well but for the succeeding pharaoh’s persecution of the Israelites: the resulting plagues sent the Jews to the east, while Gathelus and his Graeco-Egyptian followers departed for the west. Settling in what subsequently became Galicia, Gathelus founded a powerful kingdom based eventually at the city of Brigantium. Later still Gathelus’s two sons Hiber and Hemecus discovered Hibernia, where the second son Hemecus would establish an independent kingdom. To this standard account of Scottish origins that had reached back to the fourteenth-century wars of independence and even earlier, Melville added an altogether original dimension. The two sons embodied two conflicting

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ideals, two conflicting visions of human destiny and human purpose. Hiber, the leader of the Iberian Gaels, is ruthlessly aggressive and blood-thirsty, striving ‘to extend his fame and his father’s kingdom by whatever force, by whatever power’. He sweeps through the entire peninsula. Believing himself exalted through divine favor, he seeks ‘to mount up to the high heavens’. His younger twin is a total contrast. Hemecus, leader of the Hibernian Gaels, wins praise for his ‘modesty’. He establishes ‘laws and justice for the people’, and ‘he exerts himself in handling the shared reins of governance’. Hiber manifestly anticipates the Iberian kingdoms and the Hapsburg’s global empire. Hemecus and his successors obviously found Ireland, then Scotland, and ultimately the united British kingdoms. Hiber the exalted, Hemecus the good, the two emerge clearly as the western counterparts to Ishmael and Isaac, the children of an Abramic Gathelus. No less are they archetypes of the contemporary British-Iberian confrontation: civic Britain against hierarchical Spain, the articulate citizen against the obedient subject. Here culminated a long-developing confrontation of the greatest moment, one that promised to fulfil the fullest range of prophecy. On Melville’s telling, Hemecus emerges not only as a modest, limited, and hence legitimate king, but also a sage steeped in the wisdom of both Athens and Memphis. In Greek letters or in Egyptian hieroglyphs, Everyone accustomed himself to receive from the mouth of Gathelus All of the master’s teachings howsoever much there might be, Or commit them to memory, Whatever he heard in his native country from the patriarchs of Athens, Whatever secret wisdom he took from the sacred books of Memphis, Whatever he learned when he sat at the feet of Moses,  And Hemecus took these teachings with him from Cantabria When he went forth into his own kingdom. From all this arose ‘the wisdom in the mouths of the Caledonian Druids’.15 It is not clear how seriously Melville took the Druids, though they surely would have emerged as proto-Presbyterians had he completed the poem. Undoubtedly, they describe emblematically if not historically the integral association of politics, piety, and learning. Shared governance, social responsibility, self-imposed law, an emphatically British perspective, a reformed and civic spirituality – these commitments were far from exclusively Scottish. Rather, they comprised the shared property of a loose network of intellectuals and politicians throughout the British Isles – and beyond. By the mid-1580s, well before the Armada crisis, such people had begun to call themselves ‘patriots’. When David Hume of Godscroft spoke of the ‘good patriot’ in his dialogue with

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the earl of Angus written in 1586, the term required no explanation. The language of the citizen and the patriot had arisen during the explosive, defining decade 1558–1568, when authority in Scotland, England, France, and the Netherlands became radically destabilized and variously contested. In that context, appeals to fellow countrymen, to the common good, and, literally, to the respublica – now seen as underlying dynasty, region, customs, traditions – became insistent and frequent. Nowhere did such appeals possess greater urgency or desperation than in the fratricidal French wars of religion, and by the mid-1570s Huguenots and Politiques (though not Ligueurs) invoked the duties of ‘bon patriottes et concitoyens’.16 We need not assume that the Anglophone adoption of this vocabulary simply derived from French sources – though there doubtless were powerful interconnections founded on a sense of shared purpose and common ideals – for civic values spoke to immediate needs in all three realms. Prominent figures within the Franco-British civic tradition included individuals well known today: Buchanan and Melville in Scotland, Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser in England, Hubert Languet and Philip du PlessisMornay in France. Significantly, such individuals would be remembered as ‘patriots’, whether or not they were recorded as using the term. Fulke Greville’s Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, written decades after his friend’s death, describes him as the ‘good patriot’ and the ‘wakeful patriot’.17 By the early seventeenth century, the term had come to identify the political tradition. Sixteenth-century ‘patriots’ differ significantly from today’s variety. The former stood out for their internationalism, their opposition to the crown or its policies, and, most remote, the firm conviction, which we encountered in the poems to Walsingham, that the triumph of public life (of ‘pietas’) would entail the growth of literature and learning. All but inevitably people in the civic tradition would welcome the creation of Britain. Its potential advantages to the Reformation and to the struggle against the Hapsburgs could hardly be more obvious. But what would this ‘patriot’ Britain actually look like? Its fullest articulation would be provided by a much less wellknown figure, Melville’s younger associate, Hume of Godscroft. Imagining a civic Britain would prove no easy matter. Not only were England and, to a lesser extent, Scotland massive structures of feudal and ecclesiastical law, supported by powerful dynastic traditions, Britain itself, as a composite monarchy, encouraged notions of Augustan or Constantinian empire rather than of a Ciceronian republic. Moreover, during the 1590s a new authoritarianism manifested itself as the Counter-Reformation penetrated the textures of European culture. Hierarchy and headship assumed a deepening persuasiveness. In previous decades, direct action, public responsibility, concilliar government, all had seemed to possess both cogency and urgency. Now imperial claims had recovered their voice, and the citizen in all three realms became increasingly supplanted by

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the subject, public duty by private right, moral imperatives by legal prescriptions. In Scotland the new ‘absolutism’ manifested itself dramatically after 1596. During those years the literature that gripped the public imagination was not Presbyterian Latin poetry, but royalist vernacular prose, prose written by the most determined royalist of them all, King James VI. In rapid succession, the king produced a series of works – the Daemonologie (1597), The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598), and the Basilikon Doron (1599) – all designed to show that headship and hierarchy were inherent in the structure of nature and prescribed by God. There existed an underlying order in the universe that withstood all mutability, all instability, all contingency, all flux, and certainly all the radicalism of the previous decades. Even the damned and the demonic were subject to reason and nature’s logic – an order that they ‘aped’. Most emphatically, James insisted that he was king through his blood, by nature and right, and not the creation of Scotland’s political revolutions and her citizens. Quite the reverse, kings made law, not the other way around. Arguments to the contrary verged on the blasphemous. The godly emperors and imperial Rome provided the model, and, although he did not mention it in this series of tracts, James also liked to see himself as a latter-day Julius Caesar – the man, after all, who overthrew the great republic.18 The fading of republican and civic ideals before the new political realities accompanied a cultural shift of the first magnitude. The other side of authority would be a new world of private life, of doubt, of introspection. In the last decades of the century emerged a ‘new humanism’, an intellectual environment where one survived the flux of time rather than participating in the course of history, where one endured events rather than enacting them. Its key figures included Michel de Montaigne and Justus Lipsius, who variously reinterpreted and transvalued the political ideals of the Renaissance. Montaigne had insisted ‘that the wise man should withdraw his soul within, out of the crowd    Society in general can do without our thoughts’. ‘Private reason had only private jurisdiction.’19 One could hardly reform and, still less, create a world whose watchword was, ‘que sais-je?’ Lipsius had looked at the struggle for Dutch independence and declared: While the cruel fighting troubles us and the trumpets summon us to civil war, may I (forgive me, my country) dwell free from care in Hauten’s garden, and may my gardening make me forget my sorrows.20 Private withdrawal rather than public endeavor, intimacy rather than participation, was not only sanity but also righteousness. Within this reshaped Stoicism, radical Calvinists could only emerge as destructive – and irreligious – incendiaries. Against this converging conservatism Hume would write his De unione insulae Britannicae, a tract concomitantly reinforced by patriotic Latin poetry.

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The tract comprises the Presbyterian response to the True Law, the patriotic riposte to the Basilikon Doron. Its very writing challenged the new humanism, for Hume the writer was a self-conscious citizen: ‘I don’t want to avoid an opportunity for contributing to the public good’: Neither should I worry too much about who I am or, as a private citizen with no official function in the commonwealth, what I can reasonably contribute    Nor does our country despise any citizen’s service. And this is a shared responsibility and a rare thing in the annals of history.21 His words surely confronted Montaigne, Lipsius, and their increasing followers when he went on to declare against over-valuing what people today like to call meaningful personal relations: Without community of interests there’s no such things as brotherly love or even friendship between one person and another. In my opinion this [public connection] seems to be the most important bond among human beings. Without it friendship cannot exist and probably cannot last where it already exists, which is clearly because it intermingles itself in everything. But there’s no need to belabor the point. It is only necessary to take care that we engage ourselves in a common cause, an achievement towards which a community of interests is properly directed. Nothing else will suffice. Nor will we settle for something less noble and significant.22 There was an unmistakable moral edge to Hume’ claims – which were also a political imperative. Hume seems to have regarded the 1603 regnal union and the prospect of a new Britain as a Machiavellian ‘occasione’, an altogether unique opportunity for immediate, far-reaching political innovation and creativity.23 Quite unlike any other unionist literature of the time, Hume’s writings passionately urged a civic and reformed British commonwealth. But they also went much further. The new commonwealth would fuse England and Scotland into a common society with a common British identity neither English nor Scottish. Scots and Englishmen would become Britons by the creation of public life through which citizens pursued shared social goods and articulated common purposes. Only within such a politicized, quasi-republican world could there ever be an enduring, workable union, and Hume went on in the second part of the De unione to outline in surprising detail the constitutional and political arrangements by which it might be achieved – whose publication would be suppressed, even in France. Only civic ties rather than dynastic loyalty, only the values of the polis rather than of the court, only radical enactments rather than tradition could produce an equitable union, a genuinely British society. No other unionist writing, however

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ardent, at any point approached such sweeping vision. Hume’s determined civisme reaches further than that of any of his predecessors, whether Buchanan in 1567 or Melville in 1590. It would require one great legislative act of almost Sinaitic proportions, and yet one in which the peoples of both realms directly participated. If at moments Hume seemed to cast James in the role of a classical legislator, the king still remained a surprisingly modest figure. No Lycurgus, no Solon, and certainly no Moses, James needed only to give his ‘nod’. Political society would emerge not simply through approbation, but participation. To a surprising extent Britain would be self-created. Hume called for the founding of a new people. His project sought nothing less than to supplant what we today would call Scottish and English ‘identities’. Yet there could hardly have been a greater Scottish patriot. One of the very earliest to adopt that neologism, Hume resisted James VI and I’s intrusion of bishops into Scotland during the first decade of the seventeenth century as English ‘tyranny’. He took great pleasure in speaking ‘Scottish’, the northern kingdom’s Anglophone tongue, while southern speech was simply a dialect and possibly an inferior one at that. To learn the latter amounted to no more than ‘affectation’. Hume even believed, astoundingly, that no form of English had existed in Scotland prior to the thirteenth century and the coming of Edward I. However, none of this in any way qualified his passion for Britain, and Hume is utterly removed from today’s nationalist sensibility, which involves concepts that neither he nor his contemporaries could have understood, much less approved.24 We find not the slightest trace of concern for an imagined Scottish ‘soul’ and any such transcendent categories that would separate Scots from other peoples. Quite the reverse. For Scottish patriotism generated British consciousness and with it the prospect of a reformed and redeemed world. Mission defined peoples, not the other way around, and mission could only be universal. Hard as it might be for us to imagine today, no one disputed ‘conformity to England’. The real issue for Scotland – for the world – was which England would it be. It will not surprise us that Hume anticipated a British Council and a British parliament. The great offices of state would be jointly held by an Englishman and a Scot – in a way almost sounding the consuls of classical Rome. More arresting is his plan to create powerful regional councils based in Lancaster, at York, London, Edinburgh, and perhaps Aberdeen. Quite unlike late twentieth-century devolution – quite unlike anything projected by Jim Callahan or Tony Blair – the new councils would be British as well as regional, their purpose civic rather than ethnic, their concern participation and integration rather than localism and identity. One fifth of the membership of each council would be drawn from the other country. Moreover, the new provinces governed from Edinburgh and Carlisle would straddle the old border. There would also be a new British order of knighthood, in

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fact the Order of the Garter now transformed into a British organization for British purposes. Its membership would be drawn from those whose commitment to Britain and specifically British public service had proven outstanding. Members of the British Council of State would be excluded, thereby encouraging the provincial elites – and, presumably, those serving on the new regional councils. These guardians of the new Britain clearly received their recognition for efforts on behalf of the community rather than simply or perhaps even mainly on behalf of the ruling dynasty. These would be public knights, and hence altogether atypical ones, whose title derived manifestly from merit. Hume even wanted to establish a set of British prayers, but these would be civil prayers, a kind of social liturgy that sounds something like the modern pledge of allegiance. Less happily, Hume also sought to institute a system of fines for ethnic slurs, an arrangement that, distressingly, seems to anticipate today’s politically correct speech codes. By far the most contentious issue – then and now – would be the creation of a British church. Here Hume’s views were emphatic: a civic Britain would be a reformed Britain, and that meant a non-hierarchical church, a Presbyterian church like the one that existed in Scotland. Naturally enough, the creation of such a church itself needed to be a British undertaking. A great council would convene to decide the British church polity through ‘frank, friendly, and unrestricted’ discussions. Where disagreements arose, ‘the best foreign churches shall be consulted’ – a striking anticipation of the 1640s Westminster Assembly. Once agreement was reached, the ‘great Council of Britannia’ (it is not clear whether the ‘consilium’ is the British Council of State or the British Parliament) would make the final decision. Hume had no doubt but that honest consideration would lead to a church of councils rather than of bishops, one with fully reformed liturgy, ceremonies, vestments. For here was something, Hume insisted, that most of the British people truly wanted, overwhelming in Scotland and a majority in England – and ‘not just among the puritans’: There are by no means few conscientious and faithful English churchmen who think as we do, and more will do so if they are allowed to speak freely. Now they tolerate their own discipline to a greater extent than they approve it, even some of the highest rank.25 The English population in general was far from enthusiastic for the southern ceremonies. ‘Given their freedom by the king to say what they really believe, how many [Englishmen], do you think would wish to make use of them?’ Hume’s question answered itself. ‘So it seems sufficiently clear that these rituals derive their standing not from popular choice and common consent, but rather simply on the basis of royal authority.’ Ultimately, Hume insisted,

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‘the large majority of the people living on this island’ endorsed a truly reformed church. The great obstacle not only to a British church but also to a united Britain turned out to be nothing other than the obstinacy of James Stewart himself. More than anyone else the king was sinking Great Britain. Here lay no small irony. In a remarkable change of tone and moment of candor, Hume declared that these corrupting ceremonies were things ‘which he [ James] may insist on regardless of the disturbance to the church, even to the point of popular indignation, which he wishes to keep even to the hindering of the union’. It became a stark case of popular will versus royal decree. Speaking directly to the Basilikon Doron, Hume went on: So, like a good parent, give way to the people. Be an indulgent prince and truly a leader, and make the best of things even if you think them epidemic diseases. The lesser evil, if it be so, is yielding to what most people want. And so don’t hesitate to favor the people’s feelings.    Isn’t this better than swimming against the tide or contending against popular opposition?    It’s a discreet course in public affairs to contend for one’s own cause only to the extent of trying to persuade one’s fellow citizens. And isn’t this one of the rules of prudence as well?26 For most people the issue would resolve itself if only the king would ‘slacken his resolve’ for hierarchy and ceremonies, and, instead, consent to open discussion. True, James undoubtedly could compel obedience, Hume admitted, but wouldn’t that defeat his very objective of union? In the end, Hume intimated (though did not say), unpopular policies upheld through compulsion would subvert royal authority. Government required consent simply to be effective, as Buchanan would surely have agreed. But the real issue lay elsewhere. A British union required a British public spirit, and that required a sense of common purpose and shared objectives, something that dynasty alone could never create. Hume even addressed the English bishops. Giving up their rights and ecclesiastical prerogatives would not cost them their dignity. Rather the opposite, they would gain public esteem and be remembered in times to come for what they achieved for God, church, and king. Hume comes perilously close to suggesting that as good citizens they really ought to consider stepping down – an argument he would subsequently develop in his struggle against the Scottish bishops that James later introduced. The king’s conservatism, Hume insisted, would eventually subvert the very union he sought, for its royalist foundations were misconceived. In retrospect, Hume may turn out to have been right. Even so, the prospects for the British era were truly enormous, and Hume’s enthusiasm for them is difficult to exaggerate. Spiritual and political transformation carried with it far-reaching cultural consequences. In the new Britain men will ‘move over to the camp of the Muses’. That, however,

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by no means implied that they withdrew from public life. Just the reverse. They would not do so ‘as baseborn knaves, nor as cowards    but as soldiers ready to do battle henceforth on a different ground, and with a different expense’.27 Learning necessarily comprised a civic activity. The struggle against the Counter-Reformation and the Hapsburgs would not be decided simply on the battlefield but also within the realm of letters. Men who, as fighters in the wars between England and Scotland, had formerly worked against the good of this island would now strive for the common interest. These opportunities apparently extended to just about everyone. The conclusions seem not only civic, but extraordinarily meritocractic and populist when Hume declares: ‘We don’t want men of this kind [of learning and letters] to be as rare as in former times, but to be numerous, indeed to be the entirety of the population.’28 After all, so many achievements seemed to result simply from education. ‘Nor do I doubt that there were some of small or no name who, given the same chance in life and the same education, could have equaled or surpassed’ even the greatest names.29 The implications were emphatically activist: Let not our native land stand in the way of anyone’s ambition. Whoever you are, do not be lacking in yourself, and she [Britannia] will not be lacking to you.30 Familiar ways of thinking crumbled; traditional postures became untenable. The old excuses simply would not do: Nor will there be any person complaining that his native land will stand in the way of his virtue which, if I am not mistaken, was the excuse we used to hear from people born in Scotland.31 Buchanan had indeed become universalized. Now the opening remarks to the De jure regni became articulated, elaborated, and, seemingly, realizable. Hume never imagined a democracy. He could not have conceived a modern world of social mobility. But he did insist on the largest possible levels of social participation and citizen involvement. And that world demanded learning on a similarly extensive scale. To be sure, in the new Britain Scots would attend Oxford and Cambridge, and Englishmen would attend the Scottish universities. Few things did more to generate a sense of closeness and society, Hume noted, than warm memories of college days and of friendships formed during the college years. At the other end of the spectrum lay the Highlands and the Isles. Hume was quick to point out that these regions did not distinguish Scotland from other countries. Did not all nations have their primitive regions, their mountain men? ‘The Alps, the Pyrenees, the Apennines, the Caucasus, and the like; that is,

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Italy, France, Spain, Asia Minor, etc.’, how did they differ from Scotland and her mountains?32 Nothing need condemn any individual, any nation. No place on earth need be blighted. What was needed was the right institutions and the right determination. Paraphrasing Horace, Hume added what in sum do we find? That mental ability is lacking to us? Or to this clime, or this earth? Or is there anything so wild that it cannot become tame, and, if you train it, that cannot take on a civilized way of life?33 Hume’s solution to the Highland problem will be grossly offensive to today’s romantic and nationalist sensibility. He proposed the establishment of English settlements at Lochaber and in the Isles. Later lowland Scots would join them, and intermarriage between these two groups would feature high on Hume’s agenda.34 Why in the world did Hume want English people in the Scottish Isles and in the most intractable region of the mainland? Britain was to be one country, one people. Ethnic identity was not something to be invented, savored, and defined by its (putative) victimhood, but to be overcome for higher, shared purposes and common humanity – very much in ways that anticipate the European Enlightenment. His view is profoundly anti-racist in the sense that it vehemently denied the significance of any such category. Much the same principles informed Hume’s proposed colonial administration. English settlements in the most remote areas of Scotland would cause English people everywhere to own these regions as part of their country and part of their responsibility. Such settlements, whether English or lowland Scottish, would not seek to overawe the local inhabitants, but to provide a model: Let’s see the inhabitants there put aside their ill-will by slow degrees, their uncivilized way of life by the example [of the settlers], and little by little take on the aspect of humanity.35 Adopting the aspect of humanity can only have meant joining the highest form of human association, becoming a citizen. Perhaps the most striking consequence of Hume’s daring commitment to the power of education was its egalitarianism and its uncompromising opposition to any kind of discrimination based on blood or regional origins. Hume’s words on the matter are arresting: I do not disparage the individual of any people whatsoever. I would wish that others would refrain from extolling themselves too much and from denigrating those who are different from them. Mindful of justice and humanity, let all, one with another, strive in moderation.36

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Hume had in mind Scottish and English people with this comment, but his principles were unquestionably universal. What mattered was one’s participation in public decision-taking, and the most important decision of the moment was the creation of Britain itself. Civic involvement, even when wrongheaded, might yet have a positive effect and was a matter of consequence: Nor would I deem any man so inept that he could never come up with good advice, or with things worth our attention. At the very least, a public discussion would clarify the issues. Whoever would wish at some time to declare his opinion would have the opportunity and, by comparing his own [opinion] with those of many others (whether they were the same or otherwise), produce thereby something more carefully worked out. He would then either correct or corroborate what he wants to say. There’s no such thing as excessive diligence here, no consideration of the subject by one and all that can be too free and uninhibited. The creation of the union pertains to everyone, and whatever we devise will last for all time to come. There’s no need for secrecy. The union, a worthy thing in itself, does not require that.37 It is hard not to hear the voice of the Enlightenment in these remarks. Anticipations of Enlightenment attitudes appear prominently in the sixteenth-century civic tradition, and notably in Hume’s writings, in still other ways: the emphatic rejection of universal monarchy, whether papal, or Hapsburg, or Ottoman. As early as 1550 Buchanan had become convinced that the great Iberian empires were incompatible with civic life and thus human purpose. For Buchanan the founders and defenders of republics were history’s great men, their subverters and enemies, its greatest villains. The legendary Codrus (who sacrificed himself to establish the Athenian republic) found his anti-type in Sulla and Caesar. It will not surprise us that Buchanan held the great enemies of the polis – Xerxes, Philip of Macedonia, Alexander the Great – in utter contempt, nor that he poured out vast venom on the Roman emperors. Empire could only be a spiritual and political catastrophe. The struggle against empire, and specifically the Hapsburg colossus, could only be undertaken through leagues, alliances, or confederations of ‘free’ (i.e. civic) societies. Perhaps surprisingly, English and Scottish ‘plantations’ in the later sixteenth and earlier seventeenth century – whether within the British Isles, or in Poland-Lithuania, or in Sweden, or in the New World – were imagined as little commonwealths and, no less important, as outposts in the struggle against empire.38 Philip Sidney’s West Indian project, apparently envisioned at one point as a joint Anglo-Dutch undertaking, sought to disrupt the flow of treasure to Madrid and also to be ‘an Emporium for the confluence of all nations that love or profess any kinde of vertue or commerce’. It formed part of the larger purpose: to achieve ‘a well balanced treaty of universal peace, [to] restore and keep the world within her

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old equilibrium or bounds’. Edmund Spenser’s view of the settlements in Ireland was similarly civic and, pace Irish nationalist historiography, similarly anti-imperial.39 Andrew Melville celebrated the birth of Prince Henry in 1594 with a poem that looked to his leading a united Britain, whose ‘ScotoBritannic champions’ would turn the tide in the desperate war against Spain and its papal ally. The struggle would be conducted ‘in company with the Lémain, with the Rhone, the Seine, and the Garonne’, ‘confederated’ with the Danes, and indeed the Protestant world. As a result, the prince, ‘dear to heaven and dear to his fellow citizens, under God’, would rejoice ‘to have buried the insolent spirit of empire in its tomb’.40 Vocabularies of sacralized confederation developed in the 1590s – Melville himself played a significant role in this process – and these vocabularies soon became common property to Calvinist communities during the first half of the seventeenth century, literally from Transylvania to New England. Hume’s radical Britain would commit itself to a foreign policy at once expansive and collaborative, apocalyptic and liberating. The De unione spoke briefly at the end about the new British state leading the way against Spain, the papacy, and the Turk to create a new and apparently final world order. In poetry written at the same time, the Daphn’Amaryllis, Hume indicated that such liberation from political and spiritual tyranny would be the work of a range of European leaders. If radical Britain would be a highly aggressive state, it would also join with more than simply the Protestant world, perhaps even with liberal Catholics like Rudolf II (despite his Hapsburg origins), but outstandingly with Henri IV and France. Hume projected a revived auld alliance, now ‘a firm confederation’, and now based on new, reforming, and anti-imperial principles.41 ‘May all Britannia, all Gaul, have sight of this.’ Radical Britain implied nothing less than a reborn world, radicalism in international relations no less than at home. We may detect the voice of the eighteenth century within the FrancoBritish civic tradition. We are not, however, hearing the voice of the immediate future. The increasingly authoritarian world of James I, Henri IV, and Philip III lay ahead. The attempt to publish the second part of Hume’s De Unione at Bordeaux in 1610 coincides with years that saw repeated editions of Spenser’s works, a revised version of Greville’s drama, Mustapha, and, it seems, the years when Greville drafted his Life of Sidney. All these undertakings probably should be viewed as part of a more general effort to promote the ‘patriot’ cause in the run-up to the founding of Prince Henry’s court in 1611. But Hume’s tract would be stopped in the press, Greville’s Sidney went unpublished, and the unexpected death of the prince pushed Britain toward continental cultural and political royalism. Neither civic Britain, nor the politics of universal liberation, nor the cultural flowering in fact took place. Hume represents the culmination and final expression of Scottish Renaissance values, with its commitment to Britain, with its confidence in the citizen, in public discourse, and in the transforming power of political life for the whole of humankind.

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Notes 1. ‘On Foundations’, in the Encyclopédie, in K. M. Baker (ed.), The Old Regime and the French Revolution (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), p. 94. 2. J. Bain (ed.), Hamilton Papers (Edinburgh, 1892), vol. 2, pp. 694–5, 697; David Calderwood, History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson (Edinburgh, 1842–1849), vol. 4, p. 366; D. Laing (ed.), Wodrow Society Miscellany (Edinburgh, 1844), vol. 1, pp. 449–52; G. Donaldson, ‘Scottish Presbyterian Exiles in England, 1584–8’, in Donaldson (ed.), Scottish Church History (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Papers, 1985), pp. 178–90; P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), pp. 27–8; M. W. Wallace, The Life of Sir Philip Sidney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), pp. 320–2. 3. David Hume, Poemata omnia (Paris, 1639), pp. 72–3 (Third Part, ‘Lusus poetici’, paginated separately). My thanks to Paul McGinnis for translating these two poems.

Ad Franciscum Walsingamum Musarum cultor, verae pietatis amator: Praesidium, portus, dulce patrocinium. Quid tibi te, et tanta dignum pietate presemur? Quae fuerint meritis consona vota tuis?           Pieriasque colas cura potiore caemaenas: Pieriis et sis tu quoque cura deis. Quaeque manet, maneat; seros et perstet in annos Grata tibi pietas; et pietatis amor. Ad Eundem Quis te non patrio colat, atque obseruet amore, Cui gratae Musae, grataque relligio? Certe ego ni patrioque colam, et te amplectar amore, Dum tibi erunt Musae charaque relligio. Tunc me nec dignum fatear sacrisue carmaenis; Nec qui sincera relligione fruar. [Who is there that does not honor you and respect you with the same love he would have for a father (with the double meaning of ‘patron’)? / Anyone to whom the Muses and religion are dear? / Surely unless I shall honor you and embrace you with the affection due a father, / Considering that the Muses and religion are dear to you, / Then let me confess myself unworthy the sacred verse, / Nor let me enjoy sincere religion.]

4. For an analysis of the larger context of what was a Franco-British tradition, see A. H. Williamson, ‘An Empire to End Empire: The Dynamic of Early Modern British Expansion’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 68 (2005), pp. 227–56; A. H. Williamson, ‘Scotland the Rise of Civic Culture, 1550–1650’, History Compass, 3 (2005), pp. 1–33 (an electronic journal produced by Blackwell Publishing: http://www.blackwellcompass.com/).

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5. P. J. McGinnis and A. H. Williamson (eds), George Buchanan The Political Poetry (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 2000), Introduction; McGinnis and Williamson (eds), The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 1–9; R. A. Mason, ‘People Power? George Buchanan on Resistance and the Common Man’, in R. von Friedeburg (ed.), Widerstandsrecht in der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2001), pp. 163–81. Earlier revisionist views of Buchanan that minimized his radicalism and belittled his significance are today discounted. For an example of such an earlier conservative reading, see Mason, ‘Rex Stoicus: George Buchanan, James VI, and the Scottish Polity’, in John Dwyer et al. (eds), New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 9–33. 6. A. H. Williamson, ‘Scots, Indians, and Empire: the Scottish Politics of Civilization, 1519–1609’, Past and Present, 150 (February), 46–83. The fashionable ‘postcolonial’ reading, proposed notably by Edward Said, wherein the aborigine is demonized in order to legitimate conquest, simply will not work for Scotland. It probably will not work for Ireland either. A recent instance of this lachrymose approach is provided by Clare Carroll, Circe’s Cup: Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Writing about Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001). Regarding France and England, see for example Michael Wintroub, ‘Civilizing the Savage and Making a King: The Royal Entry Festival of Henri II (Rouen, 1550)’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 29.2 (1998), 465–94, and esp. 473, 491; Z. S. Fink, ‘Milton and the Theory of Climatic Influence’, Modern Language Quarterly, 2 (1941), 67–80. 7. Buchanan, De jure regni apud Scotos: dialogus (Edinburgh, 1579), sig. A3r –A3v ; The Art and Science of Government among the Scots (De jure regni apud Scotos: dialogus), trans. by D. H. MacNeill ([Glasgow], 1964), p. 15; The Powers of the Crown of Scotland (De jure regni apud Scotos: dialogus), trans. C. F. Arrowood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1949), p. 39. Roger Mason has just produced the authoritative edition of this work, A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots: A Critical Edition and Translation of George Buchanan’s De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 5. I am grateful to Dr Mason for sharing his manuscript translation with me in advance of publication. 8. Buchanan, History of Scotland (Rerum Scoticarum Historia), 4 vols, trans. James Aikman (Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1827–1829), vol. 1, p. 9; McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Buchanan, pp. 150 (50/3), 116 (35/3), 274 (Appendix B7), 316; De jure regni, sig. A3r . 9. For a fuller discussion of this literary context, see A. H. Williamson, ‘Education, Culture, and the Scottish Civic Tradition’, in A. I. Macinnes and A. H. Williamson (eds), Shaping the Stuart World (1603–1714): The Atlantic Connection (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 33–54. Also see R. A. Mason, ‘George Buchanan’s vernacular polemics, 1570–1572’, Innes Review, 54.1 (2003), 47–68; Mark Loughlin, ‘ “The Dialogue of the Twa Wyfeis”: Maitland, Machiavelli, and the Propaganda of the Scottish Civil War’, in A. A. MacDonald et al. (eds), The Renaissance in Scotland (Leiden: Brill, 1994), pp. 226–45. 10. McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Buchanan, pp. 4–7; Mason, A Dialogue, esp. pp. l–li, lxi–lxiii; R. A. Mason, ‘People Power?’ 11. Perhaps the most egregious is Jenny Wormald, who dismisses Melville and his associates as ‘bullies and thugs’. Wormald, ‘Godly Reformer, Godless Monarch: Knox and Mary Queen of Scots’, in R. A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British

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12.

13. 14.

15.

Radical Britain Reformations (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), p. 223. One wonders if the revisionists have actually read him. TEANIKION. Ad Regem, habitum in corononatione reginae (Edinburgh, 1590), sig. A4r , A4y , A1v . ‘Quam magis haud cogi in regno, optandum atque beatum, / Tam magis haud suaderi etiam miserum et fugiendum.’ The lines are starred. My thanks to Paul McGinnis for translating this poem. Cf. A. H. Williamson, ‘Unnatural Empire: George Buchanan, Anti-Imperialism, and the SixteenthCentury Syphilis Pandemic’, in D. S. Katz et al. (eds), Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 337–57. McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Buchanan, pp. 284–97, 329–32. These traditions were widely shared property. In 1619 the Dominican Richard Bermingham made use of the same materials at the court of Philip III to purposes quite opposite Melville’s. Noted in J. N. Hillgarth’s egregious apologia for early modern Spain, The Mirror of Spain, 1500–1700: The Formation of a Myth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 414. Hiber’s anticipation of the Iberian empire is unmistakable: And now dire Hiber thirsting for gold, And hungrier than Orcus, seizes all things by waging unbridled war. He slaughters great numbers of people and overturns kingdoms, More savage than all others. (p. 296)

16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

These lines echo a section from George Buchanan’s famous critique of the Portuguese Empire in his De Sphaera (McGinnis and Williamson [eds], Buchanan, p. 189). Discussed at greater length in Williamson, ‘The Patriot Cause’. For example, The Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, ed. N. C. Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), p. 87. For an important overview, see Ronald Knowles, ‘The “All-Attoning Name”: The Word Patriot in the Seventeenth Century’, The Modern Language Review, 96 (2001), 624–43. Cf. Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History, 1509–1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 209. See Paulina Kewes, ‘Julius Caesar in Jacobean England’, The Seventeenth Century, 27.2 (2002), 155–86. ‘Of Custom’, in D. Frame, ed. and trans., The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), pp. 86, 88. Cited by D. Allan, Philosophy and Politics in Later Stuart Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2000), pp. 13–14. More generally, see R. Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), preface, chapters one through three. McGinnis and Williamson (eds), The British Union, p. 59. ‘Nec illud, putem, nimis anxie cogitandum mihi est, qui sim aut quid possim; privatus nempe nulla in Reip. parte;    nec patria, ullam ullius ciuis operam aspernatur. Et est commune hoc opus; et rarum ab orbis conditu.’ This ‘shared responsibility’ is historically rare because societies like the Scottish commonwealth rarely occurred in history. Significantly his Latin phrase echoes Livy. Ibid., pp. 260–3. ‘Certe non frater fratris, non quisquam cuiusquam tam amans est, nisi etiam socius idem sit. Unde mihi res accuratius expendenti primum hoc

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23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36.

37.

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iter mortales vinculum videtur; ut sine quo non constet ulla amicitia, et forte nec constare possit: quippe quod omnibus se immisceat, ut omnia percurras. Sed non ago subtilius, nec dilatare rem opus, quae quotidiana experientia sic constat. Hoc tantum hic curandum, ut in bono fcinore sit, cuius solius honesta societas est, et societas dicenda; aliae conspirationes potius. Sed et in magno et digno:’ Ibid., pp. 59, 91, 277, 293ff, and passim. A. H. Williamson, ‘Patterns of British Identity: “Britain” and its Rivals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Glenn Burgess (ed.), The New British History: Founding a Modern State, 1603–1715 (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1999), pp. 138–73. McGinnis and Williamson (eds), The British Union, pp. 243, 237. ‘Illud quod Anglorum non pauci quorum sedula et fideli opera ea ecclesia usa est, nobiscum sentiunt, pluresque sentient, si libere profiteri detur. Nunc suam magis rolerant, quam probant; forte et ex iis qui in excelsissimo gradu sunt.’ The material cited in this paragraph and the next comes from chapter 13 (pp. 224–49). The Latin text will be provided only for the longer passages. Ibid., p. 247. ‘Indulge populo Parens, Princeps, Politice tolera vel morbos Epidemicos; certe errores leviores, si quidem errores sunt. Affectibus vero non vitiosissimis etiam fave.    Nonne hoc melius quam oniti fluminis alveo, aut cum adverso luctari, ut superandi spes sit?    Est inter Modestiae regulas, tantum quemque in Patria sua contendere, quantum persuadere possit civibus suis. Sed annon etiam inter Prudentiae regulas est?’ Ibid., p. 87. ‘Vix ipsa literas Pallas amaverit: certe vix iis vacaverit. Iacebit ipsa in Graecia neglecta eruditio; ut minus mirum si hic non plurima sit; et ideo rudiores videamur.’ Ibid., p. 89. Italics added. ‘Non raros, ut olim; sed frequentes, sed universos:’ Ibid., p. 83. ‘Nec dubitem fuisse quosdam aut parvi, aut nullius nominis, quibus si eadem sors, ac educatio accessisset, aut aequare illorum quemvis, aut superare potuissent.’ Ibid., p. 93. ‘nec quenquam patria impediat, quo minus aliquo in loco sit. Tu quisquis es, tibi ne desis, illa non defuerit.’ Ibid., p. 125. ‘nec quisquam queretur obstare virtuti patriam; quae vetus fuit, aut fallor, nostratum querela.’ Ibid., p. 81. ‘Et quae gens non aliquos gignit? Alpes, Pirenaei, Appenninus, Caucasus, et similia: id est Italia, Gallia, Hispania, Asia, &c. hinc culpam in gentem derivari, quod minime omnium aequum videtur.’ Ibid., p. 83. ‘   quas tandem inveniemus? An ingenium nobis deesse? An huic caelo? An solo? Aut esse quicquam tam ferum, quod non possit mitescere, et si tractes, cutum sumere?’ Cf. Horace, Epistles, I, 39–40. McGinnis and Williamson (eds), The British Union, p. 217. Ibid., p. 223. ‘Sentiat ipsa Barbaries ejus vim et dulcedinem, et se mirari desinat ac amare; exuantque et illinc Incolae consuetudine odium; exemplis feritatem; et humanitatem paulatim induant.’ Ibid., p. 83; cf. p. 285. ‘non cuiquam gentium detrecto; vellem nec se alii nimis efferrent; nec nimis aliis detrectarent. Omnesque cum omnibus, recti et humanitatis memores, modestia potius certaremus.’ Ibid., p. 309. ‘nec tam ineptum fastidierim, ut non putarim posse in apta incidere, et commodum admonere. Sic saltem ventilata res nitesceret, et qui sententiam olim dicturus sit, haberet multorum collatione seu idem, seu aliter sentientium, quod maturius promeret, se aut corrigens aut confirmans. Nulla enim hic nimia

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38.

39.

40. 41.

Radical Britain diligentia, nulla nimis aperta rei consideratio ab omnibus, quae ad omnes pertinet, in omne aevum duratura. Nec celari quicquam opus: non id res postulat per se honesta;’ McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Buchanan, pp. 11–31, 58–101. Williamson, ‘An Empire to End Empire: Empire and Anti-Empire in the Dynamic of Early Modern British Expansion’, pp. 235–54. A. I. Macinnes, ‘Making the Plantations British, 1603–38’, in Steven G. Ellis and Raingard Esser eds, Frontiers in History and Historiography, 1500–1850 (Wehrhahn Verlag, Laatzen, 2006) in press. My thanks to Professor Macinnes for making his manuscript available to me prior to publication. Life, pp. 86–7, 107, 117–19; Roger Kuin, ‘Querre-Muhau: Sir Philip Sidney and the New World’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1998), 549–85; P. J. Macinnes and A. H. Williamson, ‘Britain, Race, and the Iberian World Empire’, in A. I. Macinnes and J. Ohlmeyer (eds), The Stuart Kingdoms in the Seventeenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 62–93. McGinnis and Williamson (eds), Buchanan, pp. 278–81. Hume, Daphn’Amaryllis (London, 1605), pp. 10–15, esp. pp. 14–15.

5 The Happier Marriage Partner: The Impact of the Union of the Crowns on Scotland Jenny Wormald

The union of the crowns was a huge event. It changed the course of English and Scottish history. It raised enormous new problems about the relationship between the two kingdoms, no longer separate and independent entities but somehow, however badly defined – from then until now – brought together under one king, now ruling from London, and, a century later, one parliament, until in the late twentieth century there was another constitutional shift. Scotland’s destiny now lay with England, and it has almost come to be assumed that there was a kind of historical inevitability that this should be so, particularly when both England and Scotland became Protestant countries, just as there was a historical inevitability that Scotland would be very much the junior partner. Well, perhaps. What is striking, however, is that such an approach simply does not fit Scotland in the first years of union, the reign of James VI. It would be going much too far to say that it might almost not have happened, but it is certainly arguable that the fact that it had happened had far less impact than might have been expected. How does a kingdom keep going without a king? That was the question which dramatically challenged the Scots in 1603, when James VI succeeded to the English throne, and departed for London, less speedily than the English would have expected, more quickly than the Scots would have wished. And as is famously known, he broke his promise to return to Scotland every three years, returning only for a few months in 1617. Like Philip II who stuck to Madrid for almost the whole of his reign, apart from his sojourn in Lisbon when he took over the Portuguese throne, so with James. From London he ruled his three kingdoms. He never went to Ireland, although as no king of England since Richard II had done so the Irish can hardly have expected anything different. Nor did he visit the Principality of Wales, although again no king of England had gone anywhere near Wales since Henry IV appeared on the Welsh border, in his case – unlike Richard – to put 69

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down a rising, the Glyn Dowr rebellion. Scotland was very different. James’s ancient kingdom, as it described itself to the king after 1603, lost its adult and successful monarch in 1603, and virtually never saw him again. From the English point of view, it was entirely natural that the Scottish monarchy should relocate itself; who would not, when offered London rather than Edinburgh? That is a very obvious way to formulate the problem of the impact of the Union. But is it the correct one? That depends on the nature of the Scottish kingdom when James apparently deserted it for the bigger prize of the throne of England in 1603. Another way of looking at Scotland is to say that in this age of composite monarchies there was no European kingdom better equipped than Scotland to survive without the presence of an effective king. It had done so intermittently for two centuries, and can therefore be regarded as having plenty of practice. The fifteenth-century minorities beginning in 1406 had left it without an adult king for a total of thirty-eight years. The sixteenth century was even worse. By the time James emerged from his own minority, in the mid-1580s, there had been fifty-two years of minority, and to that one can add in the six wholly ineffective years of the rule of Mary Queen of Scots. Moreover, Mary’s minority (1542–1561) – the period of intense religious and diplomatic upheaval – posed problems far greater than those experienced in any previous minority, arguably greater than in the minority of James, and certainly greater than those which faced Scotland with its absentee monarch after the Union of the Crowns. For these two decades witnessed the stalemate between Catholics and reformers until the sudden and rapid lurch towards Protestantism in 1559–1560. They also witnessed the first, if premature and short-lived, stirrings of the idea of Great Britain – Arthur Williamson’s ‘Edwardian moment’.1 ‘Great Britain’ would lie dormant for almost another sixty years. But there was, for the first time since the late thirteenth century, a move towards friendship with England, begun by the embattled Protestant lords in the late 1550s and necessarily developed after their success in 1560. It would be simplistic to regard this as a switch from the Auld Alliance with France to a new alliance with the ‘auld inemie’ England. What it did was to represent something of a shift in the balance of Scottish foreign relations, because of the triumph of the Scottish Protestants. The ‘Amity’ with England replaced the ‘Auld Alliance’ as the diplomatic theme of the moment, even if that amity never ran very deep; indeed, it is important not to overstate the shift, and assume that Scotland was now firmly tied to England, for that leaves out of the reckoning Scotland’s strong and long-standing sense of being a European kingdom, which would survive the union of 1603 and underpin tensions between English and Scottish foreign interests as late as the early eighteenth century. James’s own minority was far from easy, thanks to the consequences of the deposition of his mother in 1567 and the establishment of the reformed kirk, but at least the general way forward was becoming clear as it had not been in

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the 1540s and 1550s; there would be no successful Counter-Reformation, no going back on the fact that mainland Britain now contained two Protestant kingdoms. And the same can be said of his absentee kingship, 1603–1625. In fact, absentee kingship had one great advantage over minority. The king might be remote, but he was there; there was no need for the complicating factor, with all its potential for factional fighting at the centre, of a regent. Moreover, well before 1603 the nature of Scottish government and the attitudes of those who governed were visibly developing away from the unusual level of local autonomy and long tradition of magnates coping in the absence of kings, arising from the staggering record of minority government, which had inevitably produced an unusual balance between the crown and the ruling élite. Endless interruptions made it impossible for the crown to build up a centralising authority. That does not, of course, mean absence of royal authority in Scotland, but rather a different and increasingly out-of-line kind of authority from that aspired to by other early-modern monarchs. Equally it meant that not only local power but, faute de mieux, royal power was exercised by the king’s relatives and members of the nobility; indeed, given the paucity of immediate royal relatives, one might as well just say members of the nobility. And there was another factor: that centralising force, warfare, was virtually absent from Scotland in the fifteenth century and even in the sixteenth, apart from James IV’s tragic adherence to the Auld Alliance which led him to war with England and the disaster at Flodden in 1513, and the violent and bloody but mercifully short English Rough Wooing which added to the problems and tensions of the 1540s. The survival of a comparatively high level of local autonomy, the long tradition of magnates coping in the absence of kings, made Scotland a kingdom exceptionally able to cope with the problems of absentee kingship. To this was to be added a further strength. From the 1560s, despite the vicissitudes of the monarchy, the central institutions of government, parliament and privy council, were markedly increasing their power and competence, and the tentacles of central government were reaching out into the localities to an unprecedented extent.2 Arguably the first signs of closer contact between centre and locality came in the ecclesiastical sphere, with the courts of the reformed kirk, from the national General Assembly down to the parochial kirk session; local communities were having their first taste of strenuous intervention from higher authority. It was a fundamental shift in perception, which was paralleled in the secular world by, for example, the use of local commissions of the privy council and the introduction in 1579 of justices of the peace; the latter was a novelty which would become firmly established only after 1603, and even then with resistance, but the very idea of it is indicative of a new approach to governing Scotland. There was an explosion in the amount of parliamentary legislation; efforts were made to rationalize and codify the jumble that was Scots law; and private justice

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began to give way to public, exemplified in the emergence of the king’s advocate as a public prosecutor and the decline of the long-established justice of the feud.3 This rapid attempt to sum up in a paragraph the striking changes in government cannot of course do it justice, and makes it sound too neat. What it was certainly not about was the desire of James VI to curb the power of the hereditary and overmighty aristocracy, that mythical beast so beloved of older generations of Scottish historians, and indeed English ones. The king himself seems to have seen advantages in more traditional ways of doing things. It was he who, despite some pretty heavy criticism of them, still described the nobles in Basilikon Doron as ‘the armes and executers of your (the prince’s) lawes’; he who was as least as much interested in who would keep the peace in Perthshire when the earl of Atholl died in 1595 as in the faction-fighting at court over the successor to his chancellor, John Maitland of Thirlestane; he who saw some value in that traditional form of agreement between nobles and lairds, bonds of manrent and maintenance, and in the justice of the feud with its use of arbitration, when it was coming under attack from the reformed kirk and the legal profession.4 Unlike modern historians, King James appears to have seen no reason to be frightened of the early-modern Scottish aristocracy. A strong Stewart king – any strong Stewart king – could deal successfully with individual rogue elephants, in James VI’s case men like the earls of Gowrie, Bothwell and Huntly. The king’s approach, then, was more conservative than that of some of his leading servants. Moreover, he had considerably less taste than they for the new level of paperwork and bureaucracy, about which he complained throughout his life. His excuse for his hunting trips was the need to get away from both, for the sake of his health. There was no doubt something in this; but it also appears that, although he was capable of sustained bursts of hard work, he was considerably lazier than his officials. The impetus for change came rather from increasingly literate lairds, from the reign of James V beginning to carve their way up in that former preserve of clerics, the king’s government, and the increasingly professionalized lawyers. As in sixteenth-century England, so in sixteenth-century Scotland, growing numbers of educated and literate lords and lairds were moving out of their localities into the highest circles of court and government; and the act of 1584 asserting that ministers should not serve the state in judicial matters further opened up opportunities for them.5 But there was one important difference from England. The lairds were not separated off from the aristocracy. Etymologically, ‘laird’ means lord. They were not gentry; they were the minor landed aristocracy.6 There was no real equivalent to a man like William Cecil, whose glittering career and rise into the ranks of the landed peerage depended entirely on royal service. His Scottish counterparts, William Maitland of Lethington, secretary to Mary Queen of Scots, and his younger brother John Maitland of Thirlestane, secretary and chancellor to

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James VI, the sons of the poet and privy councillor Richard Maitland of Lethington, were prominent local lairds. Of all James’s servants, only John Maitland notably incurred a level of hostility which went beyond factional politics; that ‘puddock-stool of a night’, as Bothwell called him, rising to prominence as James was emerging from his minority, achieved a degree of political power which was unacceptable to his social superiors.7 More generally, James’s government was, and remained after 1603, government by the greater and lesser aristocracy; the difference from the past was that it was ambitious lairds and lawyers who now took over the donkey-work of government which the greater nobility had never regarded as their role, and all that changed was that the king’s absence put a greater burden on a few dedicated souls, Dunbar, Dunfermline and Melrose. What this all amounts to is that the Scotland whose king went to England in 1603 could draw on both a royal government which was more interventionist, more organized, and more aspirational in its aims, and a tradition which had enabled it to be a successful kingdom in exceptional circumstances. It was a very effective mix. So what about the men who would have to cope with the government of Scotland after the king went to England? What would make the difference after 1603 was that an absentee monarch, well aware of the need of the Scottish crown to rely on the aristocracy, would raise to the peerage the lairds who, in the course of the sixteenth century, had begun to carve out a place for themselves in royal government, in James’s reign men like George Hume of Spott, Alexander Seton of Fyvie, the lord advocate Thomas Hamilton; men, in other words, who had muscled in on a world previously dominated by the pre-reformation clergy. Nine such people were ennobled in 1604–1605, Hume becoming earl of Dunbar, Seton earl of Dunfermline; Hamilton, now lord Binning, had to wait rather longer, becoming earl of Melrose when three further men were ennobled in March 1619. In all there were eighteen peerage creations in James’s reign after 1603, and to that can be added the two creations of 1600, when lord Livingstone became earl of Linlithgow and lord Seton earl of Winton. So one effect of the union of the crowns was the notable extension of the peerage, a peerage which according to English commentators was already too large, there being almost as many as in England, in a country with one-fifth of the population. But then Elizabeth was notoriously stingy. But with the exception of the lawyer Thomas Hamilton, himself a junior member of the mighty house of Hamilton, they were all drawn from the ranks of men who already held the title of lord or from the greater lairds. It is possible to regard them as forming a noblesse de robe, but entirely wrong to regard them as in any way a different breed from the landed aristocracy; such a distinction has long been challenged in France and certainly would not apply to Scotland. The actual expansion of the peerage can be seen as a direct consequence of the union, for it was in the absentee king’s interest to give those who had

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already become the leading members of his government in Scotland titles which brought them to the top of the hierarchical scale. That in itself surely reflects far less of a move away from the assumption that royal government was aristocratic government in Scotland more than in England. The older assumptions and the new developments still sat fairly easily together. What happened after 1603 was that certain individuals who had been part of these new developments received great benefit from this, and were no doubt delighted about it. What did not happen was that the union shifted the king’s Scottish government away from the path it was already taking in the second half of the sixteenth century. What did happen, from the Scottish point of view, was that the burden of government now became even greater; there was simply a great deal more paperwork, which fell particularly heavily on a few dedicated souls, Dunbar, Dunfermline and Melrose. One striking difference between England and Scotland lay in the quantity of government record; and for all the increasing documentation in Scotland, it still fell very short of that in England, which no doubt explains why we hear more about the king’s need to get away, for his health, and indeed makes life both easier and more frustrating for historians of Scotland. What made the difference after 1603 was that the king’s government became government by correspondence. Hence James’s famous, over-quoted and generally misunderstood phrase in his speech to the English parliament in 1607, ‘government by pen’; it tends to be forgotten that what the king was actually doing was to take advantage of his new style of government to paint an exaggerated picture of a very quiescent Scotland, ruled now by the pen rather than the sword, in order to persuade his English audience that they need not fear a closer union with a kingdom which they regarded as violent and backward.8 ‘Government by pen’ would have been even more accurate had it been invoked later in the reign, for to begin with, James did try to maintain direct personal government. The overworked Dunbar moved ceaselessly between Edinburgh and London until his death in 1611, endlessly engaged in what would now be called shuttle diplomacy. A particularly virulent bout of anti-Scottish hostility at that point ensured that there would be no more Dunbars, and increasing correspondence. But even in the Dunbar period, there was inevitably correspondence between the king and his Scottish politicians. One of his earliest acts was to begin to set up an improved and more efficient postal system between his two capitals, with horses posted along, in effect, the A1, cutting the time down, on average, to seven days. Admittedly that does not rival Sir Robert Carey’s mad dash to Edinburgh in March 1603, to be the first to proclaim the new king; but it was a safer and more realistic timescale.9 The correspondence itself shows another reason why absentee kingship under James could work well, where it would not under his son Charles I. James had three massive advantages over Charles. He had considerable

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first-hand experience of ruling Scotland. He was personally known to, and knew, the men he was working with. And he listened. He could be highhanded, as he had always been; this was not new to his post-1603 councillors. But letters between king and councillors maintained the element of discussion documents, in stark contrast to the royal and often badly informed diktats sent by that ‘uncounselled king’, to use Peter Donald’s phrase, Charles I.10 It was the king’s English government which was far more disturbed, partly by the appearance of leading Scots on the London scene, partly by the appearance of a Scottish king with very un-English ideas. There is a pervasive idea that what the union meant to Scotland were the great new opportunities offered when the king acquired the greater and wealthier kingdom of England, so that Scotsmen on the make flooded south. That is how James’s English subjects, and particularly his English court and parliament saw the matter, as did the merchants, the church and the universities. And what made it worse, from the English point of view, was that of course the Scots were not simply beggarly and grasping, getting their filthy hands on English offices at court and in government, English trade, English benefices, English fellowships; they were backward, barbaric and uncivilized, exactly that characterization to which James was reacting in that 1607 speech which included ‘government by pen’. It is true enough that a large retinue accompanied James to London in the spring of 1603, including the duke of Lennox, the earls of Mar, Moray and Argyll, various officers of state, and bishops and ministers. It is equally true that the king’s initial desire for an AngloScottish bedchamber very quickly failed, and that within a short time the bedchamber became wholly Scottish and remained so until Buckingham was given place there; and this, the inner political sanctum, did cause alarm and resentment.11 Some Scotsmen did get English offices. Lennox for the rest of his life was steward of the household, and resident in England. Dunbar began his post-union career with a brief spell as chancellor of the exchequer. And there was always a Scottish presence in London, as there had to be, for James was still king of Scotland; and after his recognition that an AngloScottish government in London would not work, the London Scots got not office but money, itself of course a source of huge English grievance, not least because of the hopeless extravagance of their king. There were indeed examples of Scots who were all too willing to dip their hands in the richer royal coffers of the English king, like the notorious James Hay, viscount Doncaster, and master of the wardrobe, or who cheerfully responded to Cecil’s willingness to please his new master by showing favour to his Scottish subjects. But that is only one side of the story, infinitely the lesser side, and played up only from the English point of view. In the main, the Scottish political nation did not desire or intend to move in on London and the king’s English government, for the very simple reason that they were Scots, and their

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raison d’être was to be in Scotland. Cultural and social contact between the English and Scottish aristocracy was very limited. There were, for example, few intermarriages. This was in part due to English reluctance; no English peer married his eldest daughter to a Scot. But Scottish nobles tended to marry, for the first or second time, Scots; only for the second or third marriage did they turn to rich English widows, with an eye to their money, that endless source of appeal. And, movingly, there were Scots who died in England who wanted to be taken back to Scotland for burial in their native country, like the marquis of Hamilton in March 1625 – in that month the Scottish marquis returned, the Scottish king could not – and the earl of Buccleuch in 1633.12 More generally, the absence of the king did not mean the absence of political and social life in Scotland, which was as vibrant and demanding after 1603 as it had been before. Parliament and council continued to meet, to legislate and to advise the king; royal finance continued to be a headache, just as it had been before 1603; order still had to be kept in the localities. We need to take much more account of the fact that, far from feeling rebuffed or marginalized after the union, left out in the cold, somehow reduced to second-class citizens, the ruling elite of Scotland was as committed to serving its Scottish king, fulfilling its role in its kingdom, as it had ever been. The king’s initial vision of one king, one law, one people – itself overstated by him as a bargaining weapon – did produce temporary fears that he might begin to reduce his northern kingdom to a subsidiary status, but by 1607 he had accepted defeat on the idea of a closer union, and the tarnishing of his image as king of Scots was largely removed. It was in London, not in Edinburgh, that confusion and tension attended the union of the crowns. The Scots retained their Scottish king. The English got a Scottish king, with Scottish ideas, who never became a wholly English king; for them, the best on offer was an Anglo-Scottish one. What worried them was not only his ideas about how government should work, his criticisms of the way English government did work, but his political theory which, as it developed in the 1590s, reached fruition in his two political tracts of 1598–1599: The Trew Law of Free Monarchies, which set out his defence of kingship by divine right, and his own favourite work Basilikon Doron, which told his son Henry how to be a king.13 A true European polemicist, he was engaging in the debate about the nature and source of authority of kingship, responding, as Bodin had done, to the contractual claims of the Huguenot resistance theorists of the 1570s, who included his own tutor George Buchanan. He was also countering the denial of royal authority in the kirk by his presbyterian opponents, Andrew Melville and his followers. There were those in Scotland – Buchanan, Melville, David Hume of Godscroft – who passionately disagreed with him.14 Nevertheless, his view of kingship worried his less constitutionally minded Scottish subjects far less than his English ones. It was after 1603 that it became a real, even a

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frightening, political issue, when English MPs found it impossible to pin him down on the crucial issue of king or king-in-parliament as the law-giver. They were unnecessarily concerned; James, a man of considerable and dry humour, was not above getting enjoyment out of disturbing Englishmen who took their pre-occupations all too seriously, but he was in practice no absolutist. The problem in England, unlike in Scotland, was that he could sound like one.15 There is in fact no doubt that James believed in parliaments, and that it was king-in-parliament which legislated. He summoned forty parliaments and conventions between 1584 – the first of his personal rule – and 1621, the last of his reign. There is also no doubt that he believed in parliaments which could be managed by the king; and in the 1580s and 1590s he made sustained and strenuous efforts to achieve this. The question is why: that is, was the impetus the hoped-for English future, or the Scottish present. The Scottish parliament was anything but an easy body. Only twenty-four years before 1584, it had dramatically shown its strength and will to defy the crown; the Reformation parliament of 1560 abolished the Catholic church and laid the foundations for the reformed kirk, in three acts and a Confession of Faith, and did so successfully despite Mary’s refusal to ratify these acts. It would, incidentally, show a similar determination to proceed whether the king willed it or not in 1640, when it refused to obey Charles I’s prorogation and went ahead with the dismantling of royal power. Clearly, then, it was very much in James’s interests – indeed, a necessity – to impose his authority and put in place means of control for a future when he would no longer be able to attend parliament, as by convention he did in Scotland, to influence in person; king-in-parliament there meant what it said. But to give this too much emphasis would again be to take an Anglo-centric view of the matter. The Scottish parliament of the post-union years was the product of the efforts in the 1580s and 1590s to meet very pressing Scottish problems. One was the collapse of royal authority and prestige, thanks to the scandalous and ongoing antics of the king’s mother Mary. Where better than parliament to restate that authority – and, incidentally, get rid of the dangerous political theories of Mary’s greatest detractor, George Buchanan. So the parliament of 1584 saw the banning of Buchanan’s works, and strenuous onslaught on any defaming of the king’s progenitors.16 That would only work if parliament itself had authority and prestige, and this was duly recognized, the king himself being empowered in 1587 to design the ‘severall apparrell in semelie fassioun’ to be worn by each estate for the Riding of parliament – the solemn procession through the streets of Edinburgh for the opening of parliament (actually mainly on foot).17 This was the public face of king-in-parliament; and it is symbolic of what James wanted his Scottish parliament to be after the union that the most glorious of the ridings of his reign was that of the 1606 parliament, when the king’s idea of ‘semelie fassioun’ meant that the onlookers were dazzled

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by the crimson and scarlet silks and velvet, and the ermine and furs, as the estates of the ‘Red Parliament’ moved solemnly along the Royal Mile. And impressive visual display was reinforced by bullying of the nobility to turn up and attend – and preferably not indulge in unseemly disputes about voting precedence – just as they were bullied to come to council meetings.18 But enhancing parliament had to be offset by greater control. Scotland had never had shire elections; James I’s attempt, in 1428, to introduce them, had been a complete dead letter. In 1560, therefore, it came as a considerable shock when some 100 lairds, most of them Protestant, turned up, demanding their right to attend. This was potential dynamite, and in 1587 the situation was regularized by a shire election act which did begin to work.19 But these 100 lairds reflected another very pressing matter: religious divisions were fought out in the parliamentary forum. The Black Acts of 1584 marked the temporary triumph of the crown over its presbyterian opponents, just as the Golden Acts of 1592 saw the high point of presbyterian success; the colour of both, was, of course, from the Melvillian point of view.20 Less publicly, but possibly even more problematic was the kirk’s attempt to have acts of the 1587 parliament ‘quhilk the kirk findis fault with’ omitted from the printing of the parliamentary acts.21 And not only religious tensions added a whole new dimension to parliamentary business. So too did taxation, which for the first time became regular from 1581, not because of extraordinary causes, but because of an extraordinarily spendthrift king. The nature of the Scottish parliament did offer an obvious means of control. It was a meeting of the three estates; and the detailed business of drawing up legislation was done by an elected committee of the estates, the Lords of the Articles, normally eight from each estate, with the balance tilted in favour of the secular nobility. This was not just because there were no bishops in Scotland between 1592 and 1600, but because both earls and barons were separately represented on the articles. What the king did was to bring onto the articles, as unelected members, the officers of state, thus giving him a reasonable chance of having a solid voice in favour of his policy; and moreover he ensured a sizeable presence of councillors in parliament. What he also did was to manage parliamentary business. Thus in 1594 it was enacted that four members of each estate should meet twenty days before the full meeting of parliament, to examine petitions and articles, and sift out frivolous material. The only exception to the twentyday rule was, of course, the king who could introduce business at any time.22 There was a strong parliament, then, and a king who saw the need to control it. In the 1580s and 1590s, this was clearly essential, as he saw it, for his effective governing of Scotland, and he worked hard at it. What then was the impact of the union of the crowns, when the king was in London and it was the chancellor who now used the sceptre to touch and

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ratify legislation? There were differences. There was the massive and obvious one that the king was no longer present, apart from on his return to Scotland in 1617, and it may have been in some measure a response to this that he insisted on a change of style. Before 1603, James was ‘our soverane lord’. On 23 July 1603, a proclamation by the council referred to ‘the sacred persone of his Majestie’.23 The 1606 parliament dutifully told the king that ‘we want na pairt of our wisched erthlie felicitie bot the desyrit presence of his most sacrede majestie’, and this when obligingly granting taxation.24 How much impact this had is a matter of speculation. But it is surely likely that it was not so much James reminding his Scottish parliament that the king of England was a higher being than the king of Scots, but rather reminding it that an absentee king was still the power which called it into being and gave it its authority to act, and using the language of majesty to do so. Otherwise, his tactics were simply a continuation of those before 1603. In June 1606, he sent parliament a letter concerning the lords of the articles. He left it to the estates to decide whether the lords should be continued from session to session of the parliament. But for this session it seemed to him expedient that a new election should be made; and as there were some in parliament ‘moir perfytlie aquantit than utheris with our favourable designis in materis greatlie concerning the universall weill of that oure kingdome    we have thocht gude to   ’ From this point, the text is incomplete. But what remains suggests that what James ‘thocht gude’ was to send a list of the names he wanted to see on the articles; and just possibly, in this case, parliament accepted it.25 If so, it was not something which became a habit. In 1609 and 1612, it was at least partially resisted. And in 1617, with the king present in parliament, he was forced to concede that there would never be more than eight officers of state on the articles.26 There was, therefore, a rather different kind of relationship between king and parliament. But it was not a fundamentally different one. The texts of the acts became fuller and longer, but that had already been the trend before 1603. The substance of business was much as before. Only in one respect was there a new and necessary addition: the nature of the union. Commissioners to treat of the union were appointed in 1604. By 1607, the issue was dead. In 1607, while the English parliament was killing it, the Scottish one was protesting strenuously and successfully that Scotland should not become a province on the Spanish model, with a viceroy; with some tact, they remained silent about the model much closer to home, Ireland.27 But the achievements the king did make, limited though they were, were far more of a morale boost to the Scots than the English: naturalization and free trade. Once again, therefore, at an institutional as well as a personal level, it was England which felt the strains of union. The Scots, who were almost certainly as unenthusiastic about a closer union as the English, in effect sat back, got on with their own affairs, and came out of it with some gain and with the

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reminder that their king, in absentia, still remained king of Scots as he had been in the years of his presence. Only in his last parliament, in 1621, were there signs of something different. This was the parliament which dealt with two hugely contentious issues, the liturgical innovations of the king’s Five Articles of Perth, pressed by him on his visit to Scotland in 1617, pushed through a reluctant General Assembly in 1618, and now brought to parliament for enactment; and less contentious but still deeply unpopular, a new form of taxation, on annual rents. The former saw the greatest struggle between king and kirk since the days of the battle with the Melvillians three decades earlier; like that struggle, it came into the parliamentary arena. This battle saw royal management at full stretch. The choosing of the lords of the articles was managed by the bishops, which meant the crown. The unfortunate earl of Melrose was up at six every morning, discussing tactics with an inner group before meeting the lords of the articles at their accustomed hour of eight. Proxy voting was allowed; and just to help the royal cause, a couple of Englishmen were given Scottish titles and sent up to take part. It was agreed, after some thought, to take the Articles and the new tax together; this would make it an even more serious matter directly to oppose royal policy than doing it in two stages. And the election of the lords of the articles was sheer fiddle. The king won. But the combination of votes against and abstentions outweighed the votes for. Only the eleven bishops voted solidly for the king, which made it deeply unfair that afterwards James warned them about lack of zeal and commitment. There was a majority among the nobility. But in the third estate there were more votes against than for. For the first time, the Scottish parliament was seeing a new face of absentee monarchy. Yet even now it was not wholly new, for James stopped there, and made no further innovations. Meanwhile, that furious, impassioned and wildly embittered presbyterian historian David Calderwood described the end of the parliament; no great spectacle, no great procession this time, but members straggling disconsolately out into what was clearly a normal Edinburgh rainstorm, but which Calderwood saw as the wrath of God.28 The Five Articles takes us on to the question of the kirk. John Morrill’s thesis that what James sought after 1603 was not utter conformity but congruity between the churches of England and Scotland is very persuasive;29 and that would certainly suggest that union had an impact, and indeed that it brought new problems to the king, now not only fighting for control of the kirk as he had done, ultimately successfully, before 1603, but trying to move it along new paths to bring it closer to, if not actually into line with, the church in England. But this may be to overstate the case. When had the kirk not been a problem? And when had the problem not been the nature of the kirk, as rival opinions came into play in determining or at least trying to direct its evolution? Yet before 1603 there was another side to the matter. There had been congruity even between James and his greatest presbyterian

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opponent Andrew Melville in the years of their great battle – the Melville who might openly attack the king, discourteously grab his sleeve, call him God’s silly vassal, but write flattering and congratulatory Latin verse on the birth of his son Henry in 1594, and on the British future of the Stewarts. There had been more congruity between James and his Scottish presbyterians over the issue of decent clerical stipends and a university-educated ministry than between James and the late-Elizabethan powers in the church, archbishop Whitgift and bishop Bancroft, shown up very quickly both in their reaction to the king’s demand that Oxford and Cambridge’s impropriated tithes should be ploughed back into the parishes, and indeed at the Hampton Court conference of 1604. There was even congruity between king and presbyterians in James’s attitude towards local control. Famously, he appeared to want to adopt an English form, the J.P.; it was a policy begun in a very limited way in 1579, taken up by the king in 1587 and then revived in extensive form after he went to England, in 1609–1610, producing a furious row at a council meeting in 1611 between Thomas Hamilton and George Gledstanes, archbishop of St Andrews, the latter passionately arguing that ‘the realme had many hundredth yeires bene weill governed withowt Justices of the Peace’.30 Well, that does sound like the authentic voice of protest against the impact of the union. But there are two things to be said: first, the initial idea came in 1579, long before the union and when James was still in minority. And second, far from being wholly antagonistic to the courts of the kirk and utterly committed to an episcopal polity, James was perfectly prepared to turn to the kirk sessions, backed by the presbyteries, as agents of local control; thus elders were commissioned as justices of the peace at Elgin.31 These ferocious maintainers of local discipline, the kirk sessions, could be very useful to control of the localities of the kingdom. And inasmuch as an idea was borrowed from England, that does not mean post-union plagiarism. Rather, it was a pre-union Scottish borrowing, to be adapted to Scottish needs. Once again, this can be followed through beyond 1603. James was distinctly cautious about asserting supremacy over the kirk when he finally did it in 1612, even with the Melvillians ousted after the second Hampton Court conference when they were summoned to London in 1606. The Scottish bishops, fully restored to their diocesan role from 1610, never took on an Anglican form in James’s lifetime. They worked with the courts of the kirk, they wore the plain black gown of the ordinary minister. It was left to Charles I to attempt real congruity, indeed conformity with England, and in so doing to create crisis. And it is the episcopacy that Charles I wanted and that Charles II restored which has confused the issue about episcopacy in Scotland, far more than anything which James did as a result of the union. Their version of episcopacy might lead to the Scottish kirk becoming clearly presbyterian in 1690, but that was accompanied by the establishment of a Scottish episcopal church. Earlier, in the mid-seventeenth

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century, episcopacy was as much attacked by Charles’s opponents in England as in Scotland. Where does this leave James, with his low-key bishops, and even his Five Articles of Perth? Accompanying the king to Edinburgh in 1617, Thomas Lake wrote to Ralph Winwood that ‘the Scottish bishops are much misliked’. But he was not making a general, let alone a theological, point, for he added ‘more for their persons than their calling’.32 If only we knew whom he was talking about, though we may certainly guess at John Spottiswoode, archbishop of St Andrews. Besides, it was an undoubted error of judgement which allowed Laud to come to Scotland, and, as John Chamberlain recorded, wear a surplice at a Scottish funeral.33 Yet this to an extent makes the point; it was Edinburgh, along with Fife, which was the area where there would be most unease about bishops and about Anglican practices. It was a very different matter in, for example, the north-east, where Patrick Forbes, bishop of Aberdeen, was a much respected and much accepted figure. In the next reign, that dour presbyterian earl, Rothes, having seen Charles I’s innovations, could still comment that bishops were not anathema – if only they did not agree with common folk in their dislike of lengthy preaching.34 By that time, for Charles’s subjects, James, author of the Five Articles of Perth, had moved from being his sacred majesty to ‘blessed king James’. In his own time, such evidence allows us to question that view of the Jacobean kirk which has come down to us through the sheer accident that we have only the bland account by Spottiswoode to set against the much more compelling and emotive accounts of the presbyterian historians David Calderwood and John Row.35 We know, for example, that there was opposition to the Five Articles, and that they were not rigorously enforced. We do not know enough about how much they were accepted, for such things as private baptism and private communion might offend the kirk’s insistence that all should be done in the face of the congregation, but might yet bring spiritual comfort to individuals unable to be present, with their sickly children or their own sickness, at that public face. And certainly Rothes’s comment is a reminder that the godly preaching and teaching of the word was rather too much; even today, it is accepted that an hour is the maximum tolerance and concentration time for an educated audience listening to a university lecture. Once again, therefore, it is not so much the impact of union which is of crucial importance as the early and confusing years of the conflict between the harsher and gentler faces of the Scottish Calvinist kirk. The same conclusion, that the union of 1603 and the departure of the king to London had less effect on Scotland than might have been supposed, can be demonstrated, briefly, in other matters. Witchcraft continued its Scottish existence. King James had turned away from it in 1596–1597, after his close encounter in 1591–1592. In England, Shakespeare misjudged his tribute to the royal daemonologist in Macbeth, and those who sought to engage him in witchcraft cases found an indifferent, even sceptical response. In Scotland,

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a Satan-obsessed kirk, with its influence on local communities, carried it on.36 More gently, James took south with him the surviving members of that most distinguished circle of Scottish court poets, centred round the poet-king, William Alexander, William Fowler, and the rising star, Robert Ayton. James was to trounce Alexander for departing from the sweeter style of the poetry of the Scottish Castalians and writing ‘harshe verses after the Inglishe fashion’; and there is the compelling little picture of this passionate royal horseman at Newmarket, spending a cold February day discussing not horses but poetic theory and sonnets with Alexander in 1616.37 The Castalians at the Scottish court had certainly been rivals rather than a united band. Yet it is in Ayton’s poetry that one finds a new sense of unease about the more troubled world of the English court; and certainly, apart from his relationship with Ben Jonson, James was never able to recreate in England that exciting and deeply satisfying relationship between poet-king and court poets which had so much soothed his kingship in Scotland. The corollary is, of course, that with the king’s move south, there was no longer a court in Scotland to provide a centre for Scottish culture. After the heady days of the last two decades of the sixteenth century, and especially the 1580s, that was indeed a real loss; here we do find an impact of union. Yet distinguished as Scottish court culture had been in the adult reigns of James and his fifteenth- and sixteenth-century predecessors, it had always been, of necessity, intermittent because it had always been interrupted. Scottish court culture ceased to exist; and the real loss was King James’s. Scottish aristocratic culture went local, moving out of the court back into the castles of the aristocracy and the lairds. And there was nothing undistinguished about that culture which could produce a luminary such as William Drummond of Hawthornden.38 And what of these castles? The great royal architecture of James IV and V had long been a thing of the past; neither Mary nor James VI was particularly interested in building, although James did do something to ensure that money was provided to try to ensure the maintenance of the royal palaces. There were obvious hiccoughs; in 1583 the condition of the Chapel Royal at Stirling was such that ‘the kingis hienes may nocht weill remain within the same in tyme of weit or rain’, but it was to be another eleven years before James would rebuild it, for the baptism of his son Henry, in a remarkable combination of an early example of the austerity of post-reformation ecclesiastical architecture and classical imagery and a riot of painted decoration.39 More sadly, another example of the king’s taste for the classical style was all too short-lived. The north wing of the palace of Linlithgow was visibly in need of repair by the time of his return in 1617; the classical replacement built between 1617 and 1620 stands, in its collapsed state today, as the most rushed and most ruinous part of the palace. But the aristocracy were building, and building in a style which owed nothing to any influence of the union of the crowns. Early seventeenthcentury Scottish architecture showed no sign of a flight from the castle to

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the more domestic, let alone the prodigy houses of Jacobean England. The Scots, as much as the English, were well aware that defence was no longer a priority, neither having the prescience to anticipate what Charles I would bring down upon them. It was therefore the distinctive Scottish approach which dictated that the castellated style of architecture would be continued, gloriously embellished by oriel windows, as at Huntly castle, delightfully painted ceilings, mercifully preserved under later plasterwork and so being recoverable, and impressive statements of lineage and ideology in publicly displayed coats of arms, again most dramatically demonstrated at Huntly, with its five-tiered doorway displaying the arms of the earl and his wife, the royal arms, the papal arms – there were some whom the long arm of the kirk could not reach – the five wounds of Christ, and the statue of St Michael. Meanwhile Glamis, in Angus, built in the first decade of the seventeenth century, stands as the most glorious example of Scottish baronial architecture. Further north, in Aberdeenshire, is Craigievar, constructed by William Forbes – Willie the merchant – that ‘apotheosis of the tower house’, the traditional architecture of the lairds of the fourteenth and fifteenth century. And that rising star Dunfermline was, even before his ennoblement, constructing his massive pile at Fyvie. This perhaps sums it up. In 1603, the year of the union, Dunfermline owed nothing to English style. That was the year when he completed the magnificent staircase whose inspiration was derived not from any new association with England but from the Auld Alliance with France – the stairways of the great Loire chateaux of Chambord and Amboise. So where does this leave us, in considering the impact of union on Scotland in the reign of James VI? The Scots gave England a monarch, Elizabeth having failed to do so. The king had a very difficult time of it, in his role as dual monarch. The English were plunged into confusion. The Scots cheerfully carried on being Scots and dealing with Scottish issues, Scottish problems, thinking in Scottish and European terms, and only occasionally being distracted by, or, indeed, capitalizing on, the union of the crowns. Only at the very end of the reign did they begin to wake up to the fact that this might be possible under the Scottish King James but not under the Anglicized King Charles. As the earl of Kellie sadly wrote to the earl of Mar in November 1623, ‘it maye cum that the young folkes shall have their world. I know not it that wilbe fit for your Lordshipe and me.’40 It was a prophetic statement. The real impact of union would come not after 1603 but after 1625. Before 1625, Scotland could see itself as an independent and European kingdom which happened to share a king with England. After 1625, its survival became much more locked into union with England as a ‘British’ kingdom, its affairs, foreign and domestic, increasingly determined by that union; and it was in part the reaction to the shrinking of its ideological frontiers which would underpin the debates leading to the union of the parliaments of 1707, and the English carts laden with English money creaking north to pacify the

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Scots. More immediately, that new awareness of what union was coming to mean would lead to the downfall of the second British king, that downfall which would begin in Scotland.

Notes 1. Arthur Williamson, ‘Scotland, Antichrist and the Invention of Great Britain’ in J. Dwyer, R. A. Mason and A. Murdoch, eds, New Perspectives on the Politics and Culture of Early Modern Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), p. 39. Before then, the only exponent of the advantages of Anglo-Scottish friendship was the great theologian John Major, in his A History of Greater Britain as well England as Scotland, 1521, ed. A. Constable (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1892). 2. This has been explored in two magisterial works by J. Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999) and The Government of Scotland 1560–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). These impressive and wide-ranging books examine in great detail national and local government. I remain unconvinced only by Dr Goodare’s concept of the ‘absolutist state’, although it must be said that he handles the idea with care and sensitivity; J. Wormald, Court, Kirk and Community: Scotland 1470–1625 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981). 3. K. M. Brown, Bloodfeud in Scotland 1573–1625: Violence, Justice and Politics in an Early Modern Society (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), part 3. 4. J. Craigie, ed., Basilikon Doron of King James VI (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1944–1950), vol. 1, p. 87. Calendar of State Papers Scottish 1547–1603, J. Bain and others, eds (14 vols, Edinburgh: HMSO, 1898–1969), vol. 12, pp. 6, 21–2, 28–9, 32, 43–5. J. Wormald, ‘Bloodfeud, Kindred and Government in Early Modern Scotland’, Past and Present, 87 (May 1980), pp. 85–6. 5. Acts of the Parliaments of Scotland, T. Thomson and C. Innes, eds (12 vols, Edinburgh, 1814–1875), vol. 3, p. 294 (hereafter APS). 6. J. Wormald, ‘Lords and Lairds in Fifteenth-century Scotland: Nobles and Gentry?’ in M. Jones, ed., Gentry and Lesser Nobility in Late Medieval Europe (Gloucester: Sutton, 1986), pp. 181–200. 7. David Calderwood, The History of the Kirk of Scotland, ed. T. Thomson (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842–1849), vol. 5, p. 153; M. Lee Jr, John Maitland of Thirlestane and the Foundation of the Stewart Despotism in Scotland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959). 8. J. P. Sommerville, ed., King James VI and I: PoliticaI Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 173. 9. W. Taylor, ‘The King’s Mails’, Scottish Historical Review, 42 (1963), pp. 143–7. 10. P. Donald, An Uncounselled King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 11. N. Cuddy, ‘The Revival of the Entourage: The Bedchamber of James I, 1603–1625’ in D. Starkey et al., eds, The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (London: Longman, 1987), pp. 174–95. 12. See the seminal article by K. M. Brown, ‘The Scottish Aristocracy, Anglicization and the Court, 1603–38’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 543–76; for burial in Scotland, p. 574 (‘1624’ should read ‘1625’). 13. J. Craigie, ed., The Trew Law: Minor Prose Works of King James VI and I (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1982), pp. 59–82; J. Craigie, ed., Basilikon Doron, p. 87. 14. A Dialogue on the Law of Kingship among the Scots: A Critical Edition and Translation of George Buchanan’s ‘De Iure Regni apud Scotos Dialogus’ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004),

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15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

The Happier Marriage Partner ed. R. A. Mason, with M. Smith; The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft’s De Unione Insulae Britannicae, eds P. J. McGinnis and A. H. Williamson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002). See, for example, the different emphasis he gave in his speeches to parliament of 21 March and 21 May 1610, the first much more acceptable to his audience than the second: Sommerville, ed., Political Writings, pp. 179–203 (21 March) and E. R. Foster, ed., Proceedings in Parliament 1610 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), vol. 2, pp. 100–7. APS, vol. 3, p. 296. Ibid., p. 443. Ibid., pp. 443–4, 555; vol. 4, pp. 34, 53, 157, 177–8, 246. Ibid., pp. 509–10; J. Goodare, ‘The Admission of Lairds to the Scottish Parliament’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), pp. 1103–33. APS, vol. 3, pp. 292–4, 303, 541–3. NAS, PA7/1/38. APS, vol. 4, p. 69. Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, J. H. Burton and others, eds (Edinburgh, 1877–98), vol. 6, pp. 579–81 (hereafter RPC); this proclamation loyally describes the conspirators in the Main and Bye Plots, in case they should flee to Scotland, while praising the English, ‘thristing so eirnestlie to cum under the yok of his [James’s] obedience’ – a touching if over-optimistic comment – for seeking out the traitors. APS, vol. 4, pp. 291–2. Ibid., pp. 279–80. Ibid., pp. 526–7. RPC, vol. 7, pp. 535–6. APS, vol. 4, pp. 596–605; Original Letters Relating to the Ecclesiastical Affairs of Scotland (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1851), vol. 2, pp. 662–4; Calderwood, History, vol. 7, pp. 469–509; J. Goodare, ‘The Scottish Parliament of 1621’, Historical Journal, 38 (1995), pp. 29–51. J. Morrill, ed., The Scottish National Covenant in Its British Context (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. 7. RPC, vol. 14, pp. 621–2. Records of Elgin, 1238–1800, ed. W. Cramond (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club, 1908), vol. 2, p. 54. PRO, SP14/92/69. The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. N. E. McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 2, p. 82. John Row, earl of Rothes, A Relation of Proceedings concerning the Affairs of the Kirk of Scotland from August 1637 to July 1638 (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1830), p. 4. John Spottiswoode, History of the Church of Scotland, M. Russell and M. Napier, eds, (Edinburgh: Spottiswoode Society, 1847–1851); Calderwood, History; John Row, History of the Kirk of Scotland from the Year 1558 to August 1637 (Edinburgh: Wodrow Society, 1842). C. Larner, Enemies of God: The Witch-Hunt in Scotland (London: Chatto and Windus, 1981); J. Goodare, ed., The Scottish Witch-hunt in Context (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). M. R. G. Spiller, ‘The Scottish Court and the Scottish Sonnet at the Union of the Crowns’ in S. Mapstone and J. Wood, eds, The Rose and the Thistle (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998), pp. 102–3.

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38. I am very grateful to John Kerrigan for sending me a copy of his essay on ‘William Drummond and the British Problem’ in J. Kerrigan, ed., On Shakespeare and Early Modern Literature: Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 152–80. 39. D. Howard, The Architectural History of Scotland: Scottish Architecture from the Reformation to the Restoration, 1560–1660 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), p. 25. This section owes much to this splendid book. 40. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Mar and Kellie (London, 1904–1930), vol. 2, p. 183.

6 London or the World? The Paradox of Culture in (post-) Jacobean Scotland Roderick J. Lyall

It is a commonplace of Scottish literary historiography that the accession of James VI to the English throne marked an irreversible turning point, that the departure of the king and his court created a cultural vacuum which would remain unfilled until the published anthologies of Allan Ramsay and James Watson initiated a ‘Vernacular Revival’ a century later. There is, of course, a substantial element of truth in this: by comparison with the achievements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, seventeenth-century Scottish literature seems to have little to offer in aesthetic terms, and the displacement of much cultural activity to London undoubtedly played a part in this. Yet the story is, as always, much too complex to be reduced to such stark claims. The Scots tradition had been eroded by the influence of the English Bible from the middle of the sixteenth century, and the undeniable achievements of James’s court circle in the 1580s had to some degree been dissipated by the time of the death of Elizabeth. This is not the place to investigate the forces which had combined to produce this situation, but there is a corresponding argument to be made regarding the immediate aftermath of James’s departure to London. The cultural map of Britain between 1603 and 1642 was more varied than a grand r´ecit constructed by generations of Anglocentric criticism has been prepared to acknowledge, and the commemoration of this quatercentenary provides a splendid opportunity to revise its lineaments. It would, we must concede, be absurd to deny that the southward movement of the ambitious in 1603 had a profound effect upon the Scottish cultural scene. Even before the news of Elizabeth’s death reached Edinburgh, writers like Sir William Alexander of Menstrie were evidently contemplating a possible brighter future. Alexander Craig, similarly, attempted to hitch his literary wagon to James’s star: within the year, he had published in London, as ‘Alexander Craige, Scoto-Britane’. More shadowy literary figures, such as Sir Thomas Erskine of Gogar, who may be responsible, as Curtis Perry has recently suggested, for a group of Scots poems preserved in BL. MS. Addit. 88

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22601, elsewhere apparently claimed by the king himself but here attributed to Erskine and included among a number of English works datable to 1603–1604,1 were more successful in establishing themselves at the heart of the new court: Erskine, rapidly elevated to the barony of Dirleton and later created Viscount Fenton, was among the most intimate of royal servants, a Gentleman of the Bedchamber. William Fowler, who had been part of James’s literary circle during the ‘Castalian’ period in the early 1580s, also profited from the transfer of the court, retaining his office as secretary to Queen Anne until his death in 1612. Not all the Scottish literati of the early seventeenth century saw the journey to London as an indispensable career move, however, and it is interesting to observe that the man who was perhaps the finest poet of his generation, William Drummond of Hawthornden, chose to remain on his estate near Edinburgh for almost the whole of his adult life, resisting the siren call of James’s court and going so far as to publish his verse in Edinburgh rather than in London. This did not prevent him from establishing a substantial literary reputation: as is well known, Ben Jonson thought him significant enough to travel to Scotland to visit him in 1619, three years after the publication of his Poems by the Edinburgh bookseller Andrew Hart. In his determination to stay in Scotland rather than pursuing a more obviously successful literary career at court, Drummond contrasts in particular with another gifted poet, Sir Robert Ayton, who can almost be seen as an archetypical courtier whose verse forms an essential part of his political practice. Unlike Drummond, Ayton seems to have made little attempt to publish his writings, and we shall see later that even the manuscript circulation of his verse remained comparatively restricted. For Drummond, we can surmise, publication was the only way of addressing a larger audience: not only was he less constrained, as a result of his remoteness from the centres of aristocratic power, by the surviving prejudice against print, but he was almost forced to resort to the press in order to reach the majority of his literary contemporaries. The contrast between Drummond and Ayton, then, may reveal a good deal about the cultural environment of Jacobean Britain. The two men had remarkably similar backgrounds. Both were the sons of lairds: Ayton was the second son of Andrew Ayton of Kinaldie in Fife, born most probably in 1569, while Drummond, sixteen years younger, was the eldest son of John Drummond of Hawthornden in Midlothian. Each received the education appropriate to young men of their class: Ayton studied at the University of St Andrews between 1584 and 1589, completing his MA in the latter year, and Drummond studied for the MA at the new University of Edinburgh between 1601 and 1605. A gap in Ayton’s career follows his departure from St Andrews. There is some evidence that he was already writing verse in Scots, along with Sir William Alexander of Menstrie and Alexander Craig, before 1603, but his contemporary Thomas Dempster declares that he studied for a time in France, and he was certainly in Paris

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when he learned of James’s accession to the English throne, for it was there that he published his celebratory Panegyris. We know a little more about Drummond: he was in France between 1606 and 1608, studying law for a time at the University of Bourges, returning to Scotland shortly before his father’s death. Two important differences here may help to explain the subsequent courses of their careers. One is the age-difference: Drummond was still an undergraduate when James left Scotland, while Ayton, a graduate for nearly fifteen years, was evidently ready to try his professional luck in the new environment of the king’s London court. More significant, perhaps, was their relative positions within their families: as the eldest son, Drummond inherited his father’s estates and business interests, but as a second son, Ayton had to find alternative ways of making a living. That he chose the Brave New World of London is scarcely surprising; the foregrounded decision should perhaps be seen as that of Drummond, a man of universal interests who seems to have spent comparatively little time outside his study. Thanks to his own record-keeping and the careful research of Robert H. MacDonald, we know a great deal about Drummond’s book-buying and reading. The catalogue of his collection which he compiled in 1611 contains nearly 550 titles, while the donation he made to the University of Edinburgh in 1626 comprised 363 printed books and manuscripts, many of which had apparently been acquired between 1611 and that year.2 For the years 1606– 1614, moreover, we have the yearly lists of ‘bookes red by me’ preserved among the Hawthornden manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland.3 This information is especially valuable, since it covers the greater part of the period during which Drummond’s major collection of poetry, the Poems (a first version of which was probably published in 1614), was composed, as well as his visit to France.4 Focusing upon his reading of amatory verse, for example, we can see Drummond absorbing Sidney’s Arcadia, The Paradise of Dainty Devices, Sir William Alexander’s Aurora and the English version of Montemayor’s Diana in 1606; the poems of Flaminio, Bembo and Castiglione, Pontus de Tyard, and the French versions of Torquato Tasso’s Aminta, Sannazaro’s Arcadia and Montemayor’s Diana in 1607; much of Ronsard and the poems of Passerat in 1608, as well as a re-reading of Sidney’s Arcadia; the first part of Petrarch’s Rime in 1609, together with a re-reading of the Arcadia of Sannazaro and Tasso’s Aminta in 1610; Spenser’s Amoretti, the Rime of Sannazaro, Torquato Tasso and Cesare Rinaldi in 1611; Bembo’s Rime and Passerat again in 1612; the Rime of Giambattista Marino and, remarkably, ‘Jhone Dones lyriques’ in 1613; and the madrigals of Manfredi Muzio along with Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega in 1614. These texts, it should be stressed, represent less than 10 per cent of his total reading recorded for these years. At the same time, he was reading theological, philosophical and historical texts in a variety of languages, together with a surprisingly representative range of contemporary drama: in 1606, for example,

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he read Romeo and Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Malcontent, while a much later list of plays, containing 57 titles and probably to be dated after 1621, indicates that this interest was not an ephemeral one.5 We have, moreover, Drummond’s own critical evaluation of some of this reading, in the form of an undated letter to the Neo-Latin poet Arthur Johnston and of the ‘Character of several Authors’ which he apparently delivered to Ben Jonson during his 1619 visit. The former seems fairly dyspeptic in its approach to some kinds of contemporary verse: In vain have some Men of late (Transformers of every thing) consulted upon her [i.e. poetry’s] Reformation, and endeavoured to abstract her to Metaphysical Idea’s and Scholastical Quiddities, denuding her of her own Habits, and those Ornaments with which she hath amused the World some Thousand Years    Neither do I think that a good Piece of Poesy, which Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Petrarch, Bartas, Ronsard, Boscan, Garcilaso (if they were alive, and had that Language) could not understand, and reach the Sense of the Writer. Suppose these Men could find out some other new Idea like Poesy, it should be held as if Nature should bring forth some new Animal, neither Man, Horse, Lyon, Dog, but which had some Members of all, if they had been proportionably and by right Symmetry set together. What is not like the Ancients, and conform to those Rules which hath been agreed unto my all Times, may (indeed) be something like unto Poesy, but it is no more Poesy than a Monster is a Man.6 The target here must be Donne (whom, as we have seen, Drummond was reading in 1613), and the use of the phrase ‘Metaphysical Idea’s and Scholastical Quiddities’ is a clear indication of the grounds of Drummond’s objection to the witty ratiocination of Donne’s amatory verse. His own favourites are offered as a counterweight, and as a virtual reading committee for the assessment of such innovations; Drummond seems in this passage to be the personification of the conservative, the ‘man who believes nothing should be done for the first time’. Yet the ‘Character’ which he apparently provided Jonson with in 1619 offers a rather more modulated view. After praising Sidney and Sir William Alexander, and rather more guardedly Daniel and Drayton, and dismissing Spenser’s Amoretti as apocryphal ‘for they are so childish, that it were not well to give them so honourable a Father’, he turns to Donne: Donne, among the Anacreontick Lyricks is Second to none, and far from all Second; but as Anacreon doth not approach Callimachus, tho’ he excels in his own kind, nor Horace to Virgil; no more can I be brought to think him to excel either Alexander’s or Sidney’s Verses: They can hardly be compared together, trading diverse Paths; the one flying swift, but low; the other,

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like the Eagle, surpassing the Clouds. I think, if he would, he might easily be the best Epigrammatist we have found in English; of which I have not yet seen any come near the Ancients.7 Now that he has found a classical frame of reference for Donne’s verse, Drummond seems much more able to give it, if not its due, then at least qualified praise as being good of its kind. By contrast with this detailed insight into Drummond’s intellectual and cultural life, we know next to nothing about Ayton’s. After frequenting the fringes of the court for five years, probably in the circle of Sir James Hay, he was appointed a Groom of the Privy Chamber in May 1608, a post he held until he succeeded William Fowler as secretary to Queen Anne in 1612.8 During this period he was employed on one vital diplomatic task: in the summer of 1609 he was appointed to deliver copies of James’s defence of his imposition of an oath of allegiance on his Catholic subjects, the Triplici Nodo, Triplex Cuneus, to the leading German Protestant princes, and his itinerary took him to Heidelberg, Stuttgart, Schmalkalden, Eriksburg, Köthen, Dessau, Schwarzenburg, Mattuhoven and Stendal.9 This tour, which lasted from mid-June to mid-August, must surely have had some impact upon Ayton’s cultural world-picture, yet there is no reflex of it in his extant writings, either in Latin or in English. His duties as secretary to Anne from 1612 until her death on 2 March 1619 ensured that he was constantly present at court, and there are traces in his verse of his relations with the royal family (notably, the elegies he addressed to James and to Prince Charles on the death of Henry, prince of Wales in 1612) and of contemporary affairs around the court, such as the divorce of the countess of Essex, her alleged involvement with the earl of Somerset in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the death of his friend and fellow-courtier John Murray. But neither during this period nor later, during his six years out of official office or during his tenure of the secretaryship to Queen Henrietta Maria (1626–1638) do we see any evidence of literary interests beyond the little world of Westminster. Two possible exceptions turn out not to be. One is the Latin poem Ayton wrote, probably in 1622, De Rebus Bohemicis, but the focus of this piece is upon James’s policy rather than upon the events in Prague and Heidelberg themselves; reasons of higher politics have led the king to dissociate himself from the Bohemian adventure of his son-in-law and its disastrous consequences, a decision which Ayton, remarkably, criticises on humanitarian grounds: Hec ratione potes justus Rex fortè videri, Sed non crudelis non potes esse pater.10 The other possible exception is the translation of a sonnet by Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant, on the subject of tobacco: this was a subject which

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the king himself had addressed in his Counterblaste to Tobacco as early as 1604, and it is more than likely that Ayton’s version of the Saint-Amant poem points towards James’s hostility to the fashionable weed as much as towards his French source. Two other poems which are found in the principal Ayton manuscripts, both drawn from Continental sources, present serious problems of ascription. One, ‘Faire cruell Silvia, since thou scornes my teares’, is an adaptation of ‘Cruda Amarilli’, a lyric from Guarini’s Pastor Fido; the other, ‘Were those thine Eyes or Lightnings from above’, is a translation of a sonnet by Laugier de Porchères on Gabrielle d’Estrée, marquise de Monceaux, the mistress of Henry IV of France. The fact that these pieces are included in BL. MS. Addit. 10308, compiled by Ayton’s nephew, and in BL. MS. Addit. 28622, which also seems to be an authoritative collection of his work, appears to support Ayton’s authorship; but against this there are the copies in the hand of William Drummond of Hawthornden, preserved among his papers in NLS MS. 2060, volume 8 of the so-called Hawthornden papers. Gullans gives Ayton the benefit of the doubt while acknowledging the strength of Drummond’s claims, and to be fair, such plundering of Italian and French sources seems to be more Drummond’s style than Ayton’s.11 But we do have one counter-example, in the poem by Saint-Amant, and the copies in Drummond’s hand could equally be attributable to his interest in these poems, the work of a Scottish contemporary and employing methods which are markedly like his own.12 Interestingly, the two poems also occur together in a manuscript of Scottish provenance (EUL, MS. Laing III, 436) which collects a substantial body of Ayton’s verse, so there are good reasons for concluding that copies of his poetry were circulating in Scotland in the first half of the seventeenth century. In general, it seems, Ayton’s poetry circulated in rather restricted circles. With some exceptions, there are few extant manuscript witnesses, suggesting that his verse enjoyed much less currency than that of some of his contemporaries. Those poems which do survive in more than half-a-dozen, frequently partial or corrupt, copies reflect the characteristic taste of the Jacobean and Caroline courts: stylish, even elegant, pieces, often marked by a certain degree of cynicism and a preoccupation with inconstancy: I lov’d the once, I’le love noe more, Thyne be the greife as is the blame Thou art not what thou was before What reason I should be the same? (50: 1–4) As Gullans points out, this is not a new note: in addition to the Scottish precedents he cites from Alexander Scott and Alexander Montgomerie, we

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can observe a similar rejection of the faithless beloved in a range of English poets from Wyatt onwards, and it frequently recurs in the fashionable verse of the early seventeenth century. But Ayton is capable of giving the familiar theme his own twist: When new desires had Conquer’d thee And chang’d the Object of thy will, It had been Lethargie in mee, Noe constancy to love the still, Yea, it had been a sinn to goe And prostitute affection soe, Since wee are taught noe prayers to say To such as must to others pray. (17–24) It is not only the use of ‘Lethargie’ and ‘prostitute affection’ which should catch our attention here; the latter half of the stanza deploys a neat theological allusion, comparing the petitioning of an ex-lover now in thrall to another with prayers to saints, who ‘must to others pray’ since they cannot themselves grant a supplicant’s appeal. By combining this implicitly antiCatholic jibe with the notion of prostitution, Ayton manages to achieve two objectives at once: each set of associations reinforces the other, linking the Lady with undesirable religion and Catholicism with sexual inconstancy. The wit which Ayton deploys here is typical of a great deal of his work, and reflects the degree to which he assimilated the aesthetic and values of ‘Cavalier’ verse. It reaches an extreme level in the whimsical piece beginning ‘Lov’s like a game at Irish’ (44), a short version of which, with ‘tables’ substituted for ‘Irish’, was widely copied in seventeenth-century miscellanies. With its suggestive puns and cynical attitudes it represents that libertine tendency which runs through much seventeenth-century poetry, the polar opposite of the sublimated and idealised eroticism of the Petrarchist tradition. It also embodies a characteristic double standard: male predatoriness is a given, but women’s ‘inconstancy’ is another matter entirely: Yet doth not all in happy entrance lye, When you are on, you must throw home and hye. If you throw low and weake, believe mee then, Doe what you can, they will be bearing men, And if you looke not all the better on, They will play false, beare two instead of one. (13–18)

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‘Playing false’ is a female trait, however much the poem may attribute it to male inadequacy. The theme occurs frequently elsewhere in Ayton’s verse, in more personal contexts which offer the lady no such excuse: Oft have I wish’d that there had beene Some Almanack whereby to have seene When love with her had beene in season, But I perceive there is noe Art Can finde the Epact of a heart That loves by chance and not by reason. (48: 13–18) Again, Ayton’s deployment of a striking metaphor reveals his poetic skill: the ‘epact’ is the number of days between 1 January and the first full moon, used in calendrical calculations of Easter, and the point is that this regularity is absent from the mistress’s behaviour. But we can again take the observation a stage further, since the epact is part of the lunar cycle, itself a traditional token of female inconstancy. If even this degree of predictability is absent, then the lady must indeed be the embodiment of unreliability. Yet the tone of the poem does not suggest, as would be the case in a more Petrarchist context, that the speaker is distraught at his mistress’s betrayal. The text concludes with a witty reversal, lightening the tone and introducing a note of stoical acceptance, even of optimism: Yet will I not for this dispaire, But time her humour may prepare To love him who is now neglected, For what vnto my Constancy Is now deny’d, one day may be From her Inconstancy expected. (19–24) Nowhere is this atmosphere of elegant, playful courtiership more attractively evident than in the poem Ayton seems to have addressed to Cicely Crofts (55). Gullans believed that the poem’s references to neo-Platonic doctrines of love must mean that it arose from Walter Montagu’s pastoral drama The Shepherd’s Paradise, performed at court by Crofts and others, including Henrietta Maria, on 8 January 1633, in which such ideas were articulated to fairly general ridicule. But there is no real reason to follow this argument: although Cicely Crofts is not known to have been appointed a maid of honour to the queen until 1630, she had been at court since at least 1622, when there were rumours that James had married her, and the use of the title in

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Additional MS. 11811 might, of course, be retrospective. The context of the poem, moreover, is essentially personal. It is the addressee’s deployment of Platonic arguments to deflect the speaker’s attempted seduction which is the occasion for his verse: her response to his advances has been to argue ‘That soules may have a plenitude of joy, / Although there bodyes never meet t’Enjoy’ (19–20). His reaction to this gambit is to praise the lady’s purity in the most extravagant terms, while at the same time deftly drawing attention to precisely those physical attractions which she seems to be at pains to deny: You’r all Etheri’all, there is in you noe dross Nor any part that’s gross, Your coursest part is like the curious lawne O’re Vestall relicts for a covering drawne. (5–8) ‘Vestall relicts’ is especially complex in a way that is typical of Ayton: it almost seems to anticipate the playful morbidity of Marvell, with his evocation of the posthumous ravaging of his ‘coy’ mistress’s ‘long-preserved virginity’. Here the lady’s body is compared with a religious object, in which the Roman cult seems to have fused with a Christian, and specifically Catholic, veneration of the body parts of saints. But her ‘coursest part’, remarkably, is not the object itself, but rather the material used to cover it; the ‘Vestall relict’, then, must be something less physical, proving that she is indeed ‘all Etheriall’. Having represented the lady as a paragon of philosophical and theological attainment, Ayton turns to his own inadequacies, admitting that I doe not finde The motions of my minde Soe purifyed as yet, but at there best My body claims in them some interest. (21–4) The concluding four stanzas, of which this is the first, reveal the speaker’s true purpose, wittily wrapped in the form of a proposed compromise: since he is unable to achieve the ‘abstracted’ level of awareness of the lady, he suggests that they do it his way during this life, reserving the purity of Platonic love for the world beyond. Thus both interests can, he claims, be satisfied. Perhaps there is, indeed, a satirical element in Ayton’s characterisation of the fashionable neo-Platonism of the Jacobean and Caroline courts, but it seems to me to be secondary to the poem’s essence, that deft, light-hearted libertinism so typical of a certain kind of Cavalier

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verse. Nothing reflects more fully the degree to which Ayton absorbed the cultural values of James’s London. Ensconced in his library at Hawthornden, William Drummond inhabited another world. It was, undoubtedly, a world of books, and it was, moreover, in many respects an old-fashioned world, thoroughly imbued with the cultural values of sixteenth-century Petrarchism. Yet this is not the whole story: his amatory verse reflects the wide range of reading we noted earlier, and his sources include Passerat, Desportes and Marino as well as more archaic figures such as Bembo and Sannazaro, Garcilaso and Boscán, and, of course, Petrarch himself.13 Formally, too, Drummond reveals himself to be both a skilled adaptor of older poetic traditions (concluding his 1616 sequence with a remarkable re-visioning of medieval dream allegory) and a respondent to current fashion: he incorporates several madrigals in the sequence itself, and appends a separate section of ‘Madrigals, and Epigrammes’ which draws on such contemporary Italian madrigalists as Torquato Tasso, Mauritio Moro, and Marino. His version of neo-Petrarchism, then, incorporates many elements of the Baroque (as David Atkinson has recently pointed out),14 but his sequence is also notable for its understanding of the structural principles of the Canzoniere: where the great majority of sixteenth- and early seventeeenth-century Petrarchists content themselves with imitating the manner of the Master, Drummond reverts to the In Vitam/In Mortem structure of the original, and does so in such a way as to problematise, perhaps even to subvert, the Petrarchist rhetoric of his speaker. The lover’s preoccupation with his own death which is regularly deployed as a rhetorical counter in Part One, culminating in Sonnet 51 where the only rhyme-words are ‘Life’ and ‘Death’, is decisively challenged by the demise of the Lady at the beginning of Part Two, and the speaker’s attempts to come to terms with his grief ensure a fundamental tonal shift. Mourning becomes the dominant mode in this second section, until the final, extended ‘Song’ in which Drummond ingeniously adapts the conventions of medieval dreamallegory to his neo-Petrarchist purposes by portraying a visionary conversation between his speaker and his dead mistress. While love may be the ostensible occasion of the sequence, therefore, there can be no doubt that its ultimate theme is mortality, and in this sense Drummond is a much more fundamentalist neo-Petrarchist than almost any of his predecessors and contemporaries. It is, however, in his religious verse that Drummond reveals a capacity for innovation to equal anything in Ayton’s oeuvre. Let us conclude by looking at his sonnet ‘For the Magdalene’, published in the collection Flowres of Sion (1623): These Eyes (deare Lord) once Brandons of Desire, Fraile Scoutes betraying what they had to keepe, Which their owne heart, then others set on fire,

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Their traitrous blacke before thee heere out-weepe: These Lockes, of blushing deedes the faire attire, Smooth-frizled Waues, sad Shelfes which shadow deepe, Soule-stinging Serpents in gilt curles which creepe, To touch thy sacred Feete doe now aspire. In Seas of Care behold a sinking Barke, By windes of sharpe Remorse vnto thee driuen, O let me not expos’d be Ruines marke, My faults confest (Lord) say they are forgiuen. Thus sigh’d to Iesvs the Bethanian faire, His teare-wet Feete still drying with her Haire.15 While it may be true, as Kastner suggested, that the inspiration for this sonnet came from one of Desportes’s ‘sonnets spirituels’,16 it is in reality only the initial image of Magdalene’s eyes which derives from this source, and even here Drummond’s opening quatrain is much more complex, and powerful, than Desportes’s: Ses yeux, sources de feu, d’ou´ l’Amour a´ l’embl´ee Souloit dedans les cœurs tant de traits blueter, Changez en source d’eau. It is not simply that Drummond gives his protagonist her own voice, although that is significant enough; the sequence of images, from ‘Brandons of Desire’, through ‘Fraile Scoutes’, to the reference to the prostitute’s painted eyes, makes much more effective use of the juxtaposition of seductive invitation and penitent weeping. There is also the hint of a psychological theory in l.3: the Magdalene’s eyes have first betrayed her into lust, before working their inflammatory magic on others. If this is an extremely creative intensification of a motif Drummond found in Desportes, the second quatrain pushes the metaphorical technique a good deal further, and here the Scottish poet seems to be working on his own. When he turns to the biblical image of Mary Magdalene drying Christ’s feet with her hair, he develops a striking series of metaphors, beginning with the apparently oxymoronic but highly evocative ‘smooth-frizled waues’, and then deftly switching to the metaphor’s source domain, picturing a deceptively attractive but nevertheless dangerous seaside scene with ‘sad Shelfes which shadow deepe’. The alliteration here reinforces the strength of the imagery, and leads naturally to the serpentine metaphor of the following line, with its underlying reference to the Fall (and perhaps also to the Medusa) and the neat pun on ‘gilt’. Such concentrated linguistic effects suggest that Drummond, too, had learned something from his reading of Donne, and it is in the religious sonnets of Flowres of Sion, rather than in his neo-Petrarchist verse, that he reveals the full extent of this influence.

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In their differing responses to the possibilities opened up by James’s accession to the English throne, Ayton and Drummond highlight the cultural complexity of early seventeenth-century Britain. Immersed in the life of the Westminster court, Ayton takes on some of the colouration of his environment, but through his avid reading Drummond is no less able to absorb the poetic lessons which England has to offer. His library window, as it were, gave him a perspective on the world, which included, but was never contained by, developments in London. The price of this detachment may be a certain bookishness, certainly in his adaptations of sixteenthcentury Petrarchism, but where his religious convictions are engaged the result is a poetry of surprising power and originality. Neither Ayton nor Drummond has yet received his critical due, and both men have been the victims of parochialities north and south of the Border. Over and above this, however, the contrast between them points to the dilemmas facing Scottish intellectuals in the immediate aftermath of James’s departure from Edinburgh.

Notes 1. See Curtis Perry, ‘Royal Authorship and Problems of Manuscript Attribution in the Poems of King James VI and I’, Notes & Queries, n.s. 46 (1999), 243–6. 2. The figures are based on R. H. MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971), pp. 37, 47. 3. Ibid., pp. 228–31. 4. For the dating of the first edition of Drummond’s Poems, see the edition of the Poetical Works by L. E. Kastner (2 vols, Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1913), vol. 1, pp. lii–lxiv. 5. MacDonald, Library, pp. 231–2. 6. William Drummond, Works (Edinburgh, 1711), p. 143. 7. Ibid., p. 227. 8. Sir Robert Ayton, Poems, ed. Charles B. Gullans (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society, 1963), p. 32. 9. Ibid., pp. 24–31. For the background to this mission, see W. B. Patterson, James VI and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 77–123; and R. J. Lyall, ‘The Marketing of James VI and I: Scotland, England and the Continental Book Trade’, Quaerendo, 32 (2002), 204–17: pp. 215–16. 10. Poems, ed. Gullans, p. 241; all references to Ayton’s poems are based on this edition. 11. Ibid., p. 281. 12. There is an interesting analogue in the presence of at least two, and probably more, poems by other hands among the works of Alexander Montgomerie in the principal manuscript of his verse (EUL MS. De.3.70), which may well have been produced from a collection of papers not unlike that comprising the Hawthornden MSS.; see R. J. Lyall, Alexander Montgomerie: Poetry, Politics and Cultural Change in Jacobean Scotland (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005).

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13. For an early assessment of one aspect of this indebtedness, see Matthew P. McDiarmid, ‘The Spanish Plunder of William Drummond of Hawthornden’, Modern Language Review, 44 (1949), 17–25. 14. David Atkinson, ‘William Drummond as a Baroque Poet’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 26 (1991), 394–409. 15. Poetical Works, ed. Kastner, vol. 2, p. 12. 16. Ibid., p. 333.

7 ‘Twice done and then done double’: Equivocation and the Catholic Recusant Hostess in Shakespeare’s Macbeth Matthew Baynham

In this essay I want to question the scholarly consensus about the relationship between Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot. In general, that consensus is that the play criticizes the doctrine and practice of equivocation by its depiction of the Witches, and satirizes it in the Porter Scene. There is little doubt that the Porter satirizes the Jesuit Henry Garnet and the Gunpowder plotters and specifically the doctrine and practice of equivocation. Equivocation is the language of the road to hell, of which the Porter keeps the gate; and Hell is the destination of the Plotters, despite their claim to have committed treason for God’s sake: ‘Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven: 0! come in, equivocator’ (2.3.8–12).1 Garry Wills argues that Macbeth should be thought of as a Gunpowder Play, one of several amounting to a genre that dealt with the Plot in very similar terms.2 More recently, Richard Wilson has extensively re-read the Witches as something like Jesuits in disguise, with their sexual ambiguity explained by allusion to lines in The Whore of Babylon where Dekker’s Jesuits are ordered ‘Be shaven and be old women, take all shapes / To escape taking.’3 In fact, even Wills argues that Macbeth is more complex and ambiguous in its relation to equivocation than some of the other Gunpowder Plays; but I want to suggest two kinds of further evidence for that complexity. First, as the title suggests, I will examine the relationship between equivocation and the Catholic recusant hostess and look at how that relates to the duplicitous hostess Lady Macbeth in 1.6. Secondly, I will look in some detail at the character of Rosse. In some productions of Macbeth, Rosse is represented as a bit of a weasel: and I must confess that by the time this essay was completed, he had weaselled his way into it at greater length than I first expected. 101

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I think the first mistake we make in looking at the relationship between Macbeth and the Gunpowder Plot is to associate equivocation too closely with Henry Garnet. We thus begin the history of equivocation at too late a date, whereas there is credible evidence that Shakespeare had an earlier point in mind. Garnet’s A Treatise of Equivocation is of uncertain date. Perhaps, like several recusant works, it first circulated privately amongst the Catholic faithful. But the Treatise was almost certainly written and promulgated ex post facto, some time after the doctrine had been developed and used by the recusants and, in particular, after the trial of Garnet’s Jesuit colleague, Robert Southwell, in 1595. At that trial, the doctrine of equivocation was a central issue. And this is vital, because Southwell’s trial and indeed his execution were some years before the Gunpowder Plot and therefore, of course, some years before the writing of Macbeth. We can be fairly sure of the circumstances which necessitated the use of equivocation. The whole enterprise of the Jesuit mission in England could be compromised if recusants had to tell the truth when a King’s Officer asked them ‘Is there a priest in the house?’ They needed to lie: but to lie to a King’s Officer was to run the risk of being accused of treason. The doctrine of equivocation was used as a defence against that accusation. There is a story still current in Ireland, the source of which I have not been able to trace,4 of a Catholic hostess who had a priest hidden in a priest’s hole under the floorboards of her house. When asked, ‘Is there a priest here?’, she replied, ‘Not unless I’m standing on him.’ One need only read the accounts of the extraordinary set-piece priest searches, lasting for three days and more, to know that the story must be apocryphal. No recusant hostess could have taken such a risk. Garnet himself was arrested, at Hindlip near Worcester, after a five-day search which would certainly not have overlooked something as obvious as that. However, the story neatly encapsulates the use to which equivocation needed to be put. Here a Catholic hostess tells the truth, but conceals her meaning. It is equivocation tout simple. It is probable that the doctrine was seriously taught internally as well as externally: that is to say, it is probable that as well as being taught as a possible legal defence, it was also used pastorally to reassure devout recusants that they would commit no sin if they lied to the priesthunter. It was certainly alleged at the trial of Robert Southwell that he had taught people how to equivocate to protect themselves and their priests, and had assured them that it was moral to do so under oath. It is to the arrest, trial and execution of Southwell that I now turn. F. W. Brownlow writes: In January 1592, a woman called Anne Bellamy, daughter of a Catholic family who lived at Uxenden just outside London, was committed to the Gatehouse prison for recusancy. There [the priesthunter Richard] Topcliffe either seduced or raped her    she was persuaded to lure Southwell to her family’s house, thus betraying the priest    On 25th June Southwell set

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out from London for Uxenden with her brother Thomas. Arrived at the house, he preached to a large congregation of family and tenants. That night, Topcliffe and his private army broke into the house, and captured Southwell.5 Eventually, Southwell was put on trial as a traitor. Like Garnet later, he vigorously denied the charge. He had indeed, only six months before his arrest, published an open letter to Queen Elizabeth, protesting the loyalty of Catholics to the crown and state.6 By functioning as a priest, Southwell was clearly guilty of treason under the statute of 1585, but there was not in his case a clearly treasonous activity like the Gunpowder Plot – with which Garnet was to be associated, however tangentially. Perhaps for this reason, at Southwell’s trial the Crown sought to undermine his reputation for holiness by accusing him of teaching Anne Bellamy to lie. Bellamy, now Mrs Nicholas Jones, testified against him that he had taught her to equivocate, if she were asked if she had seen a priest. Southwell probably came out about even in the courtroom jousting about equivocation which was a substantial part of the trial, but in any case the result of the trial was never really in doubt. He was convicted and later hanged, drawn and quartered. Southwell’s betrayal, arrest and trial, then, are really a more proper starting point for a consideration of equivocation in relation to the English Jesuit mission. Equivocation was needed above all as a putative defence for Catholic hosts and hostesses, and was taught to them for pastoral reasons. In at least this one case, however, the hostess allegedly so taught betrayed the priest in her family’s house, both by enabling his arrest and by giving evidence against him at his trial. Let me now turn to a slightly later treacherous hostess: Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth. First, it is important to note the emphasis and frequency with which this title occurs on the lips of her guest, Duncan. ‘Hostess’ is not only Duncan’s last word onstage (‘By your leave, hostess’ [1.6.31]), but also his last word from offstage, in Banquo’s report to Macbeth: ‘This diamond he greets your wife withal, / By the name of most kind hostess’ (2.1.15–16). This last message is the last of Duncan’s four speeches addressed to Lady Macbeth. The other three are all in 1.6, and each of them (and thus all four of four) contains the word. The emphasis is striking. Lady Macbeth, then, is importantly a hostess. But the language which she uses when addressed as hostess by Duncan is significantly related to the theme of equivocation: All our service, In every point twice done, and then done double, Were poor and single business (1.6.14–16)

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The double doubling is clearly and specifically related to the doubling of the Witches who chant ‘Double, double toil and trouble’ (4.1.10, 4.1.20, 4.1.35) and to their masters, the juggling fiends ‘That palter with us in a double sense’ (5.8.20), and this doubling is also quite clearly related to equivocation.7 Equivocation, talk with double meaning, is the Witches’ stock in trade: all their prophecies ‘sound so fair’, all of them come true, but all of them mislead Macbeth into ruin. So far, then, Lady Macbeth’s words in 1.6 appear to fit with the accepted view that this play considers equivocation as an evil. The reference to doublespeak and equivocation points to Lady Macbeth’s alliance with the Witches and the ‘murth’ring ministers’ (1.5.48) who seek to kill the king. In the very next scene, however, there is a startling move. Immediately after Duncan’s exit with his duplicitous hostess, begins the soliloquy which includes perhaps the most discussed imagery in Macbeth: what is sometimes called the Naked Babe passage.8 Notice again, that it is prefaced by an allusion to the duty of the host not to betray the guest: then, as his host, Who should against his murtherer shut the door, Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been So clear in his great office, that his virtues Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongu’d, against The deep damnation of his taking off; And Pity, like a naked new-born babe, Striding the blast, or heaven’s Cherubins, hors’d Upon the sightless couriers of the air, Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, That tears shall drown the wind. (1.7.14–25) It is startling, in the context of the discussion so far, that the imagery of this passage, almost beyond doubt, is owed to the poetry of the executed Jesuit Robert Southwell. Garry Wills argues for the influence of Southwell’s poem The Burning Babe. In a recent study note,9 I suggested that the passage owes more to a different Southwell poem: New heauen: new warre, best known to us from Benjamin Britten’s setting of it in A Ceremony of Carols. There were several printings of this text as part of the vogue for Southwell’s poetry which followed his execution. Versions of it also vary slightly, but here is one: This little Babe so few dayes olde Is come to ryfle sathans folde;

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All hell doth at his presence quake, Though he himselfe for cold doe shake: For in this weake unarmed wise The gates of hell he will surprise. With teares he fights and winnes the field, His naked breast stands for a shield; His battring shot are babish cryes, His Arrowes looks of weeping eyes, His Martiall ensignes cold and neede, And feeble flesh his warriers steede. His Campe is pitched in a stall, His bulwarke but a broken wall: The Crib his trench, hay stalks his stakes, Of Sheepheards he his Muster makes; And thus as sure his foe to wound, The Angells trumps alarum sound. My soule with Christ joyne thou in fight, Stick to the tents that he hath pight; Within his Crib is surest ward, This little Babe will be thy guard. If thou wilt foyle thy foes with ioy Then flit not from this heavenly boy.10 Here we have the naked babe upon a horse, the angel trumpets and the weeping eyes in the space of twelve lines. I think it is a slightly closer fit than The Burning Babe, but there is every reason to suppose that if Shakespeare knew one of these poems, he knew both, since they were sometimes published in the same volume. Wills is careful not to overstate the dependence of Shakespeare’s text on Southwell: I do not think that Shakespeare is imitating Southwell, but the extraordinary conjunction of similar elements suggests that Shakespeare may have been nudged by Southwell’s poem towards this particular symbol of mercy and pity. Shakespeare’s babe is not the Christ child. It is pity in a Personified form. But the iconography is the same.11 While I respect Wills’s caution, I think that as a literary explanation of the text this analysis is insufficient. It is surely too simple to suggest that the babe is just the personification of pity and to suppose that thereby it can be easily distinguished from the Christ child of The Burning Babe or of New heauen: new warre. As Muir pointed out, this soliloquy begins with a reference to Christ’s words to Judas at the Last Supper and there is a complex of Christ imagery

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surrounding Duncan’s betrayal and death.12 The naked babe is surely part of that complex. There is also an obvious transference to the naked babe of the meekness of Duncan’s bearing and the clear innocence of his rule. So there is a direct borrowing of themes, images and exact words from Southwell here. With every proper caution about the inscrutability of the intention of the author, I find it implausible that the author could borrow this literally apocalyptic imagery and remain unaware of where he was borrowing it from. Indeed, if there were ever a passage in Shakespeare where the imagery was stretched for and sought out from an unlikely lexicon, surely this is it. It is the next step, however, that is more interesting and, at this stage in Southwell research, more speculative. If one can argue, with reasonable assurance, that Shakespeare had this poetry in his mind, is it not also probable that he associated it with its Jesuit author? In other words, is it the case that in this alleged Gunpowder Play, which satirizes and criticizes the practice of equivocation, Shakespeare nonetheless knowingly uses the poetry of a saintly Jesuit priest, who was betrayed by his equivocating hostess to his ultimate death, vividly to describe the saintly king who has just entered the house of the double-talking hostess who will betray him to his death also? I am struck, indeed, by the extent to which Macbeth’s description of Duncan could apply to Southwell himself. It seems that there was great sympathy for him, because of his reputation for humble piety and his courage under torture. Of the procession to the hanging, Garnet wrote, ‘His courage and nobility and gentleness, the beauty of his face and form so won the hearts of all that even the mob of sightseers gave it as their verdict that this was the properest man that they had ever seen come to Tyburn for hanging.’13 Garnet was not by any means an unbiased observer, but it is very probable that the immense posthumous popularity of Southwell’s poetry was a reflection of the popularity of the man. His subsequent canonization has perhaps rather compromised the objectivity of some of his biographers, but it too is reasonable evidence of his goodness of character. His betrayal, torture and death certainly appear to have aroused much pity. There are, indeed, few men of whom it could more truly be said that his virtues plead like angels against the deep damnation of his taking off. This raises directly the question of whether Southwell was personally known to Shakespeare. The present state of Southwell research leaves such a question tantalizingly unanswered, though such a connection has often been alleged. One strong recent advocate is Michael Wood, who writes in the book which accompanied his BBC series In Search of Shakespeare: ‘The Southwell connections also await close attention. Astonishingly he is not indexed in recent Shakespeare biography. [We do not have] a full-length study.’14 Since I completed an initial draft of this essay, Richard Wilson has expounded with full approval the theory that Southwell addressed to

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Shakespeare some praise and some criticism of his poetry. What is known is that Southwell wrote a letter addressed ‘To my worthy good cousin, Master W. S.’ which was published (though much later in 1616) with Southwell’s poem St Peter’s Complaint. Shakespeare was indeed a distant relation of Southwell. Wilson argues that Southwell’s dedication of St Peter’s Complaint makes direct criticism of Shakespeare’s choice of a pagan theme in Venus and Adonis: Still finest wits are ’stilling Venus’ rose, In paynim toys the sweetest veins are spent, To Christian works few have their talents lent.15 For Wilson, and also for Gary Taylor, Southwell thus laments what was in fact a strategy which Shakespeare adopted throughout his career: avoiding religious issues either so as to conceal his recusant sympathies altogether, or to express his distance from the more extreme forms of recusancy advocated by the Jesuits and their more zealous adherents.16 Wilson argues similarly that in Macbeth the strategy of blaming the Jesuits (in Wilson’s reading, the Witches as well as Farmer/Garnet) is explained by Shakespeare’s need to distance himself from the recusant Warwickshire families whose members were actually guilty of the Gunpowder Plot. I am sure that there are reasonable grounds to suggest that Shakespeare and Southwell knew each other, and that Shakespeare is the ‘W. S.’ of the published letter. In those circumstances, Southwell would have been dutybound to encourage his cousin to put his outstanding talents to the use of the Catholic cause, which for Southwell was obviously all-embracing. That Shakespeare did not do so is clear; but what can be argued from that must be argued more or less from silence – ‘This is a book about what Shakespeare did not write’ writes Wilson – and while Taylor may be right to assert that, in context, that silence must be construed as an act, rather than merely an absence, our interpretation of it will always be speculative, especially when there is so much other noise and activity which Shakespeare provides. What his contemporaries say about Shakespeare is that he wrote with surprising ease and fluency. It is clear too that ‘paynim toys’ informed his art at the very deepest level: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the comedies, Empedocles’ contrarious cosmology in the tragedies, Plutarch’s Roman history in the Roman plays and so on. In Southwell, the springs of his poetry and his religion are unmistakably one, and also informed by his experience of continental Catholic aesthetics: neither of these things is true of his cousin. Returning to Macbeth, I think that acceptance of Shakespeare’s acquaintance with Southwell increases the probability that his reliance on New heauen: new warre is sympathetic. It is important to stress that it is by no means clear that the Gunpowder Plot diminished Southwell’s personal or literary popularity, perhaps because his publication of the Supplication had emphasized his loyalty to England. The thesis that Shakespeare knew

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Southwell well enough to correspond with him probably means, in any case, that his reaction to his death must have been primarily personal. Let me turn, secondly, to Rosse. One equivocal question which Macbeth faces squarely is whether it is right for Macduff to leave his wife and children in danger while he goes to England to seek Malcolm’s return. Malcolm himself asks Macduff: Why in that rawness left you wife and child (Those precious motives, those strong knots of love), Without leave-taking? (4.3.26–8) And, of course, these words echo Lady Macduff’s earlier angry complaint: His flight was madness: when our actions do not, Our fears do make us traitors       to leave his wife, to leave his babes, His mansion, and his titles, in a place From whence himself does fly? He loves us not: (4.2.3–4, 6–8) Macduff certainly blames himself, but perhaps not so much for leaving them as, more biblically, by regarding his children’s fate as judgement for the sins of their father: ‘Sinful Macduff! /   Not for their own demerits, but for mine, / Fell slaughter on their souls’ (4.3.223, 4.3.225–6). The audience probably remains unsure whether he was ‘wise’ and ‘judicious’. In these exchanges, Lady Macduff and Macduff share the same interlocutor: the ‘worthy Thane of Rosse’. This apparently minor character is a key go-between in the play and his relation to the themes of this essay is particularly interesting. Macduff’s journey to England, says Rosse, is equivocal, in that it can be explained in either of two ways: ‘You know not,’ he says to Lady Macduff, ‘Whether it was his wisdom or his fear’ (4.2.4–5). Then, when he tries to break to Macduff the news of the murder of his family, Rosse himself at first equivocates: Macd How does my wife? Rosse Why, well. Macd And all my children? Rosse Well, too. Macd The tyrant has not batter’d at their peace? Rosse No; they were well at peace, when I did leave ‘em. (4.3.176–9)

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‘At peace   ’, of course, because they have died and gone to heaven, which is why they can also be said to be doing ‘well’. As in the Irish story, this is equivocation in its simplest form. Analysis of Rosse’s speeches and appearances suggests that this equivocation is consistently typical of him. Adrian Poole has noted that this ambiguity is also matched by something unidentifiable and strange about his appearance.17 Three times, people are unsettled by or unsure of what Rosse looks like: Dun Who comes here? Mal The worthy Thane of Rosse. Len What a haste looks through his eyes! So should he look That seems to speak things strange. (1.2.46–8) Ban Who’s here? Enter Rosse and Angus (1.3.88 and SD) Enter Rosse Macd See, who comes here. Mal My countryman; but yet I know him not. Macd My ever-gentle cousin, welcome hither. Mal I know him now. Good God, betimes remove The means that makes us strangers! (4.3.159–63) Most importantly, at one point Rosse himself explicitly participates in this confusion about his identity: ‘But cruel are the times, when we are traitors, / And do not know ourselves’ (4.2.18–19). As these words suggest, this difficulty of personal identity is implicated in a difficulty of national identity and relation to the nation. Here Rosse calls himself and those like him a traitor. In 4.3, as we have seen, Malcolm somehow fails to know the man whom he can yet recognize as a fellow national, a fellow Scot. Rosse himself amplifies this doubt about national identity and one’s relation to it: ‘Alas, poor country! / Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot / Be call’d our mother, but our grave’ (4.3.164–6). This ambiguity of identity is matched by the persistent theme of ambiguity in Rosse’s speeches. Many critics have suggested that the play has a hidden comparison between Macbeth, who becomes the treacherous Thane of Cawdor, and the previous treacherous Thane; but it is Rosse’s description of the fight between them that explicitly sets up this comparison: Macbeth ‘Confronted him with self-comparisons, / Point against point, rebellious arm ’gainst arm’ (1.2.56–7). When Duncan then sends Rosse to convey the title of Cawdor to Macbeth, there is a related and peculiar difficulty of expression of

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Duncan’s commendation: ‘His wonders and his praises do contend, / Which should be thine or his’ (1.3.92–3). As they stand literally, in fact, these lines are unintelligible, so that Rosse’s ‘strange’ speaking illustrates the ambiguity of Duncan’s response. Similarly, in Rosse’s next important contribution, night cannot be told from day; By th’clock ’tis day, And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp. Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame, That darkness does the face of earth entomb, When living light should kiss it? (2.4.6–10) What essentially characterizes all these examples is ambiguity: a factor which similarly recurs when Rosse is dealt with in performance. Whose side is he on? In Roman Polanski’s film version, famously, Rosse connived at the murders at Fife. In a recent London production, with Sean Bean as Macbeth, Rosse was arrested by Malcolm’s soldiers in the final scene. There is perfectly good ground for this. Rosse himself has told us, after all, that he does not himself know whether he is a traitor. Here is the whole of that speech to Lady Macduff: Rosse

My dearest coz, I pray you, school yourself: but, for your husband, He is noble, wise, judicious, and best knows The fits o’th’season. I dare not speak much further: But cruel are the times, when we are traitors, And do not know ourselves; when we hold rumour From what we fear, yet know not what we fear, But float upon a wild and violent sea Each way, and move – I take my leave of you: Shall not be long but I’ll be here again. Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward To what they were before. (4.2.14–26)

The compromised self-knowledge which we have already seen is here again accompanied by the characteristic ambiguity of moving each way upon the ‘wild and violent sea’, and by the following uncertainties about leaving and returning and about whether things will improve or not. The image of the sea may specifically relate equivocation to religious doubt: ‘   for he that wavereth, is like a wave of the sea, tossed of the wind, and carried

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away. / Neither let that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. / A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways’.18 In this, Rosse’s longest and most personal speech, the tossing to and fro upon the sea seems almost emblematic of him; but what strikes me most about the heart of the speech is that any English Catholic could have said it at the time of the Gunpowder Plot: ‘cruel are the times when we are traitors.’ Here this equivocal, equivocating, character exposes the heart of the Catholic dilemma, torn between loyalty to nation and loyalty to one’s most deeply held beliefs, in which one’s personal, familial and national identities are inevitably involved. So, if the Southwell example suggests that Shakespeare looks back to a time when equivocation had a respectable face, then perhaps the treatment of Rosse depicts with feeling accuracy the state of Catholics in the aftermath of the Plot and suggests that for the recusants equivocation was not so much a strategy as an inevitable way of life. On Shakespeare and Southwell, I am sure there is more work to be done; but I have come to think that the conventional understanding of Macbeth as a Gunpowder Play, or as a play which, insofar as it deals with the Plot, explicitly and implicitly only satirizes equivocation, is seriously incomplete. I think that we must take seriously the possibility that, underneath the noisy barracking of the Porter, there is a murmur of real sympathy for the recusant position.

Notes 1. References to Macbeth are to the second Arden series version, ed. Kenneth Muir, 9th edition with corrections (New York: Methuen, 1972). 2. Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’ (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), passim. 3. Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon, 3.1.162–4, in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers, 4 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953– 1961), vol. 2; cited in Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 193 and note. 4. It was told to me by my Irish colleague, Dr John Flood. 5. F. W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996). The account of the trial which follows is indebted to Brownlow at all points. 6. An Humble Supplication to her Majesty [1591], ed. R. C. Bald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953). 7. See, most especially, Tom McAlindon, Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 200–9. 8. The passage was particularly important to New Critical understanding of Macbeth. See, for example, Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn (London: Dobson Books, 1947). 9. Notes and Queries, n.s. 50:1 (March 2003), 55. 10. The Poems of Robert Southwell S. J., ed. James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 13. 11. Wills, Witches and Jesuits, p. 134.

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12. Muir, footnote to 1.7.2. He is to some extent dependent in this passage on Roy Walker, The Time is Free (New York: Macmillan, 1949). 13. Garnet letter cited in Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell, Poet and Martyr (London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1956), p. 320. 14. Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC, 2003), p. 346. 15. Robert Southwell, St Peter’s Complaint and Saint Mary Magdalene’s Funeral Tears (Saint-Omer: Society of Jesus, 1616) A4, cited in Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, p. 126. 16. Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, passim; Gary Taylor, ‘Forms of Opposition: Shakespeare and Middleton’, English Literary Renaissance, 24 (1994), 313–14. 17. Adrian Poole, ‘Macbeth and the Third Person’, Proceedings of the British Academy, vol 105: 1999 Lectures and Memoirs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 73–92. 18. James 1.6b–8 (Geneva Bible).

8 The Romans in Britain, 1603–1614 John Kerrigan

There was controversy in 1980 when Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain opened at the National Theatre. Set in 54 BC, during Julius Caesar’s invasion, and in AD 515, when Anglo-Saxon settlers were displacing the Romanized Britons, the play is punctuated by contemporary scenes – calculated to provoke – that show the British Army in action in Northern Ireland. Brenton does not shrink from displaying the brutality of an archaic society. His play starts with a group of ancient Britons killing an outlaw and abusing a slave. But the Romans, despite their developed social order and technology, are as brutal as those they attack. In a scene that prompted Mrs Whitehouse to take the play’s director to court, three Roman soldiers, separated from their unit, murder two British ‘wogs’ and rape a third after slashing him about the buttocks with a knife.1 That scene was the more shocking because it subverted a widely held belief. As Brenton says, his play challenged ‘a rooted, popular myth from the British national consciousness. Everyone knows the Romans came to Britain. This is vaguely felt to be “a good thing”, because they built straight roads and “brought law”’ (vii). Like all popular myths this one has a history, and a key phase of its development lies in the early modern period. Medieval chroniclers had accepted the legendary history of Britain put together in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth: the tale of a line of kings reaching back to the fall of Troy, through Arthur and Brut. Once his Historia Regum Britanniae was exposed to Polydore Vergil’s critique in Anglica Historica (1534), it began to lose plausibility, even as his stories gained in contemporary resonance,2 and historians looking for reliable testimony about ancient Britain turned to Caesar, Tacitus, and other Latin authors. Geoffrey’s version of antiquity looked reassuringly like medieval England. To read William Camden’s Britannia (1586, &c.) was, by contrast, to learn that our ancestors were half-naked, painted with woad, and suspected of human sacrifice – primitives easily placed in the civility vs. barbarousness paradigm espoused by early modern colonialism.3 Of course, the situation wasn’t that simple. Patriotic conservatism kept Geoffrey’s influence alive even in texts aimed at the classically educated. 113

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Drayton’s verse chorography Poly-Olbion (1612–1622), for example, is full of Galfridian matter, and, for reasons that will become apparent, he gives a particularly strong defence of the legends to Welsh and Welsh-border rivers (the Wye, Severn, and Dee). As late as 1633, the Oxford play Fuimus Troies was using these resources to bolster native dignity in the face of Julius Caesar’s invasion. And the governing elite, schooled in classical humanism, could identify their Britishness with Roman civility and tar the mere Irish and native Americans with the brush of barbarousness. They could shift from Galfridian imperialism – both the internal imperialism of Brut, who gave suzerainty of Scotland to the kings of England, and the north European empire-building credited to King Arthur – to a colonialism that was inspired by the expansion of classical Rome. In place of Geoffrey’s belief that the Britons resembled the Romans because both descended from Troy, they began to embrace the idea that the Roman mission to conquer and civilize had translated westwards and been inherited by Britain. This idea does not preclude an irony, familiar from later postcolonial societies, that a state which breaks out of the shell of an ageing empire and claims its autonomy – as Henry VIII broke free of the power of Rome, asserting in the Act in Restraint of Appeals (1533) ‘this realm of England is an empire’4 – is likely to be imprinted not just with the ideology but the vices of the apparatus that fostered it.5 This irony troubled a number of early modern writers, especially as the Tudor imperium extended its dominion into Ireland and the New World. It permeates such poems as Spenser’s Ruines of Time (1591), which is tolerant of Boadicea’s revolt against the Romans, and laments the pride and fall of imperial Rome and its dependent, Verulamium, the Roman forerunner of St Albans, along with the vanities of Lord Burghley’s England. Classical humanists like Milton could derive from such sources as Tacitus not just an admiration for Rome’s civilizing expansionism but an approval of indigenous simplicity contrasted with Roman decadence.6 More largely, feelings about the Romans in Britain were complicated, on the one hand, by the capacity of the legend of Brut to underpin the construction of a pan-British state in 1603, and on the other, relatedly, by the cult of the British martyrs persecuted under Diocletian. A focus of devotion and pilgrimage by the twelfth century, these martyrs survived the Reformation, only lightly revised by Foxe, because they could be used to demonstrate the existence of an ancient, British Christianity pre-existing the influence of the papacy, and because their persecution for refusing to worship the pagan idols of Rome could be seen as prefiguring the martyrdom of Marian Protestants who refused to worship the idols of the Roman church. Here are potent reasons why Jacobean writers inherited a view of the Romans in Britain that could be closer to Howard Brenton than to the Enlightenment and Victorian idea that they were ‘a good thing’ who ‘brought law’. The positive qualities of ancient Britain were associated with Wales. Of Caledonia little was known. Were the Picts, as Camden thought, a section of

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the Britons unassimilated to Rome whose name indicated that their bodies were tattooed with pictures, or were they a separate people, newcomers like the Scots who arrived before them from Scythia via Spain and Ireland?7 Such uncertainties meant that, when a site of authentic Britishness was sought, writers looked to the mountainous country which had resisted Rome and kept out the Saxons. ‘The Welshmen’, as Holinshed put it, ‘are the verie Britains in deed’.8 That is a leading factor why the Jacobean plays which anticipate Brenton’s The Romans in Britain – William Rowley’s A Shoo-maker a Gentleman (c.1608), Shakespeare’s Cymbeline (c.1610), Fletcher’s Bonduca (1613) and Robert Armin’s The Valiant Welshman (1612–1614) – give Wales such prominence. But their Welsh–British grounding also allowed them to negotiate, through such topics as rape, invasion, and hybridization, both the archipelagic politics reconstituted by 1603 and the relationship between the new Jacobean state and Europe. It has been pointed out by historians that Henry VIII’s incorporation of Wales had the paradoxical effect of producing, for the first time, a coherent Welsh domain. The construction of centralized institutions had been restricted in Wales by physical geography and the dispersed rural economy. In any case, the thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman conquest created a longstanding division between the principality in the West and the Marches along the border, where authority lay with barons. The shiring of Wales under the union of 1536–1543 created a single polity, in which the gentry had more rights through election to parliament and the common law, while an Erastian reformation took root. Controlled by a Council in the Marches based at Ludlow, this new political unit was peculiarly subject to the crown, because Henry VIII preserved powers to govern it without legislation passing through the Westminster parliament. Praisers of the Tudors liked to claim that this increased the happiness of the Welsh. Crucially for the plays which interest me, however – and this is not generally realized – the status and extent of Wales were unfinished business in 1603. When James came to the English throne this was not at first apparent. Except among die-hard papists, willing to stir up Welsh patriotism on behalf of a Spanish claimant,9 his accession was welcomed. Anglo-Welsh poets discovered in regal union the fulfilment of Merlin’s prophecy in Geoffrey of Monmouth, that the Britons would be defeated by the Saxons but one day resume a leading role in Britain,10 and Welsh MPs were placed on the commission to discuss fuller union with Scotland. Yet the borders of Wales and the Marches, already redrawn in 1536–1543, remained an issue, and it is no accident that the Jacobean plays about the Romans in Britain coincide with the Four Shire Controversy of 1604–1614, during which border magnates and gentry tried to secure the same exemption from control by the Council in the Marches as had been granted to Cheshire and Bristol in the 1560s.11 The Welsh élite, who welcomed the opportunity to bring the border country under local control, resisted this. And James refused to redivide Wales,

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partly for reasons of good order in an area difficult to administer, but also because he wanted to preserve the privileges of a principality that would be granted to Prince Henry. That raised another issue. From about 1607 the rights and honours attached to Wales became topics of interest in Henry’s circle. Prompted by George Owen of Henllys, the Pembrokeshire historian, who argued that the principality had not been abolished under the Acts of Union, the case was made that Wales was uniquely attached to the crown and could be separately governed. Yet although this direct connection between the monarch and Wales was gratifying to loyal subjects, it could also be disturbing given a king with absolutist pretentions. The anomaly was patched up in 1610 when James – although he refused to change the Act of 1543 – promised not to use his power in Wales arbitrarily.12 It is often said that Cymbeline was written to celebrate the investiture in 1610 of Prince Henry, as Prince of Wales (or, more correctly – and the difference was symptomatic13 – Prince of Wales and of Britain). Whatever the truth of that, Cymbeline reflects contemporary debate, like A Shoo-maker a Gentleman and The Valiant Welshman, by presenting ancient Wales as a separate entity. There is no developed sense of an independent authority in Shakespeare’s Cambria, and Cymbeline is called King of Britain, yet when the Roman envoy, Lucius, is denied tribute in London and sets out for Milford Haven, he is given an escort only as far as the Severn.14 In The Valiant Welshman – which was performed by an acting company called the Prince of Wales’s Men – Caradoc, prince of ancient Powys (and thus of a realm which encroached on the early modern border shires) marries the daughter of the King of North Wales, consolidating a Welsh polity; when Guiderius appeals to him for help against the Romans, it is as the King of Britain appealing to a Welsh monarch. In these works Wales is picked out as a retrospective guarantor of the legitimacy of the new British state, a taproot into antiquity, but also as a distinct dominion in the manner of Wales in Jacobean debate. The arguments around the four shires and Jacobean royal authority would not have been so vigorous were Wales the placidly incorporated principality that historians sometimes write of. It is clear even from their writings in, or translated into, English that the Welsh literati were not lacking in pride and resentment. In his preface to The History of Cambria (1584), for example, David Powel complains that the Welsh have been condemned as rebellious without their circumstances being understood. Pointing out that Edward I placed the people under English officers who were ‘thought oftentimes to be ouer-severe and rigorous for their owne profit and commoditie’,15 he laments the oppression of the country by Henry IV, after Owain Glyndˆwr’s rising.16 Welsh intellectuals had particularly tense relations with the Scots. It was resented that Hector Boece, for instance, had argued that Caractacus and Boadicea were Caledonian leaders.17 Denying that the Scots had saved Britain from Julius Caesar’s invasion, Humphrey Llwyd noted that ‘the most cruell, and sauage nations the Readshankes and Scottes’ had – like their medieval

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descendants – attacked their Romanized neighbours while its young men were fighting in France.18 The accession of James to the English throne gave these relations a further twist, as Welsh writers (like some of the Irish)19 claimed the king as one of their blood20 – an understandable reaction given the eagerness of English antiquaries to view him as a Saxon.21 The Welsh now tailored their patriotism to the pluralities of multiple monarchy. In ‘Cambria’ (1603), for instance, John Davies of Hereford says that, as a descendant of Camber and Owen Tudor, Prince Henry should come to Wales and govern it. Yet Welsh particularism remained strong. Looking forward to the reconstruction of Roman cities under James, Davies wanted them ‘faire as before, / That Scots, and Brittaines may mixt liue therein’.22 In a poem designed to welcome an AngloScottish prince to his Welsh inheritance, this is quietly provocative, because it denies Scots the name of Britons. It was a prickliness which the court had reason to respect, because, as advisers warned during the Four Shire Controversy, a balance had to be struck. Union was desirable, but too much of it – removing the border counties from the jurisdiction of the Council in the Marches – would endanger other elements of regional government in Britain and destabilize the Anglo-Welsh precedent for Anglo-Scottish union.23 It would also risk igniting rebellion.24 While the regal union of 1603 encouraged a certain expansiveness in the Welsh intelligentsia by making them feel central to the political mythology of Britishness,25 English views of Wales combined an acceptance of its symbolic importance with mistrust and condescension. Armin points out in his preface to The Valiant Welshman that the English are grudging in their recognition of Welsh achievements. When fears of Spanish invasion rose, Wales was looked upon as a likely point of entry. The idea that the Welsh élite remained potentially troublesome gained credibility from its participation in the earl of Essex’s Rebellion. As late as 1634, when Milton was writing Comus, the land west of the Severn was associated with riot, rapes, and robberies.26 In the English imagination, even more than in reality, Wales was poor, infertile, linguistically alien, and run by a down-at-heel élite that was, as Humphrey Llwyd admitted, given to ‘ouermuch boastying of the Nobilitie of their stocke’.27 Much of this comes through in the Jacobean plays about the Romans in Britain. Most obviously, the wars against Rome which dominate all four texts reflect a Welsh history of rebellion. We are shown an impoverished but noble life in Bonduca and Cymbeline, in the rocky places where Fletcher’s Caratach hides with the young prince Hengo, and in the mountains of Pembrokeshire where Shakespeare’s Belarius, Guiderius, and Arviragus live by hunting and grubbing up roots. Above all, Wales is a site of magic and romance, not just because the miraculous is inextricable from the Galfridian history that still shaped perceptions of Wales, but because North Wales and the former Marches were associated with superstitious recusancy. This gives rise to the

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border country witchcraft of The Valiant Welshman, where Caradoc, like the Elder Brother in Milton’s Maske, who uses a sprig of haemony against Comus, has to see off a monstrous serpent with a sprig of moly. And it contributes to A Shoo-maker a Gentleman, where Rowley exploits another paradox that I must now bring into focus: the association of Wales with ancient, primitive Christianity yet also with unreformed religion. Both the origin of British Protestantism and its threatening, recusant opposite, Jacobean Wales could stand for what it was not. ∗

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Many people resisted Polydore Vergil’s historical revisionism lest it damage the case for Britain having received Christianity without the mediation of Rome. Again, the Welsh gave a lead. In the widely read Epistol at y Cembru (‘Address to the Welsh Nation’) which prefaced the Welsh version of the New Testament (1567), the cleric Richard Davies followed Geoffrey of Monmouth in saying that Christianity came to Britain with Joseph of Arimathea, and was established before King Lles the son of Coel corresponded with the Bishop of Rome in the second century. After the invasion of the Saxons, paganism pushed the faith back into Cambria, and when St Augustine came from the pope to convert the Saxons he brought with him a debased, formal religion. For a time the Britons maintained the purity of their faith, but eventually they were drawn in by the tentacles of Rome. Davies highlights the irony that an anciently believing nation should have sunk into recusancy; playing on the Welsh sense of political inferiority, he urges his countrymen to recover the ‘one excellent virtue’ which gave them ‘a privilege and a pre-eminence, namely, undefiled religion’.28 After Augustine’s mission, he says, the Welsh Bishops (anticipating Henry VIII) refused to accept the pope’s authority. In the same vein, he finds protoProtestantism in the British bard Taliesin, who lived in the time of King Arthur and wrote: ‘Woe to the worldly priest who does not rebuke evil passion, and who does not preach. Woe to him who does not protect his fold and being a shepherd does not watch. Woe to him who does not protect with his pastoral staff his sheep from the Roman wolves.’29 Lamenting the destruction of Welsh books during the centuries of war with the English, Davies uses the evidence of proverbs to show that his people had the scripture in their own tongue of old. English Protestants might seem excluded by this, but they could affiliate themselves with Davies’ story through the Henrician union and its associated Reformation, and they were stirred by his complaints about the unreformed darkness of Wales. Spenser, for example, represents Davies in The Shepheardes Calender (1579) as Diggon Davie, the pastor who pursued his ministry in ‘a farre countrye’ and found its church asset-stripped by noblemen, and its flocks infiltrated by Roman wolves.30 Davies’ account of the primitive church

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made Wales, which helped underpin Tudor legitimacy, the guarantor also of ecclesiastical independence from the pope.31 As a result, he was consulted by such English divines as Matthew Parker, who had an interest in the Saxon church.32 And his message did not become less potent when Britain acquired a single defender of the faith in 1603. Common ground was nowhere clearer than in Davies’ account of the Romans in Britain. Medieval collections of saints lives had not neglected the martyrdom of Christians by Diocletian and his underlings in Britain. But these deaths were peculiarly important to Davies’ generation, who had witnessed Queen Mary’s execution of Protestants in the 1550s – some of them in Wales. Since the blood of ancient British martyrs ran in their veins, Davies believed, the Welsh should embrace the faith that this blood had bought for them ‘perfect and uncorrupt’.33 English reformers like John Foxe could not claim a blood-link but they also saw the sufferings of the Diocletian saints at the hands of pagan Rome as foreshadowing the martyrdom of reformers by an idol-worshipping Roman church. After 1603, the martyrs were wellplaced to articulate new infra-British confluences and demarcations, and their potential was realized in Rowley’s A Shoo-maker a Gentleman – a rich historical fantasia, staged for popular audiences at the Red Bull theatre. The star of this show is Winifred, who enters ‘in a blacke vaile’ C2v . One does not expect the heroine of a Red Bull play to be a crypto-nun, a version of the St Winifred who, to the consternation of reformers, continued to attract thousands to the holy well in Flintshire which reputedly did miraculous cures. In Caxton’s version of The Golden Legend, the source-at-one-remove of Rowley’s play, the martyr’s story is told. She was a Welsh maiden decapitated by a lustful Welsh prince who demanded her virginity. A spring of fresh water welled up where her head fell to the ground. Revived by a holy man, she lived as an abbess, with only a fine scar round her neck to show where she had been decapitated. Much remains in the play’s treatment of post-Apostolic miracles that a hot Protestant such as Foxe would disapprove of. At one point, the Roman persecutor Lutio loses and regains his sight through the power of Winifred’s well. Yet Rowley follows his immediate source, Deloney’s The Gentle Craft (1597?), in replacing the tale of virginity and rape – a topic which I shall return to – with a Protestant debate about whether Winifred should live a single, holy life or marry her suitor Sir Hugh, and both authors introduce her well with a miracle which is more like the vision of the Britanno-Roman emperor Constantine (acceptable to mainstream Protestants) than it is to recusant legend. An angel rises from the water, with a crucifix, to urge belief. Like some other texts, the play never quite seals in its account of Winifred a distinction between the ancient fidelity and the modern superstitiousness of Wales.34 This helps Rowley map, however, both the doctrinal diversity and the geopolitical range of British Protestantism, because the crypto-Catholic ardour of Winifred, and what he sees at her well, spurs the

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‘Cambrian sectarist’ Amphiabell (a puritan sort of description) to go from Wales to Verulamium to convert the agent of Roman rule, Albon.35 Neither Amphiabell nor Albon appears in The Gentle Craft; they come into the drama from Rowley’s own reading of The Golden Legend, and also, probably, of Foxe. Moreover, in the legend Amphiabell does not meet Winifred, and he does not go to Wales until after he has converted Albon. So the play, unlike its sources, reinforces the Welsh–British idea that the origin of pure religion lay in the Wales that now needed reform. The British idea in this case did not diminish England. For it is an equivocally integrationist feature of Jacobean plays about ancient Britain that they are keen to issue reminders of later, Saxon history – as though the impending formation of a British state created a backflow of English pride towards previously undervalued Saxon origins. In King Lear, the British-Galfridian royal house shares the action with the Saxon-named Edgar and Edmund. In Bonduca, the child-prince Hengo has a name which hints at Hengist, the leader of the Kentish Saxons at the much later time when the British were being displaced. And in A Shoo-maker a Gentleman the romantic leads are young British princes who somehow turn out to be Offa and Eldred. Nothing in his sources would have led Rowley to believe that King Offa was alive during the reign of Diocletian. We are dealing with historical telescoping rather like that found in Howard Brenton. There may be nothing as explicitly topical in A Shoo-Maker a Gentleman as Brenton’s introduction of the Northern Irish troubles into The Romans in Britain, but the marks of recent archipelagic history on the martyrs are just as clear. Thus Rowley puts the ancient Briton Albon into a Reformation context. Early in the play, he promises: ‘Albon shall still as substitute to Rome / Observe, and keepe her high imperiall Doome’ B3v . After his conversion, he says that he cannot persecute Christians because, like Henry VIII in 1534, he is an Englishman free of Rome. Similarly, when the Romans find Amphiabell and Winifred together in Wales, they use words that elide the Diocletian and the Marian persecutions: ‘turne unto Rome, and worship give unto / Our Golden gods’ E4r . When the pair resist, they are taken to Verulamium to see Albon martyred. Three victims become four, as the Welsh prince Sir Hugh, who has become a shoemaker to avoid persecution, is so appalled to see his mistress a prisoner that he ‘rusht in amongst them    rail’d on the Roman gods    and swore he would dye if she did’ H2v . The Christians are then tortured and executed – popular scenes, no doubt, the flavour of which can be gathered from the gory woodcut ‘of the 10 persecutions of the primitive church’ tipped into later editions of Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, and often printed separately. Meanwhile, Offa and Eldred take up careers as shoemakers alongside Sir Hugh, apprenticed to the same merry master and bustling wife. One shows his mettle when the emperor’s daughter falls in love with him. There is a charming comedy of shoe-fitting and foot-fondling, as Leodice fights with

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her feelings and her prejudice against his lowly status. The other enlists in the Roman army and fights the Goths and the Vandals, twice saving Diocletian’s life. This display of British valour elicits a favour which seals the stay-at-home brother’s marriage with Leodice. It is not the only permission granted. At the end of the general rejoicing, after the Romans have divided Britain to be governed north and south by Eldred and Offa, the latter says A Church then, and a beauteous Monastery On Holmhurst-Hill, where Albon lost his head, Offa shall build; which Ile St. Albons name, In honour of our first English Martyrs fame.    and his Roman father-in-law replies: ‘Build what Religious Monuments you please, / Be true to Rome, none shall disturbe your peace’ L1v –2r . As though the horrors of execution can be instantly forgotten, the play shifts modes, and Rome shuffles off its identity by name and analogy with the CounterReformation church. But ‘our first English Martyrs fame’ is equally striking. Offa finally erases Albon’s British identity. It is tempting to conclude that A Shoomaker is flatly Anglocentric as well as opportunistic about the meanings of Rome. By the end of it, the Welsh characters are dead and the scene has shifted to St Albans. The island has been divided north and south, no-one (pace King James) urging union. And the protomartyr of Albion has been reclassified as English, with a Saxon proposing his memorial. Yet Rowley has changed his sources to emphasize the Welshness of the British saints, and thus how much Protestant England owes to the principality. Winifred’s well and the Cambrian martyrdoms create the most lasting stage images. So although the play touches down in the patriotism of its London audience, making the Saxons the inheritors (in a way Archbishop Parker would appreciate) of the virtues of the primitive British church, it avoids xenophobia, and within the limits of the theatrical vocabulary available at the Red Bull, it celebrates the hybrid and devolved make-up of British religion. It shows popular theatre reaching an accommodation with the politics of 1603. ∗

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I began with the scene in The Romans in Britain in which three Roman soldiers kill a couple of ancient Britons on a riverbank and cut up and rape a third. It was this episode which landed the play’s director in court. Yet although the scene is extreme, it is not untypical of works that deal with imperialism. Rape can be a symptom of, but also symbolize, the penetration of one culture by another: the violence of the rapist rendered reckless by a sense of cultural superiority, the trauma of a victim who is not just personally

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violated but carries within him or herself the pain of a wounded social order. For the damaging power of rape depends on the physical act having psycho-social implications. In Brenton it is the initiate Druid Marban who is raped, and who then at Caesar’s hands has an image of Venus hung about his neck before he is sent back to his people. We later see Marban killing himself because through his degradation he understands that the Romans will displace the British gods and destroy the value systems of his society. Among the Jacobean plays that deal with the Romans in Britain, rape – virtual, attempted, and actual – recurs. One reason for this is that, historically, the best-documented British uprising against Rome, that of the Iceni led by Boudica (i.e., Boadicea, Bonduca, and Voada), was sparked off by an incident in which she was whipped and her daughters raped by Romans.36 John Fletcher’s Bonduca deals with that rebellion, although, in line with the stress on Wales in these plays, it merges the queen’s revolt with that of Caradoc, Caratacus, or Caratach – generally thought of as a leader of Welsh or border country tribes, though in reality the son of Cunobellinus, Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. In Armin’s The Valiant Welshman, a Roman tries to rape Voada herself, who is translated from the territory of the Iceni in what is now East Anglia to being a princess of the Welsh border country. And in Cymbeline, the earliest and most influential of these plays, a virtual rape by voyeurism triggers the heroine’s journey into Wales and her co-operation with the enemy, Rome. In all three works, conflict between Rome and Britain is articulated through sexual violence in situations shaped by the politics of Jacobean union. The ongoing importance of rape in Bonduca can be gauged from the queen and her daughters’ last stand in a stronghold that the Romans assail with rams. In keeping with the sexualized scenario, a bowl of poison and two swords are produced as instruments of suicide. The second daughter imagines an afterlife ‘where no Wars come, / Nor lustful slaves to ravish us’, and before the elder daughter stabs herself, she cries out to the besiegers: your great Saint Lucrece Dy’d not for honour; Tarquin topt her well, And mad she could not hold him, bled.37 (4.4.111–12, 4.4.117–19) These (tonally volatile) suicides are not, though, the end of the play. With more than an act to go, Bonduca concentrates on Caratach who is retreating with the boy prince Hengo to what he calls ‘my Countrey’ (4.2.85). The importance of Wales was a given in Fletcher’s material because in Holinshed Voadicia’s rebellion broke out during the absence of Roman troops in Anglesey. But Fletcher gives the country greater prominence, not just merging but reversing the order of Caradoc’s and Bonduca’s campaigns, so that the action

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devolves towards Wales. Indeed, Caratach and Hengo find a resting place in a precipitous, stony height – some sort of onstage structure – that resembles the stronghold of Caractacus placed by Holinshed in the Welsh borders.38 When the Romans attack Holinshed’s Caractacus his men retreat to the hilltops. In Cymbeline, as the invading Romans advance, Belarius says to the princes: ‘Sonnes, / Wee’l higher to the Mountaines, there secure v[s]’.39 The last act of Bonduca starts in the same Cambro-British way, with Caratach musing over Hengo, ‘Thus we afflicted Britains climb for safeties’ (5.1.1). On this elevation, his love of liberty and defiance reach their zenith. In the absence of Bonduca and her daughters, however, a family romance, not unlike that centred on Shakespeare’s orphaned Posthumus, begins to join Britons and Romans. When the cortege of a Roman called Penyus goes by, Caratach tells Hengo, who lost his father before he was born, that ‘This worthy Romane / Was such another piece of endlesse honour’ (5.1.70–3). Caratach himself is talked into a noble surrender, and his question or prediction to Swetonius, ‘I am for Rome?’ (5.3.194), is tellingly ambiguous. As I shall show, the resemblance to Rowley’s play in this rapprochement with Rome is not accidental. The Welshness of Fletcher’s Caratach is rarely more than tacit, and, strictly considered, nothing in Bonduca takes place in Wales. From some angles this might look like English appropriation of a Cambro-British hero. A play about ancient Britain could not exist for post-1603 audiences, however, in a purely English perspective. It is symptomatic that, when George Powell revised it in the late seventeenth century, he introduced a Pict by the name of Macquaire who is as lasciviously attentive to Bonduca’s daughter, Claudia, as any Roman.40 That Powell’s satirical eye was directed at Scotland is as secondary as the fact that his Caratach does not speak discernibly Welsh lines. He educed the geopolitics around the play – the pan-British context it brought in train – in ways that are if anything more recognizable for this displacement. Certainly, the working out of Welsh material in The Valiant Welshman and Cymbeline involved the introduction of Scottish elements, as though the modelling of Anglo-Scottish on Anglo-Welsh union after 1603 created a dynamic whereby the more Welsh an English writer tried to be the more Scottish matter made itself felt. Reinventing himself as an English monarch, King James apologized to the (Welsh-descended) Robert Cecil for the ‘very rude Scottish spelling’ in one of his published works by saying that transcribers had corrupted it into ‘good Britaine language or rather Welsh’.41 Ambitious Scots now joined the Welsh in claiming to be ‘British’ in order to gain admission to the English-based power-structure that controlled the three kingdoms. Out of this overlap between the two peoples (most readily perceived by Englishmen, who categorized them both as not-English) came the possibility of substitution. Anthony Munday’s London pageant, SideroThriambos (1618), thus brings an ‘ancient Brittish Bard’ out of his grave to address the crowd not in Welsh or Anglo-Welsh but in Scots.42

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On the face of it such dislocations are irrelevant to The Valiant Welshman. The ‘ancient Bardh’ raised from the grave to introduce this play is a firmly ‘Welsh poet’,43 and the action is centred in Cambria. Son of the earl of March, Caradoc helps Octavian, King of North Wales, fight and defeat a would-be usurper, and marries Octavian’s daughter. He is then summoned by Gederus, King of Britain, to help resist the Roman demand for tribute. Undermined in Gederus’ eyes by a message that says he is a traitor, he fights the Romans disguised as a common soldier and is given a golden lion by the emperor Claudius as a token for sparing his life. Boudica has already put in an appearance as Caradoc’s sister, Voada; she is now saved from being raped by the Roman, Marcus Gallicus. Caradoc, visiting York to persuade Venusius to fight against Rome, is betrayed and taken to the imperial city. While British forces defeat the Roman army on home ground, he enjoys the moral victory of showing Claudius the golden lion. Heroic stuff, but the risible side of Welshness is also represented. Just as Cymbeline simultaneously includes classical Romans and the Renaissance Italian Iachimo, so Armin’s play combines noble ancient Britons, who speak conventional English, with a Stuart Welshman (ostensibly an ancient earl of Anglesey) who swears ‘By the pones of Saint Tauy’ 1v –2r . Yet if this is a doubly Welsh play, it is also, as I have hinted, part-Scottish. For Armin, like Fletcher, combines Caradoc and Voadicia in a single plot, by drawing on some version of Hector Boethius’s account of ancient Caledonia, most likely via Holinshed’s History of Scotland. In this tradition, Voada, the sister of Caratake, King of Scotland, is put aside by her husband, King Arviragus of Britain, in favour of a Roman wife. Released from prison by her British subjects, she escapes to Wales. Advised by a lord called Comus (possibly remembered by Milton), the Welsh ask Caratake to help her get revenge, and assisted by Picts and Scots they fight the Romans and Arviragus to a draw. Eventually defeated, Voada takes her own life, and one of her daughters marries a Roman called Marius who had previously deflowered her.44 I have mentioned the quarrel between Welsh and Scottish historians over Boethius’s location of Boadicea and Caratacus. He moved these figures north because they were valuable cultural capital. If Voada and Caratake were Alban, they could backdate Scottish independence while making it clear that the Picts and Scots had long been willing to lead British resistance to continental invaders. To the English, who had political dominance within Britain, the siting of these stories mattered less. Thus, in William Warner’s predominantly anglocentric45 Albions England, the Scottish version of Voada is adopted despite the Latin evidence and the patriotic gratification that might flow from claiming her for East Anglia.46 The Scottish account is more selectively followed by Armin because his aim was not to exclude England and Wales as bases for Boadicea but to place them, in a post-1603 spirit, within a British scheme.47

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The attempted rape in The Valiant Welshman fits these composite geopolitics because Voada is not removed from the orbit of the Scottish story by the recasting of Holinshed’s Marius into Marcus Gallicus, yet her being Caradoc’s sister draws her into a Welsh narrative. Meanwhile the rapist’s lust is firmly related to Rome. We are asked to behold how Marcus Gallicus comes ‘like Bloudy Tarquin’ into Voada’s bedroom, while she, in the style of Lucrece, cries: ‘For shame forbear, and cleare a Romans name, / From the suspition of so foule a sinne’. The episode H3v –4v  ends in farce, yet it begins to turn the British tide against the Roman invaders. It was patriotic of Armin to contradict his sources and give Voada and her allies victory; but he does not end his play on a xenophobic note. Instead, he inspects the behaviour of Caradoc in Rome. When the besieged Bonduca is asked to submit in Fletcher, she asks ‘If Rome be earthly, why should any knee / With bending adoration worship her?’ (4.4.15–16). The same pattern recurs when Caradoc refuses to kowtow to Claudius: I was not borne to kneele, but to the Gods, Nor basely bow vnto a lumpe of clay, In adoration of a clod of earth.    I3v  In A Shoo-maker a Gentleman, Rome could not so persuasively represent idolatrous Catholicism were it not associated with the idea of earthly power becoming an impious object of admiration, centre of an emperor cult, even (as in The Ruines of Time) an emblem of the world’s vanities. This Protestantized anti-imperialism reinforces the British defiance of Rome in Bonduca and The Valiant Welshman – defiance that will have carried a topical accent for early audiences, anxious about King James’s Caesarian aspirations, his Scottish liking for Roman law rather than common law, and so on. But there is also the pattern that runs through these plays and extends to Cymbeline, by which Britons put conflict behind them and unite with Rome: for in The Valiant Welshman, Caradoc compromises with Claudius. To understand that larger conformity it is worth looking back through the telescoped account of early modern history rehearsed by Armin’s play. When Caradoc brings his border forces to the aid of the King of North Wales, then marries his daughter and, in the course of helping Gederus, King of Britain, against the Romans, becomes King of Wales, he unifies an enlarged Cambria (including his ancestral Marches) within a version of Tudor union. The next phase of the action is more Jacobean in resonance, since it involves a league between Caradoc and the northern powers of Venusius. Finally, like King James ending the Elizabethan wars against continental catholicism, Caradoc agrees to live in peace with Rome without losing his freedom. ‘We

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freely giue you all your liberties’, Claudius announces, ‘And honourably will returne you home / With euerlasting peace and vnity’ I4v . The play that I shall finish with, Cymbeline, is far more peculiar and sophisticated, but it raises some of the same issues. ∗

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Brenton’s The Romans in Britain would be less adequate to its subject if the psycho-social effect of the rape were simply to anticipate the destruction of Celtic culture by colonialism. After he is assaulted Marban surprises the audience as well as the Roman soldiers by defying them in Latin (37). Told about this, Caesar is unruffled: ‘We know Druids on the mainland speak Greek. Even write it. It’s no surprise to find a little Druid in Britain, talking Latin’ (49). It was a matter of pride among early modern antiquarians that the ancients attributed a knowledge of Greek to the Druids, and said that the Gauls came to Britain to develop their learning. But the real issue, as Brenton knows, is that colonial encounters rarely happen – especially around trading empires – without a pre-history of interaction. A country drawn into tributepaying will absorb in advance some of the culture of its stronger neighbour, and may even possess knowledge that the empire considers arcane. Each of the plays I’ve looked at somewhat Romanizes ancient Britain, though it’s often hard to decide how this is meant to be registered by audiences. The references to Pluto, Cerberus, and other classical figures by Caradoc and his fellows in The Valiant Welshman might be the dramatist’s shorthand way of suggesting a pre-Christian milieu. And the illegality of stage blasphemy after 1606 might also explain the tendency of the Britons to swear by Roman gods.48 Yet Shakespeare turned these conventions and constraints to dramatic advantage, using classical references to seam British with Roman culture and to prepare for the appearance of Jupiter himself in Posthumus’ dream. The play instals a Roman deity – rather than Adraste, as in Act 3 of Bonduca – as divine governor of the isle. The growth of imperial hegemony may be at an early stage, but it is set to merge Britons and Romans into what Camden calls ‘one stocke and nation’.49 The pull of Rome is clear at the most basic level of plot. Posthumus is drawn there when banished from court for marrying Imogen. His father and two brothers fought the empire, but his royal father-in-law was knighted by Augustus Caesar and gained honour in his service. Cymbeline makes the Roman Lucius ‘welcome’ despite his declaration of war, and wishes him ‘Happines’ on departure (3.5; TLN 1912). The wicked Queen and her son are more defiant; but their deserved deaths make possible the play’s romance ending, and with them goes the chauvinism that stands between Britain and Rome. The smuggling of Cymbeline’s sons to Pembrokeshire by Belarius, another soldier who fought the Romans, reinforces

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the significance of Wales as a redoubt of resistance. Yet the princes cherish the memory of his wife, their supposed mother, Euriphile – more ‘Europhile’ than ‘Eurosceptic’. So it makes sense that their reunion with Cymbeline, after they turn the tide of battle in favour of Britain, should give him the confidence to overrule his subjects and voluntarily pay tribute to Caesar. All this makes it less surprising that Imogen’s virtual rape, like the assault on Brenton’s Marban, should reveal the proleptic penetration of Britain by Latin and by Roman culture. Classicized guilt makes Iachimo compare himself to ‘our Tarquine’ as he creeps towards Imogen’s bed (2.1; TLN 919), but when he gets there he discovers that the princess has been reading Ovid – the tale of Tereus’s rape of Philomel, ironically appropriate to her predicament, if not symptomatic of a subconscious fear, but significant also in illustrating the domestication of Roman myth. The princess’s bedtime reading shows her to be more intimate with Roman values than do the jibes of Bonduca’s elder daughter when she shouts from the tiring house that Lucrece enjoyed her rape. When Iachimo back in Rome describes the furnishings of what must have been an almost bare stage, he fills out the details of a classicized bedchamber (while making us believe in things that we didn’t see, with such ease, that Posthumus’ credulity about Imogen’s seduction in that chamber should seem more understandable). Hangings of silk and silver showed Cleopatra, he says, meeting Mark Antony on the River Cydnus: a colonial queen welcoming her future Roman lover. The goddess Diana bathing was carved on the chimney piece. The fire irons were ‘two winking Cupids’. Posthumus reacts to the account with a Roman oath: ‘Ioue’. And when Filario doubts the seduction, Iachimo’s swearing ‘By Iupiter’ adds to the proof for Posthumus (2.4; TLN 1226–1304). In emphasizing these ties with Rome, I am far from wanting to diminish the importance of archipelagic politics. As Leah Marcus has shown with almost excessive ingenuity, the composition of Cymbeline was influenced by the Jacobean union debate.50 The Anglo-Welsh axis is obvious, and, whether or not Posthumus’ name evokes the post nati (Scots born after 1603, whose right to inherit property south of the border had been legally established in 1608), his character does carry hints of Scoto-Britishness.51 It is significant, however, that Cymbeline was written after 1607 when the king’s plans for union were rejected by the House of Commons. By working in the aftermath of a many-faceted initiative, Shakespeare could play across disparate motifs, assuming a saturated, even insouciant, familiarity in the audience. To cite just one example, the prominence given to Milford Haven as the site of Roman invasion and defeat and the reunion of the royal family is in line with crown propaganda about British state-formation;52 but where Samuel Daniel’s masque for the investiture of the Prince of Wales, Tethys Festival, dutifully describes Henry VII’s landing at ‘Milford    The happy

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Port of Vnion’ as foreshadowing the conception of Prince Henry,53 Imogen’s delight at the prospect of meeting Posthumus there edges the happiness of the place into knowing and punning (haven/heaven) satire. ‘Say’, she commands Pisanio, how farre it is To this same blessed Milford. And by’ th’ way Tell me how Wales was made so happy, as T’inherite such a Haven.    (3.2; TLN 1524–9) So although Cymbeline will have been written to please the patron of Shakespeare’s acting company, the King, not to mention his Welsh patron, the earl of Pembroke,54 and (as will become clear) a potential Scottish patron, Sir James Hay, its dramaturgy is not instrumental. Shakespeare responded to the culturally opportunistic artificiality of the union project, to the mélange of myths and invented traditions which accompanied James’s initiative, by modulating from tragedy (King Lear and Macbeth) into the knowing, consciously syncretic genre of tragicomedy, in which artifice is of the essence. If any function were ascribed to Cymbeline, it would be that of compensating for the failure of union through a pan-British family romance in which a pair of Welsh-bred brothers are reunited with their London–British father and a sister who recovers her somewhat-Scottish husband. And any account along those lines would have to acknowledge that the play does not engage in easy wish-fulfilment; it does not slot Wales into Britain, or accommodate a post natus, without confusion and distress. Its interest in the Romans in Britain, and thus in the relationship between natives and strangers, is part of a scenario that deals with alienation within Britain itself – including hostility between English and Scots members of the elite.55 After all, the case of the post nati had turned on the question of whether the Scots were foreigners in England, and as late as the 1620s Scotsmen appear in the lists of aliens drawn up in London.56 These issues impinge on the virtual rape of Imogen because Iachimo’s visit to Britain (and it is neither his first nor his last) is prompted by the competitive patriotism of men of different nationalities gathered in Rome – a city, in the Iachimo scenes, contemporary with and as cosmopolitan as Jacobean London. Feminists have rightly pointed out that Posthumus fetishizes Imogen’s sexuality and uses her as negotiable property in his wager with Iachimo. The analysis is incomplete, however, if we overlook the driving force of patriotic rivalry, and Posthumus’ vulnerability as a ‘Stranger’ (1.4; TLN 344, 416). Even before he arrives, at least one Italian, a Frenchman, a Dutchman, and a Spaniard have used their mistresses as counters in a dispute about national superiority. That the Frenchman who recalls

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their quarrel also describes an earlier argument involving Posthumus in Gaul reinforces the point that such competition is a recurrent source of conflict: It was much like an argument that fell out last night, where each of vs fell in praise of our Country-Mistresses. This Gentleman, at that time vouching (and vpon warrant of bloody affirmation) his to be more Faire, Vertuous, Wise, Chaste, Constant, Qualified, and lesse attemptible then any, the rarest of our Ladies in Fraunce. (1.4; TLN 369–75) By the time he gets to Rome, ‘the Britaine’ (1.4; TLN 342) is a more seasoned traveller, who only maintains that Imogen is as excellent as any woman in Italy. His insecurity as a visitor from the reputedly barbarous island beyond the empire is, however, easily played on by Iachimo. Although it would be futile to mount a defence of Posthumus, it is worth adding that Imogen’s assertion that her husband is astonishingly superior to Cloten – an insult which triggers his vow to rape her57 – provides an ironic parallel to the men’s dispute about which of them has the best mistress. What makes her even more like Posthumus is that insecurity about foreigners obscures her view of him. She regrets she has had no time to make him ‘sweare, / The Shees of Italy should not betray / Mine Interest, and his Honour’ (1.4; TLN 297–9). When Iachimo arrives, she is quickly persuaded that Posthumus has found a Roman mistress. Despite learning from this encounter that Iachimo is at least mendacious, when Pisanio tells her that Posthumus wants her murdered she denies that Iachimo was false and concludes that her husband has fallen for ‘Some Iay of Italy / (Whose mother was her painting)’ (3.4; TLN 1720). She is still going on about this imaginary ‘Roman Curtezan’ ninety lines later. Anti-Italian/Roman prejudice is shared by other virtuous Britons, including Pisanio. It is at its strongest, however, in the plot about paying tribute. Cymbeline’s refusal to pay Lucius (unnamed in Shakespeare’s sources) no doubt reminded many of King Arthur’s defiance of another Roman Lucius who demanded tribute from Britain.58 But the Queen and Cloten strike a peculiarly insular note. Ironically, however, their speeches resonate strongly with Latin. Early audiences would have heard behind Cloten’s outburst, Britaine’s a world By it selfe, and we will nothing pay For wearing our owne Noses. (3.1; 1390–2)

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Virgil’s famous words in the Eclogues, ‘et penitus toto diuisos orbe Britannos’ [‘And Britans people quite disjoin’d from all the world besides’].59 The Queen adds Remember Sir, my Liege, The Kings your Ancestors, together with The naturall brauery of your Isle, which stands As Neptunes Parke, ribb’d, and pal’d in With Oakes vnskaleable, and roaring Waters, With Sands that will not beare your Enemies Boates, But sucke them vp to’th’ Top-mast. A kinde of Conquest Cæsar made heere, but made not heere his bragge Of Came, and Saw, and Ouer-came: (TLN 1395–1402) Beyond the familiar tag, ‘Veni, vidi, vici’, this recalls a body of classical poetry, well known in Renaissance England, describing the ocean-girdled defensibleness of Britain. The Queen might almost be engaging with the Latin lines reprinted and translated in Camden, about Britain, I say, far set apart, and by vast sea di[s]join’d, Wall’d with inaccessible banks and craggy clifts behind; Which father Nereus fensed had with billowes most invincible And Ocean likewise compassed with ebs and flowes as fallible. – lines that boast of Julius Caesar’s ability to undo the island’s apartness: ‘What heretofore was world and world is now conjoind in one.’60 When Armin echoed this scene in King Octavian’s refusal to pay the Romans tribute (C3v , he removed the intertextuality with Latin, wanting no complication of the idea that resisting Rome was right. With its recurrent, often very subtle, implication in Latinity, the balance of Cymbeline is different. Plays about the Romans in Britain had a problem with sources once Geoffrey of Monmouth’s stock fell. If they wanted to use ancient testimony, dramatists had to rely on Latin, leaving their plays open to the objection that has been levelled even against Howard Brenton,61 that any more-or-less postcolonial impulse to represent ancient Britain as the victim of empire was compromised by the materials they inherited from the colonizing power. Shakespeare capitalizes on this difficulty, making it part of the drama that the independence asserted by the Queen should be qualified by the formulations she uses. The aftershock of Imogen’s ordeal at the hands of Iachimo continues when she travels to Wales because Cloten pursues her promising to rape her on Posthumus’ corpse. There is another way, however – and I have not seen this pointed out – in which the virtual rape reverberates into later acts of the

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play. Here is the story that Belarius tells the young princes, Guiderius and Arviragus, when they come out of their cave (the upstage ‘discovery space’) in Act 3. ‘Cymbeline lou’d me’, he recalls, But in one night, A Storme, or Robbery (call it what you will) Shooke downe my mellow hangings: nay my Leaues, And left me bare to weather.    My fault being nothing (as I haue told you oft) But that two Villaines, whose false Oathes preuayl’d Before my perfect Honor, swore to Cymbeline, I was Confederate with the Romanes: (3.3; TLN 1616–27) Like Imogen, Belarius was betrayed in one night’s storm or robbery (or call it what you will). Both suffered at the hands of villains who swore against and dishonoured them: swore that Belarius was too intimate with the Romans, and that Imogen was sexually confederate with the Roman Iachimo. Belarius goes on to explain how, dogged by royal displeasure – again like Imogen – he left the court for Wales, and spent twenty years in exile. He now has his ‘Rocke’, the redoubt of a Briton, yet also what he grandly calls his ‘Demesnes’, where he enjoys the élite privilege of hunting deer (TLN 1627–34). The Welsh scenes present a utopian combination of equality with aristocratic order, a locus free of the conflict created at court when Imogen marries a worthy commoner rather than the base prince Cloten. In Cambria Shakespeare found a setting perfectly adapted to his exploration of the great romance theme of DNA, because the Welsh, as we have seen, were by their own admission given to ‘ouermuch boastying of the Nobilitie of their stocke’. Into this world comes Imogen, testing Belarius’ belief in the excellence of the youths only he knows to be royal, and hers in the uniqueness of Posthumus. At this point it is worth forgetting the levelling associations of Welsh Methodism and Trade Unionism. In the early seventeenth century, this drastically unequal society combined an old kin structure, celebrated by the bards, with a tradition of cymortha, or armed retaining, that edged into lawlessness.62 As Richard Davies complained in his preface to the New Testament, Welsh noblemen fostered brigandage.63 Shakespeare’s princes are outlaws, in danger of being pursued into the mountains. Like the Welshmen described by Humphrey Llwyd, they avoid physical labour, and are naturally attuned to ceremony.64 In fact, they represent what is parodied in stage Welshmen like the beggarly Caradock of Thomas Randolph’s Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery (1651), who thinks even his lice descended from Aeneas: a glittering pedigree mired in poverty, indigent high status. They also believe in fairies, and occasionally play the harp. Within limits that I shall get to, they have plenty of Welshness about them.

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Yet the Pembrokeshire setting of these scenes, in addition to being a compliment to Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl thereof, is an ethnically complicating factor, because, although it contained many Welsh speakers, especially in mountainous areas, the county had English (and Flemish) settlements around Milford, not to mention the more recent Irish immigrants who had set up in the region.65 The commonplace that Pembrokeshire was a ‘little England beyond Wales’ might seem irrelevant given the Welsh traits of the princes. Yet they have been bred as Cambro-Britons at a time in British history when Welshness did not exist, and as Cymbeline’s children were born in what would become England. Come to that, with the possible exception of the beggars who give Imogen directions, or misdirections, towards Milford, and who do not appear on stage, the play has no bona fide Cambrians. So the fact that Wales forms a unit which is distinct yet not separable from Cymbeline’s Britain makes Pembrokeshire an apt focus for the Welsh scenes because it was removed in the Stuart period from England but also part of it – a piece of the West Country, as it were, that had crossed the Severn and formed a Pale around Milford. In so far as it is part of greater England, it is not less a synecdoche of Wales as whole, which was from some angles invisible (even nameless) within the 1536 union,66 exemplary of the new British state not just in its ethnic diversities. When the Jacobean Britishness of the princes appears through their Welshness, their retreat begins to resemble such other wild places as the AngloScottish borders or the Peak District. Just as, in The Winter’s Tale, Sicily and the sea-coast of Bohemia matter less as locations because they figure a contrast between the overheated sophistication of Leontes’ court and the pastoral world of Perdita, so the intricacy, politicking, and oddly advanced science of Cymbeline’s court (where the Queen experiments with poisons) contrast with the simple, bonded, male world of the princes. To put it another way, Belarius has a harp but no leeks, goats, or cheese; the salient properties of his life are not entirely ethnic. Yet the great Welsh theme of pedigree remains a focus. The princes possess what Belarius calls ‘Honor vntaught, / Ciuility not seene from other’ (4.2; TLN 2472–5); their innate quality is gratified when Imogen puts sauce on their meat and cuts their vegetables into letter-shapes. But the notion that virtues are proportionate to breeding is challenged by Imogen’s love for her social inferior Posthumus, and by the well-born grossness of Cloten, who arrives in Posthumus’ clothes and makes the mistake of insulting Guiderius. Like the fiercest of the Britons depicted in John Speed’s History of Great Britaine, the rustic prince does what ancient Britons were notorious for: he chops off Cloten’s head. Arranging a funeral, Belarius reduces his belief in inherited excellence to something like Imogen’s declaration to Arviragus that all human dust is alike and dignity a social attribute.67 As for the princess, when she awakes from a drugged sleep, next to the headless Cloten in Posthumus’ clothes, her belief that she married a non pareil does not

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prevent her from assuming that the body is her husband’s. The confusions she endures in Wales encourage her to mean what she perhaps only said to Arviragus about man as clay. She also has a speech about the princes’ merit which carries a larger meaning: These are kinde Creatures. Gods, what lyes I haue heard: Our Courtiers say, all’s sauage, but at Court; Experience, oh thou disproou’st Report. Th’emperious Seas breeds Monsters; for the Dish, Poor Tributary Riuers, as sweet Fish. (4.2; TLN 2284–9) This has its touch of automatic anti-Roman hostility (‘Th’emperious Seas breeds Monsters’), but it matters that Imogen calls the small streams ‘Tributary’ because that can mean paying tribute. It is another straw in the wind that Cymbeline, though triumphant in war, will, at the end of the play, prevent the isolation of Britain by doing a deal with Rome. I suspect that Shakespeare remembered the rout of Boadicea’s army when, near the end of the play, the flight of Cymbeline’s Britons, ‘all flying / Through a strait Lane’, is reported.68 But the battle had another source, which scholars have long recognized but been unable to make much of. Shakespeare turned from Holinshed’s Historie of England to his Historie of Scotland, and drew on a passage which relates how a farming ancestor of Sir James Hay, one of King James’s favourite courtiers, called his sons from their work into ‘a long lane fensed    with ditches and walles made of turfe’ where they reversed the fortunes of King Kenneth in a battle against the Danes.69 The likely occasion for this borrowing was the admission of Sir James as a Knight of the Bath at the 1610 investiture of the Prince of Wales – the probable context, as I have said, for the first performance of Cymbeline. But the effect for informed audiences was to make Guiderius and Arviragus (like Prince Henry) Scottish Welsh princes; and the larger pattern once again is of a work about Anglo-Welsh Britain turning Scottish at a decisive moment. Interestingly, the play was revived at Whitehall (and ‘Well likt by the kinge’) in 1634,70 on Charles I’s return from his Scottish coronation. In a Jacobean performance, these features would have gratified or consoled those who believed that Anglo-Welsh union remained a precedent for Anglo-Scottish union on the grounds that without Scottish heroism Britain could not defend itself. That raises the question, however, of why Cymbeline should diverge from its sources and share the consensus of the other plays in reconciling Britain to Rome. It was not, I believe, because these authors were concerned (as Shakespeare possibly was) to compliment a king whose ambitions for European peace made him irenic towards Spain and even accommodating with the pope,71 nor just because translatio imperii made

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it possible to interpret submission as the price of an imperial destiny (5.5; TLN 3798–3808), but because no rational interest in British politics could now stop at Milford. Recent as well as ancient history showed that the state established in 1603 would only be secure if its relations with the continental empires (active in Scotland and Ireland) were stabilized. Surveying archipelagic literature between 1603 and 1707, I’ve found this a recurrent issue. When the earl of Orrery writes heroic drama about a lightly veiled version of Ireland, he quickly shows his anxiety about Spanish and French interference. When Milton and Marvell are severe about the Scots, they are encouraged by the potency of the Dutch–Scottish axis to think about the one union which the commonwealth actively sought, rather than felt itself obliged to secure – its 1651 scheme for confederating with the Netherlands. And when the Anglo-Scottish dynasty founded by James VI and I collapsed, and Defoe picked over in his novels the remnants of Stuart support, he found himself, in Colonel Jack, exploring the French, Italian and even New World dimensions of the Jacobite, Romanist threat. While acknowledging the important work which has been inspired or encouraged by the ‘new British history’, we should remind ourselves of the danger of replacing anglocentrism with Britocentrism, and recall that it’s the unappetizing Cloten who declares, in Cymbeline, ‘Britaine’s a world / By it selfe’.

Notes 1. Howard Brenton, Plays: Two (London: Methuen Drama, 1989), pp. 20, 31. 2. On criticism of Geoffrey before Polydore, and the paradoxical reinvigoration of his influence brought about by the urge to defend the honour of Britain against the Anglica Historica during a period in which a new ideology of ‘Britishness’ was emergent, see Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), especially ch. 1. 3. See William Camden, Britain: Or, A Chorographicall Description of the Most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, trans. [and expanded by] Philemon Holland (London, 1610), pp. 28–34; cf. John Clapham, The Historie of Great Britannie (London, 1606), pp. 4–5; John Speed, The History of Great Britaine (London, 1611), pp. 179–82; and Thomas Hariot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, 2nd edn (Frankfurt, 1590), which reproduces, by way of appendix, ‘The trwe picture of one Picte’, ‘The trwe picture of a women Picte’, and other images, after those of native Americans, ‘to showe how that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie haue bin in times past as sauuage as those of Virginia’. 4. 24 Henry VIII c. 12; see for example Walter Ullmann, ‘ “This Realm of England is an Empire” ’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 30 (1979), 175–203. 5. The boldest version of this thesis is in Willy Maley, Nation, State and Empire in English Renaissance Literature: Shakespeare to Milton (London: Palgrave, 2003). For reservations, see my Foreword to that book, pp. xi–xvii (pp. xii–xv), though a range of Protestant texts, from Bible commentary to neo-Latin verse, could elide imperial with papal Rome – see for example John Napier, A Plaine Discouery of the Whole Reuelation of Saint Iohn (Edinburgh, 1593); ‘In Romam’, in Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson eds, George Buchanan: The Political Poetry (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1995), pp. 250–3.

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6. Anti-Roman comments can be traced through the century, in various political perspectives, from Samuel Daniel’s prose history, The First Part of the Historie of England (London, 1612), pp. 13–14 (lamenting ‘the State of Britayne, whilst the Romans held it; induring all the calamities that a deiected nation could do, vnder the domination of strangers, proud, greedy and cruell’), through the anonymous King and Queenes Entertainement at Richmond (Oxford, 1636), in which a Druid speaks persuasively of ‘those grand Theeues / The Romans’ C3v , to Charles Hopkins’ play, Boadicea (1697). 7. Camden surveys the controversy, Britain, pp. 114–16. 8. Raphael Holinshed et al., Chronicles, enlarged edn (London, 1587); Historie of England, p. 90. 9. A. H. Dodd, ‘Wales and the Scottish Succession’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1938), 201–25: pp. 209–11. 10. Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 8–42, 37. 11. Penry Williams, ‘The Attack on the Council in the Marches, 1603–1642’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (1961), pt 1, 1–22; R. E. Ham, ‘The Four Shire Controversy’, Welsh History Review, 8 (1977), 381–400; Peter R. Roberts, ‘Wales and England after the Tudor “Union”: Crown, Principality and Parliament, 1543–1624’, in Claire Cross, David Loades, and J. J. Scarisbrick, eds, Law and Government under the Tudors: Essays Presented to Sir Geoffrey Elton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11–38: pp. 19–33, and, in a slightly different context, the same historian’s ‘The English Crown, the Principality of Wales and the Council in the Marches, 1534–1641’, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds, The British Problem, c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), pp. 118–47: pp. 137–45. 12. See for example, Roberts, ‘English Crown’, pp. 142–3. For an almost contemporaneous, informative survey of the issues, see John Doddridge, The History of the Ancient and Modern Estate of the Principality of Wales, Dutchy of Cornewal, and Earldome of Chester (London, 1630). 13. See for example, p. 133 below on the Scottish/Welsh-British make-up of the princes in Cymbeline. 14. The Tragedie of Cymbeline 3.4 (TLN 1911–21), in The First Folio of Shakespeare: The Norton Facsimile, ed. Charlton Hinman (London: Paul Hamlyn, 1968). 15. Caradoc of Llancarvan, d. 1147?, Historie of Cambria, now Called Wales, tr. Humphrey Llwyd, corr. and cont. by Powel (London, 1584), ¶6v . This Historie, commissioned by Sir Henry Sidney from his chaplain, David Powel of Raubon, consists of Llwyd’s translation of the old Brut y Tywysogion (i.e. Chronicle of the Princes), preceded by Lhuyd’s revision of Sir John Price’s ‘Description of Cambria, now Called Wales’, introduced by Powel’s dedication to Sir Philip Sidney and preface ‘To the Reader’. 16. Ibid.; cf. for example George Owen, Cruell Lawes against Welshmen, in Cymmrodorion Records, ed. Henry Owen, ser. 1 pt 3 (London: Charles J. Clark, 1982), pp. 120–60; and Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV. 17. Humphrey Llwyd, The Breuiary of Britayne, tr. Thomas Twyne (London, 1573), B6r – v , E4v –5v (on the Brigantes), E8v –F2r , F6v –G7r (Cataracus, Voadicia, and much more). Boece’s sources and motives are sketched by T. D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950), pp. 67–8.

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18. Llwyd, Breuiary, F6r–v , C3r . Buchanan responded to Llwyd, exposing the limits of Scoto-Cambrian humanist solidarity, in Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582); see Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales’, p. 26; and Roger A. Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History and National Myth in Sixteenth-Century Scotland’, in Mason, ed., Scotland and England, 1286–1815 (Edinburgh: Donald, 1987), pp. 60–84: pp. 73–4. There were even rival Merlins, ‘One of Scotland commonly titled Sylvester,    the other Ambrosius    borne of a Nunne (daughter to the K[ing] of Southwales) in Caermardhin’ (John Selden, notes to Poly-Olbion, IV). 19. Breandán Ó Buachalla, ‘James Our True King: The Ideology of Irish Royalism in the Seventeenth Century’, in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan, eds, Political Thought in Ireland Since the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 7–35: p. 11. 20. See for example, Robert Holland’s Welsh translation of King James’s Basilikon Doron in 1604, with its recommendation that Prince Henry learn Welsh, and the associated genealogy, which in practice appeared separately, tracing James’s descent through Henry VII back to the Welsh princes and ancient British kings. This move had been anticipated in the sixteenth-century claim that James’s ancestor Fleance – as featured in Shakespeare’s Macbeth – had fled from Scotland to Wales, where he founded the Stuart dynasty by marrying a Welsh princess (e.g. Llwyd, Breuiary, F2v –3r ). 21. The leading figure in this comparatively innovative upward revaluation of Saxon antiquity is Richard Verstegan, A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence in Antiquities, Concerning the most Noble and Renowned English Nation (London, 1605). 22. ‘Cambria’, in Microcosmos (Oxford, 1603), pp. 29–38 (pp. 30–1, 35). For similar, discreetly articulated tensions in Welsh–Latin writing – an important body of work – see, for example, John Owen, Epigrammatum libri tres (London, 1606), vol. 3, pp. 37–9. 23. ‘And hath not the vnion of Wales to England added a greater strength thereto?’ the King asked a reluctant Parliament, ‘Which though it was a great Principalitie, was nothing comparable in greatnesse and power to the ancient and famous Kingdome of Scotland.’ Speech of 19 March 1603, in King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 132–46: p. 135. 24. Roberts, ‘English Crown’, pp. 140–2. 25. For example, confidence in the ancient dignity of the British tongue encouraged Welsh literati to produce grammars and dictionaries to instruct their new fellow-Britons. Works by Siôn Dafydd (John Davies of Mallwyd) reached some influential readers, including Ben Jonson, who used his Antiquae linguae Britannicae (London, 1621) in his masque For the Honour of Wales (1616) and received a copy of his grammar as a New Year’s gift in 1630 from the Welshman James Howell, who attached an anglophone poem of his own on Welsh as ‘A wild and Wealthy Language’ (‘Upon Dr Davies British-Grammar’, in Howell, Poems [1663], pp. 71–2). 26. On Wales, the borders, and A Maske Presented at Ludlow Castle see for example Richard Halpern, ‘Puritanism and Maenadism in A Mask’, in Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers, eds, Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), pp. 88–105; Michael Wilding, ‘Milton’s A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634: Theatre and Politics on the Border’, Milton Quarterly, 21:4 (1987), 35–51.

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27. Llwyd, Breuiary, 60r . The Gaelic Irish and Scottish Highlanders shared many of these traits; but both groups were relatively distant; sharing a common border, and conspicuous in English towns and cities, the Welsh were the ‘other’ closest to home (cf. Glanmor Williams, Renewal and Reformation: Wales c.1415–1642 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 464; and Philip Jenkins, ‘SeventeenthCentury Wales: Definition and Identity’, in Bradshaw and Roberts, eds, British Consciousness and Identity, pp. 213–35: p. 216). 28. ‘Address to the Welsh People by Bishop Richard Davies’, tr. Albert Owen Evans, in Evans, A Memorandum on the Legality of the Welsh Bible and the Welsh Version of the Book of Common Prayer (Cardiff: William Lewis, 1925), pp. 83–124: p. 85. For contexts see Glanmor Williams, ‘Bishop Richard Davies’ (?1501–1581)’ and ‘Some Protestant Views of Early British Church History’, in his Welsh Reformation Essays (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1967), pp. 155–90, 207–19; and P. R. Roberts, ‘The Union with England and the Identity of “Anglican” Wales’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th ser., 22 (1972), 49–70: pp. 67–70. 29. Davies, ‘Address’, p. 85. 30. ‘September’, ‘Argument’, in William Oram et al., eds The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 31. Contrast the view, found for example in Holinshed, that although Joseph of Arimathea introduced the faith, paganism persisted in Britain until two Romans, Fugatius and Damianus, brought the gospel from the pope to King Lucius. 32. Robin Flower, ‘William Salesbury, Richard Davies, and Archbishop Parker’, National Library of Wales Journal, 2 (1941), 7–14; and Glanmor Williams, ‘Bishop Sulien, Bishop Richard Davies, and Archbishop Parker’, National Library of Wales Journal, 5 (1948), 215–19. 33. Davies, ‘Address’, p. 123. 34. Cf. The Gentle Craft, where the healing properties of Winifred’s well are described in the address to the reader, or Poly-Olbion X.139–67, which celebrates the well but through the mouth of a Welsh mountain, then calls it a ‘tedious tale’ (while Selden’s notes denounce the ‘lubberly Monkes’ who profited from the Winifred cult). In ‘Purity and Danger on the West Bank of the Severn: The Cultural Geography of A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634’, Representations, 60 (1997), 22–48: p. 40; Philip Schwyzer interestingly suggests that Milton uses Sabrina in Comus to counter Winifred’s insidiously Catholic appeal – an appeal that can be deduced not just from the 1635 translation by I. F. of Robert of Shrewsbury’s medieval Vita, but also from local sentiment; in Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), Alexandra Walsham reports that ‘When a man was found dead at Holywell in Wales in 1630 after making disparaging remarks about the marvellous healing properties of the spring a local jury seems to have brought in a verdict of death by divine judgment’ (p. 99). The work of desacralizing Winifred had, however, already begun with Deloney and Rowley. 35. At D3v , where a Roman leader calls Amphiabel a ‘Cambria[n] sectarist’, Winifred is characterized as ‘superstitious / Virgin, that with her sorcerous devotion works miracles, / By which she drawes Christians’ – a pejorative formulation which sectarists might use of moderate Protestants as well as Catholics. Differences within British Protestantism are safely flagged up by a pagan, who carries the blame of an intolerance which might as readily be found within the faith. 36. For instance Camden, Britain, p. 49; Clapham, The Historie of Great Britannie, bk 2, ch. 2.

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37. Bonduca 4.4.115–19, ed. Cyrus Hoy, in The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, gen. ed. Fredson Bowers, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 38. Holinshed, Chronicles; Historie of England, p. 38. 39. 3.4 (TLN 2801–2). 40. George Powell, Bonduca: Or, The British Heroine (London, 1696). 41. 8 July 1609, quoted by G. Dyfnallt Owen, Wales in the Reign of James I (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 1988), p. 2. 42. Sidero-Thriambos: Or, Steele and Iron Triumphing, lines 216–20, in Pageants and Entertainments of Anthony Munday, ed. David M. Bergeron (Garland: New York, 1985); cf. Fuimus Troies: The True Troianes (London, 1633), G1r , where ancient Britons sing in Scots their survival of a Roman attack. 43. The Valiant Welshman: Or, The True Chronicle History of the Life and Valiant Deedes of Caradoc the Great, King of Cambria, now Called Wales (London, 1615), A4r –B1r . 44. Holinshed et al., Chronicles; Historie of Scotland, pp. 45–53. 45. Hence Drummond of Hawthornden’s jesting inclusion of Albions Scotland in a short list of imaginary books: see Robert H. MacDonald, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1971). 46. Albions England (1586; London, 1602), bk 3, ch. 18. 47. In line with Holinshed’s Historie of Scotland, the heroine is Voada and Caradoc’s sister. She is imprisoned, though not by her husband, and is released by the Welsh. Above all, the alliances between Caradoc, Gederus, and Venusius produce a war of three kingdoms against Rome, with Venusius, based in York, fighting from north of the Humber. 48. Hence the dashes substituted for oaths in the first (1647) edition of Bonduca; a 1620s–30s transcript (now BL Add. MS 36758) substitutes such asseverations as ‘I vowe’ and ‘good cozen’. See the Historical Collation in Hoy’s edition (1979). 49. Camden, Britain, trans. Holland, p. 88. 50. Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 118–48. 51. For instance, as Marcus notes, his sur-addition, Leonatus, glances at the leonine iconography favoured by James as King of Scotland, and his well-born poverty and post in the King’s Bedchamber recall the position of Scotsmen at court, often poor, often Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, looking for highly placed English wives. 52. See for example Emrys Jones, ‘Stuart Cymbeline’, Essays in Criticism, 11 (1961), 84– 99; and, for salient counter-factors, Garrett A. Sullivan, Jr, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property, and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 135–7; and Ronald J. Boling, ‘Anglo-Welsh Relations in Cymbeline’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 51 (2000), 33–66, especially pp. 47–9. 53. Tethys Festival: Or, The Queenes Wake, in The Order and Solemnitie of the Creation of the High and Mightie Prince Henrie, Eldest Sonne to our Sacred Soueraigne, Prince of Wales (London, 1610), E4v . 54. William Herbert, the ‘Welsh Earl’ – see Michael G. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 132 – was a local magnate as well as a power at court. Through several generations, his family had supported Welsh bards, and although the Welshspeaking Earl wrote his own verse in English, he associated with Welsh literati. His brother (co-dedicatee of the first Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays), Philip,

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56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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earl of Montgomery was also the object of attention from Anglo-Welsh poets like William Harbert, and had Welshmen in his household. Cf. for example Jenny Wormald, ‘O Brave New World? The Union of England and Scotland in 1603’, a lecture delivered on 24 March 2003, Proceedings of the British Academy, 127 (2005), 13–35. Irene Scouloudi, Returns of Strangers in the Metropolis 1593, 1627, 1635, 1639: A Study of an Active Minority, Publications of the Huguenot Society of London Quarto Series 62 (London: Huguenot Society, 1985), p. 1; I owe this reference to Emma Smith. 2.3 (TLN 1101–14); 3.5 (TLN 2050–62). This episode figures in Robert Chester, Loves Martyr: Or, Rosalins Complaint (London, 1601), H2r –3r , the Welsh-sponsored poem-cum-anthology in which Shakespeare’s ‘Phoenix and Turtle’ first appeared. Cf. for example Thomas Churchyard, The Worthines of Wales (London, 1587), D3v –E3r ; Thomas Hughes, Misfortunes of Arthur, ed. Brian Jay Corrigan (New York: Garland, 1992), ‘The Argument of the Tragedie’, and 2.1. Eclogues I.66, quoted and translated here from Camden, Britain, p. 1, but commonplace in early modern accounts of British antiquity. Camden, Britain, p. 47. The entire selection of Latin verses, 45–7, is relevant. Meenakshi Ponnuswami, ‘Celts and Celticists in Howard Brenton’s The Romans in Britain’, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 2:2 (Spring 1998), 69–88. See, for example, J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘The Welsh Poets and their Patrons, c.1550– 1640’, Welsh History Review, 9 (1978–79), 245–77, and Concepts of Order and Gentility in Wales 1540–1640 (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1992). Davies, ‘Address’, pp. 83–124: pp. 107–8. Llwyd, Breuiary, 60r . All this was well known, but is spelt out in George Owen of Henllys’s Description of Pembrokeshire (1603) – a work that includes a history of the Earls of Pembroke which Shakespeare, as a client, might well have read. See the edition by Dillwyn Miles (Llandysul: Gomer Press, 1994), pp. 41–3. See, for example, Sir Henry Spelman, ‘Of the Union’, in Bruce R., eds, The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 Galloway and Brian P. Levack (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1985), pp. 161–84: pp. 165, 167. 4.2 (TLN 2249–51, 2560–3). 5.3 (TLN 2933–4). The source is Tacitus, quoted in Holland’s tr. of Camden, Britain, pp. 51–2; cf. Clapham, Historie of Great Britannie, p. 63. Holinshed, Chronicles; Historie of Scotland, p. 155. E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), vol. 2, p. 352. See, for example, W. B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

9 Rex Pacif icus, Robert Cecil, and the 1604 Peace with Spain Pauline Croft

The conclusion of the treaty of London in 1604, which ended the long Armada war between England and Spain, is often depicted as a personal triumph for James VI and I. In the words of Derek Hirst, ‘War weariness created a favourable climate for James to set in train moves which were to bring peace with Spain in 1604’. As king of Scots he had never been at war with Spain, with whom he had no particular quarrel, so perhaps not surprisingly, historians have tended to assume that it was his accession which ‘opened a possibility for peace’.1 In May 1603, some six weeks after coming to the English throne, James proclaimed a ceasefire at sea with the recall of all English privateering vessels. So the end of the great conflict is presented as the consequence of the Stuart succession, with war-weariness leading smoothly to the successful peace negotiations of 1604. On this scenario the reign of the monarch frequently entitled ‘Rex Pacificus’ began fittingly with his first international triumph, the Treaty of London.2 There is a strong argument for contesting this interpretation as oversimplistic, perhaps positively misleading. James I later commented that he did not know how he first acquired the title of ‘Rex Pacificus’, unwittingly revealing that he did not particularly associate the title with the events of 1604.3 There was certainly a widespread feeling that the change of royal personalities, from Elizabeth to James, defused some long-standing antagonisms, but just as the death of Philip II in 1598 had not led the English to sue for peace with Spain, so the death of the queen in 1603 did not immediately convince Spain of the need for serious negotiations. James himself was diplomatically active in 1603, greeting the numerous ambassadors who came to congratulate him on his accession, but he had surprisingly little to do with the final negotiations for the peace of 1604. The treaty of London is better seen as the last chapter of Elizabethan foreign policy rather than the first Jacobean peace initiative, and that chapter was largely written by the leading Elizabethan politician in James’s privy council, Robert Cecil later earl of Salisbury, who after March 1603 continued as secretary of state. If 140

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monarchs traditionally formulated foreign policy themselves, it was the secretary of state who was always charged with gathering foreign information, conducting diplomatic correspondence and implementing royal decisions.4 Under Elizabeth, Cecil had been privy to the making of foreign policy and was frequently instrumental in quietly guiding the queen into a course of action that she did not initially wish to espouse. He was uniquely placed to continue the soundings for peace that were already well advanced by Elizabeth’s death.5 To substantiate this argument it is necessary to go back briefly to 1588 and then on to the hectic years 1598–1601. In winter 1588 the twenty-five-yearold Cecil was a junior diplomat on his first mission, accompanying the earl of Derby’s embassy to the Spanish Low Countries to meet the envoys of the duke of Parma at Bourbourg in the Pas de Calais. Derby had been sent by Elizabeth to see if, even at this last moment, a peace could be brokered that would stop the Armada from sailing for England. Of course the negotiations failed, but Cecil encountered two Flemish diplomats: Prince Jean de Ligne, Count of Arembergh, and Jean Richardot sire de Barly, president of the council of state of Flanders and Parma’s right-hand man. Although Elizabeth remained bitter for years about the negotiations of 1588, in which she saw Richardot as deliberately deceitful, it was exactly this trio – Cecil, Richardot and Arembergh – that bore the brunt of the final negotiations of 1604. The importance of Flanders, so closely tied politically and economically to both England and Spain, was a continuous theme in diplomacy between 1588 and 1604. In terms of personnel, in 1604 the efforts of three men at last brought to a successful conclusion the abortive diplomacy of 1588 in which they had all participated.6 A decade later, in 1598, Cecil led another English delegation, this time to Paris to undertake negotiations immediately prior to the 1598 treaty of Vervins made between Henri IV of France and Philip II. Cecil by then was thirty-five, an experienced bureaucrat who had been principal secretary of state to Elizabeth for two years. His father Lord Burghley, although still lord treasurer, was old and ill, slowly relinquishing effective charge to his son. The English aim was to stop Henri IV from making a separate peace with Spain and thus seceding from his 1596 triple alliance with England and the Dutch. Cecil was under few illusions. He thought that they would fail to persuade Henri, who desperately needed peace, but that the real gain would be a clearer understanding of the king’s mind. ‘The chiefest end of our journey’ he wrote to his father ‘is inquisition’ using the Spanish word with deliberate irony.7 For her part Elizabeth remained deeply suspicious of Philip II. She tended to dislike rebels, on principle, but she had come to see that England had ‘antient confederacy with the people of the Provinces United, for both our securityes’. The Dutch were the key ally and without proper provision for them she would not treat. If England abandoned the United Provinces only to see them steamrollered by the Spanish army in

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Flanders, the men and money sacrificed in their defence since 1585 would have been wasted. Even worse, if Spain ever regained full control of the Low Countries, England would be frighteningly vulnerable: hence the queen’s emphasis on both securities, not merely that of the Dutch.8 On disembarking in February 1598, Cecil was appalled by the war-ravaged state of France, which immediately confirmed him in his conviction that nothing would stop Henri IV from making peace. His discussions with the king were uncomfortable, even confrontational, but there was some encouragement. Henri had been insistent that he wished to include his allies the English and the Dutch. In the very first meeting, on 24 February 1598, his representatives demanded that a courier should be sent to Philip II to obtain for the Spanish delegation, led by the archduke Albert, an explicit permission to treat with the other two powers. Philip agreed, and empowered Albert to treat with England. Although it was clear that the terms demanded by each side, England and Spain, were almost certainly irreconcilable, here was the first sign that some fruitful diplomatic contact might be renewed.9 Moreover, at these negotiations Cecil not only renewed his acquaintance with Richardot, accompanying Albert, but also met Louis de Verreyken, who was emerging as another key figure in the diplomacy of the Spanish–Flemish Netherlands. During their discussions, Henri IV asked Cecil the crucial question: Suppose England were to follow France and make a peace with Spain but without the Dutch, leaving the rebels to continue the war on their own? It was surely unreasonable for the Dutch to be allowed, as the king put it, to keep everyone else ‘miserable in perpetuity’. Cecil flatly replied that that was, indeed, ‘the knotty question’. Elizabeth refused to contemplate a separate peace, but facing Henri IV, Cecil was forced to hedge. It might be a possibility, ‘so they [the Dutch] might not perish by it, it was least harmeful’ – less harmful than continuing the endless war.10 Here in 1598 was the germ of the English position in 1604; a separate peace with Spain, not allowing the Dutch a veto over English diplomacy but at the same time ensuring that the United Provinces would not fail in their bid for independence. After 1598, that shift of perception by Cecil gradually brought about a significant re-orientation of English foreign policy. The shift was significantly aided by new developments in the Low Countries. Albert of Austria, who acted as Philip II’s leading diplomat at Vervins, was already engaged to his cousin the Infanta Isabella, and on 6 May, two days after the treaty with France was signed, Philip II ceded the old Burgundian dominions of his father, the Emperor Charles V, to his daughter and her future husband. They were married in Valencia in April 1599 and slowly made their way back to the Low Countries, entering their new capital, Brussels, on 5 September 1599.11 Philip’s grant in theory covered all seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, but in practice Albert and Isabella only ruled the ten southern ones which remained under Spanish control. Elizabeth was

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delighted at the news of the cession to the archdukes, at once seeing the possibility of reviving the old Anglo-Burgundian alliance.12 Her euphoria faded but she was right to discern that the devolution of power, limited as it was, constituted an important change in European politics. It soon became apparent that Albert in particular knew far more about the realities of the situation in Flanders, where he had already served as governor before his marriage, than did Philip III and the Spanish council of state. He was also acutely aware that his southern provinces would need the goodwill of England if they were to recover from the devastation of war. Albert had led the Spanish forces that took Calais in March 1596, but on his own initiative and despite the explicit instructions of Philip II, the archduke offered to restore Calais to France at Vervins. On hearing the news in 1596, Burghley had been appalled: ‘England may not endure this town to be Spanish’, he wrote to his son. Albert knew that Elizabeth would never rest while the great deep-water haven which had sheltered the Armada remained in Spanish hands. It was far better to hand it back to Henri IV, thereby winning the goodwill not only of the king of France but also of the queen of England.13 Relations with Spain were the first point of importance for the privy council between 1598 and 1603, but they were impossible to disentangle from the condition of Ireland. Since 1595, a major rebellion under the leadership of the earl of Tyrone had threatened English control. In return for Spanish aid, the Irish rebels even offered Philip II the crown of Ireland, a title first claimed for the Tudor monarchy by Henry VIII. King Philip sent money and encouragement at a crucial moment in 1596. Thereafter for the English, Ireland became the major theatre of active combat, distracting their attention from France and the Low Countries. Both the Cecils were often nervous about internal stability, for between 1594 and 1598 England was struggling with the consequences of repeated harvest failures that were pushing the price of basic foodstuffs beyond the reach of the poor. Coming at the same time, heavy taxation for the Irish war was beginning to carry unmistakeable risks of disturbances, even rebellion, at home. If only Ireland were settled, wrote Cecil to his father in 1598, ‘I protest I would not in my poor judgement care what France did’.14 At the same time, the succession to the English throne was vitally relevant to any future peace. After 1599 Cecil became deeply uneasy about the Infanta-Archduchess Isabella, a direct descendant of John of Gaunt and put forward by her father Philip II as the claimant in 1588, when he hoped that his forces would dethrone Elizabeth. In 1590, he had also urged Isabella’s claims to the crown of France, as eldest daughter of Elisabeth de Valois and niece to the last three Valois kings. Philip refused to accept the Salic law, which had passed over a woman to convey the French crown to Henri IV. At Vervins, Philip had been persuaded by Pope Clement VIII to abandon the claim to France, in the hope that it might lead Henri IV to back Isabella as the agreed catholic claimant to England. On Elizabeth’s death, whenever that

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occurred, might Isabella be tempted, or even forced by her more bellicose brother Philip III, into an armed assertion of her remote claim to the English crown? After 1599, Isabella was very conveniently placed across the channel, where she and her husband were proving increasingly popular with their new Flemish subjects. Her dynastic claim was far less good than that of Lady Arbella Stuart, the other possible contender for the English throne; but the Infanta was in Brussels (whereas Arbella was safely under the control of her grandmother Bess of Hardwick) and she might call on the military power of the Spanish army of Flanders. Spain had largely rebuilt its naval might after 1588, and still maintained formidable forces in the Low Countries. King James in Scotland was also worried about Isabella, and writing secretly to Cecil he made it clear that he was opposed to any English direct negotiations with Spain until he, James, was securely on Elizabeth’s throne. Any uncertainty might encourage Philip III to back Isabella’s claim with force.15 Paradoxically, the situation was precisely the reverse of what James feared. Both Albert and Isabella increasingly identified with the Low Countries and were wary of Philip III, who made no secret of his dislike of his father’s grant to them of autonomous rule. The archdukes both opposed the unrealistic idea of having Isabella bid for the English throne. In February 1603 the Spanish council of state calculated that funds were sufficient to maintain the army of Flanders at around 25,000 troops: Albert had already told them years earlier that an invasion of England would require at least 30,000 men, of whom he could not spare one from Flanders.16 The devout Isabella longed for peace in which she and Albert could rebuild their ravaged dominions and also was optimistic that James could be induced to turn catholic, following his wife Anne of Denmark.17 Beginning in January 1599, the Brussels government began a series of probes of English intentions, sending the Antwerp jurisconsult, Jerome Coomans, to London and constantly offering to mediate between Elizabeth and Philip III. It was these contacts that led eventually to abortive negotiations between England, Spain, and the archdukes at Boulogne in May 1600. Cecil never held out much hope for these talks, but considered they must mean at least a continued willingness on the part of the archdukes to urge Philip III to explore the situation. ‘Seeing they desire to meet’, he wrote, ‘we ought to ymagine they have a purpose to accommodate’, rather than merely enter into ‘a vayne colloquie’.18 The English terms were stiff. Nothing should be agreed that would harm the Dutch: the cautionary towns would not be handed over to Spain or the archduke; trade between the Dutch and the English must continue, and English troops would not be withdrawn; Spain must cease to aid the Irish rebels and allow Englishmen free trade in Spanish dominions, although in the New World this might be limited to parts not settled by Spaniards. The colloquy progressed little further than a dispute over precedence, but it helped to underline the increasing importance of the archdukes, steadily growing in stature as European mediators. Cecil did not

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go himself, but the English envoy Thomas Edmondes found himself across the table from Richardot and Verreyken, now the audiencier; the latter had already travelled to London to try to get Cecil to place his weight behind the negotiations. Boulogne failed, but in the eyes of senior members of the English privy council, a new triangular relationship was gradually being forged, diluting the old bilateral hostility between England and Spain. Brussels was becoming the accepted forum in which contacts could be made and soundings taken, in attempts to end the long Anglo-Spanish conflict. The contacts continued, with Coomans again in England in the autumn of 1601 and with intermittent correspondence with the veteran Richardot, by now president of the archdukes’ privy council.19 After Burghley’s death in August 1598, Cecil inherited his leadership of the peace group on the English privy council. They favoured a negotiated end to hostilities, not least in order to promote English overseas trade. By contrast, the earl of Essex was still urging an aggressive policy towards Spain, including the mounting of further expensive expeditions on the model of the spectacular Cadiz raid of 1596. The friction between Cecil and Essex over policy towards Spain and Ireland only ended with Essex’s folly in raising an insurrection in 1601 in the streets of London, which led promptly to his execution. However, since 1599 military efforts had been wholly concentrated on Ireland, and Essex’s preferred policy of attacks on the Spanish coastline was abandoned. Philip III provided arms to the Irish rebels in 1600, and a small Spanish expeditionary force landed at Kinsale in September 1601, only to be defeated on Christmas Eve by Lord Mountjoy who had replaced Essex as the general in Ireland. Despite Kinsale, the costs of Ireland remained dauntingly high, and in 1602 the English privy council debated the way forward. Some thought that a formal peace between England and Spain would so dishearten the Irish rebels that they would lay down their arms. Others, including Cecil, insisted that peace in Ireland must come first. In earlier years Spain had regarded Scotland as the ‘postern gate’ through which to make trouble in England, but the increasing grip of James VI on his kingdom, together with his acceptance of a pension from Elizabeth from 1586 on, had led Spain to switch attention to Ireland as a more promising place in which to stir up trouble.20 Despite Mountjoy’s victory and the despatch home in March 1602 of the remaining Spanish prisoners in Ireland, there were still fears that the expedition was only a precursor of more vigorous efforts by Philip III to reinforce the rebels. Cecil received reports of shipping in Lisbon and Corunna and concluded that Spain’s strategy would be, once every year, ‘to consume the Queen by charge in Ireland’, even if only by despatching some ‘forlorn companies’. It would be a cheap but effective way of wasting England’s resources. ‘I cannot be secured but that he will still feed that fire with fuell.’ Moreover, even though Elizabeth had thought to offer a pardon to Tyrone, out of sheer weariness with the war, the earl remained at large

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and commanded great loyalty, particularly in Ulster.21 The possibility that Tyrone might still succeed in making rebel Ireland into a base from which Spanish forces could threaten England was too risky. Ireland must be fully secured before a peace could be made with Philip III. Cecil and his allies won the argument in 1602. Despite the burdens of the Irish war, the majority on the privy council were slightly more positive than they had been earlier. The dreadful period of continuous harvest failure was over by 1599, and in December 1601, tacitly acknowledging that the country could bear further taxation, the House of Commons voted the queen four subsidies for the Irish war. It was the largest vote of supply of her whole reign. The cliffhanger years were over, and even more encouraging was the slowly dawning realization that Spain had finally ceased to interfere in Ireland. Mountjoy’s victory at Kinsale was the turning point, and Philip III reluctantly accepted that he could pursue no further action against England in 1602.22 However, Brussels had still not convinced Madrid that peace was the only sensible way forward, and Cecil’s fears about the Infanta were not entirely misplaced. Philip III in February 1601 was moving cautiously towards greater support for her claim, hoping to destabilize England by backing Isabella as soon as he heard of Elizabeth’s death. He hoped the threat would lead the English to withdraw support from the Dutch rebels. It was only as late as February 1603 that the king finally abandoned hopes of his sister and thought instead of an English catholic candidate for the English throne, but with a wildly unrealistic plan still on foot of mounting an invasion. It was optimistically expected that this would be supported by English catholics, and in gratitude for Spanish aid it was even suggested that they would agree to a long-term cession to Spain of the Isle of Wight.23 Even though Spanish aid had ceased, the Irish situation remained unresolved. In February 1602, Tyrone made attempts to sue for peace, but the queen’s terms were too high for him. He tried again some six months later but Elizabeth remained adamant. She would offer him only his life: he could bargain for nothing else. Then in mid-February 1603, Cecil led the privy council in pressurizing the queen to relent: she must allow lord deputy Mountjoy to offer Tyrone his life, his liberty, and a pardon. Cecil and Mountjoy were concerned that the earl in despair might flee to Spain, where he might plot further mischief. Elizabeth insisted on denying him his title, but writing to Mountjoy on 18 February, Cecil simply told the general not to bother to follow the letter of her commands: ‘all honest servants must strain a little when they will serve princes’. The secretary of state was a man in a hurry. Elizabeth was visibly fading and it was vital to seize the chance of bringing the dreadful Irish war to an end, before facing the additional uncertainties of the accession of James VI. In any case, it had always been apparent to both Mountjoy and Cecil that the grant of reasonable terms of surrender was essential to prevent Tyrone from following another strategy,

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of prevaricating in the hope that the queen’s eventual demise might allow him to get even better terms from the king of Scots, with whom he had corresponded at the height of the war.24 On 25 March 1603, Mountjoy sent Tyrone a safe-conduct inviting him to come to discuss the terms of his pardon. He was made a generous offer, which he accepted: he and his ally Rory O’Donnell earl of Tyrconnell would keep their lands. Peace in Ireland, with all the relief in men and money which it would bring to England, was within the lord deputy’s grasp but he was walking a tightrope, for on the morning of 28 March he received a report that Elizabeth was dead. If she was, his commission to treat with Tyrone was void. But suppose her death was only a rumour, as had happened in 1599 when Spain had been awash with tales of the queen’s passing? Only a few days earlier, he had received a letter from Cecil informing him that Elizabeth was recovering from her indisposition. Mountjoy kept the latest news absolutely secret. Displaying steely nerve, on 30 March he concluded his dealings with Tyrone in the treaty of Mellifont, with the earl still ignorant of the queen’s end, which had indeed occurred at Richmond on 24 March 1603.25 By negotiating peace in Ireland, Mountjoy also broke the European deadlock, since with Tyrone’s submission all the necessary pre-conditions for negotiations with Spain were at last in place. Cecil had been persuaded in 1598 that a peace might be made between England and Spain, without the Dutch. Since 1599 the archdukes had persistently signalled their desire for negotiations. The abortive discussions at Boulogne in 1600 had set out a framework for English diplomacy which remained unchanged. Now at last Ireland was quiet. So there is every reason to believe that after the treaty of Mellifont, the Elizabethan regime would have moved decisively towards a peace with Philip III, even if James VI and I had not come to the English throne right in the middle of a crucial week in Anglo-Irish relations. Despite James’s insistence that there should be no formal moves towards peace between England and Spain until he was on the throne, he had taken the opportunity to begin a friendly correspondence with the archdukes from at least February 1602. They always responded with warm assurances of regard. Even as James learned of his accession to the English throne, he was entertaining an envoy from Albert, who was attempting to end the recruitment in Scotland of volunteers to aid the Dutch. James was accustomed to dealing with Brussels on diplomatic matters before he rode south.26 The king from Edinburgh replied to his ‘cousin Albert’ that there was nothing closer to his heart than the renewal of England’s ancient amity with the houses of Austria and Burgundy.27 The archdukes immediately saw James’s peaceful accession as another opportunity to broker a peace. Albert seized the initiative, announcing that he would send a delegation to congratulate the new king. He quickly decided on his envoy, since on 4 May 1603 Cecil’s servants paid £3 to a man who brought him a present of a Barbary falcon sent over by ‘Count Arimbercke’. He must have remembered that at Bourbourg in 1588, Cecil had often gone out hawking.28

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The archdukes’ move in sending an immediate delegation of congratulation was shrewd, and made a particularly favourable impression upon James.29 Moreover, Albert and Isabella had already made it known that they were willing to accommodate virtually all the demands the English were likely to make of them. In a letter dated 2 March 1603, Richardot revealed the archdukes’ concessions to a Portuguese diplomat, whom he was intending to use to revive the Boulogne negotiations of 1600. Elizabeth could choose the place of negotiations; there was no intention of asking anything displeasing on religion; and an arrangement might be found to the queen’s liking, as regards the cautionary towns and the English alliance with the Dutch. With that document in his possession, Cecil could go into negotiations knowing that the archdukes would be on his side, not on that of Philip III.30 However, Spain must still be brought to the negotiating table, and Philip III was much slower off the mark, since he was still willing to contemplate military intervention in English affairs.31 At Aranjuez, where he learned of Elizabeth’s death, he decided to emulate Albert and send an envoy to James to offer his congratulations. His choice was Juan Bautista de Tassis, member of a famous family grown rich in Habsburg service but not a diplomat of any experience. He travelled slowly to London via Paris (where he consulted his kinsman the Spanish ambassador) and Brussels, where he finally arrived in August 1603. Tassis was annoyed to find during his stay in Flanders that the archdukes’ ministers, led by Richardot, indicated that since they had more experience in English affairs, Tassis – and Spain – should follow their guidance.32 The archdukes’ delegation of June 1603 brought Cecil and Arembergh together for the first time since 1588, but there was an unfortunate hitch when the elderly count, already rendered ineffective by crippling gout that prevented him from regularly attending the court, inadvertently became enmeshed in the Bye and Main plots of 1603 which deeply implicated his old friend Lord Cobham. Tassis was not much use to the English privy council since he had no powers to negotiate anything, although he spent a great deal of time and money attempting to bribe English courtiers. Yet by spring 1604 the archdukes had managed to persuade the reluctant Philip III to send an envoy with powers to treat. He must travel to London, instead of meeting on neutral territory: the archdukes had already conceded that point in March 1603, and at least it avoided the precedence dilemmas that had dogged all parties at Boulogne. As guests, the Spanish could appropriately be accorded diplomatic precedence even though they had lost the battle over the place of meeting. Philip III was committed to obtaining, as his chief priority, a toleration for English catholics, but once again, in Brussels, Richardot had already told Tassis that the point would have to be conceded. The English regarded religion as non-negotiable.33 To fracture the Habsburg team still further, the chosen Spanish envoy, Juan de Velasco Duke of Frias, the Constable of Castile, was convinced that Tassis was an inadequately

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experienced negotiator who would never have been chosen by Philip II. He was also quite clear in his own mind that the English would never agree to an explicit clause forbidding them to navigate to the Indies, and decided that he would return to Spain if they demanded the right to do so.34 With all these complexities it was not surprising that Spain was much less forthcoming than the archdukes. The Flemish delegation arrived in Dover on 19 May 1604 and made its way to London. Led by Aremberg (the archduke had thought of dropping him after the Bye and Main imbroglio, but decided against it), the delegation included the other 1588 veteran, Jean Richardot, with Louis Verreyken, now principal secretary, who had been prominent in the negotiations of 1600. Final talks began on 30 May, in the absence of the Constable of Castile, who remained on the other side of the channel pleading illness. To show his distance from the whole business, Frias prolonged his arrival in Dover until 7/17 August, when the negotiations had been concluded. As a result, the Brussels trio of experienced negotiators, Aremberg, Richardot, and Verreyken, often carried the discussion forward more effectively than the two Spanish envoys, the unimpressive Tassis (now Conde de Villa Mediana) and the obscure Alessandro Rovida, senator of Milan and a lawyer in the service of the absent Constable, a former governor of the Spanish-held duchy. The conclusion of the treaty of London confirmed the success of the archdukes in gradually transforming the contacts between England and Spain into a trilateral relationship in which Spanish Flanders was an almost-equal partner. It is suggestive that in the great painting of the Somerset House conference, it is Verreyken, Richardot, and Arembergh who sit opposite Cecil, Northampton, and Devonshire (better known by his previous title of Mountjoy) and not the Spanish commissioners. On the English side, King James was not unlike the Constable, conspicuous by his absence rather than his presence. He spent most of the summer between May and August 1604, not in London where the diplomats were gathered at Somerset House, but on a lengthy hunting tour of the midlands. He was in London in March, when he firmly told Tassis that he would only negotiate in England, not on neutral soil. James also referred to Queen Anne the ambassador’s request to have Somerset House as the place of negotiations, since the property technically belonged to her. Then James left to go hunting and only returned somewhat reluctantly on 28 April. It seems to have been during that period that he wrote his famous letter to Cecil exulting in the fact that he was now in his ‘paradise of pleasure’.35 After the envoys landed on 19 May, the king received them in audience. Serious negotiations began on 30 May, but James went to Greenwich the following week, only coming back briefly on 7 July to prorogue parliament. By 13 July he was at Oatlands, hunting. The king was particularly annoyed that the Constable’s reluctance to travel across the channel delayed his own plans for going further afield. With testy irony, James complained to Cecil, ‘I lose all

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this year’s progress if I begin not to hunt there’ – Cecil’s house at Theobalds – ‘upon Monday come eight days, for the season of the year will no more stay upon a king than on a poor man, and I doubt if the Constable of Castile hath any power in his commission to stay the course of the sun’.36 Negotiations continued steadily, but there are no known letters from the king to Cecil or anyone else giving any precise royal instructions. The Constable landed on 7 August but James by then had lost patience and was off in the midlands. Letters from Sir Thomas Lake to Cecil detail the king’s various overnight stays: at Somersham in Huntingdonshire, at Bletso with Lord St John, at Drayton with Lord Mordaunt. Lake never mentions the Anglo-Spanish negotiations. Finally on 8 August the king agreed to return, but requested that ‘the Constable might make as little stay as could be’. James was adamant that he would not return to London for longer than six days, from Tuesday 15 to Sunday 20 August, when the treaty was due to be ceremonially concluded. What seems to have been an aghast letter from Cecil in response to this lack of appropriate royal courtesy was in vain: Lake was forced to repeat that ‘his Majesty would have you understand that he does not purpose any more days than Sunday’.37 Reluctantly the king turned south and started the journey back, staying at Apthorpe on 11 August. On 12 August, he had some very last-minute thoughts about the precise states to be included in the treaty, if they wanted to join in later – should they offer it, for example, to the pope? But on 16 August Cecil ordered the fair copy engrossed, showing no intention of sending a letter to Rome and awaiting a reply.38 It is possible that James’s absence from the negotiations was all to the good. There was a widespread feeling among European diplomats that James was timid and lacking in any sort of military ability. The Constable’s final report to Philip III, written a month later, was diplomatic about the king, but ambassador Tassis was much blunter in his letters, reporting what he said were widespread English impressions of their new monarch. James was ‘un hombre de poco’ (a man of little substance), ‘timido como una mujer’ (as timid as a woman), ‘ynconstante’ (inconstant), and ‘poco sobrio’ (rarely sober). Everything was left to Cecil, ‘palabras y actos’, both words and deeds, so that James could go off hunting. The king had not made a good impression.39 Throughout the negotiations, Cecil was unbending on the limited nature of the agreement he was pursuing. ‘For the present’, he told the Spanish delegation, ‘it would be best to advise to establish a firm amity for assuring of the liberty of trade and free entercourse betweene the kingdoms and states’. English trade with the Dutch was non-negotiable, nor would he budge on the cautionary towns, the essential safeguard for the repayment of the great debts owed to the king by the rebels. Cecil ‘told the said Commissioners that they were not to expect other satisfaction uppon that point’. As regards access to the new world, it was finally agreed that commerce would be

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permitted where it had been before the war, according to previous treaties. Spain insisted that this deliberately ambiguous clause debarred the English from both the Portuguese Indies and the New World, while the English interpreted it in the contrary sense; but it was clear that in reality Spain could not stop English ships and men from making inroads, at least into areas not actually held by Spain.40 If the treaty of London was surprisingly limited, Cecil remained wholly committed to the maintenance of the peace. There was still a war party in England which wanted to return to the aggressive policies of Essex, and there were merchants who found that re-opening legitimate trade in Spain after 1604 was surprisingly difficult and less lucrative than the privateering of the war years. These groups could be vociferous both in the House of Commons and the city of London.41 Cecil remained firm; war and peace, he told parliament in 1607, were matters for the king, advised by his privy council, not for them. He remained convinced that the treaty, whatever its flaws, was the only solution. ‘Who so ever rightly weigheth the Conditions of this peace’, he wrote to Sir Ralph Winwood at The Hague, ‘must either confess that such must have been the peace as it is, or else the War must have been continued    it were but a vanity to have expected more than we have’.42 Like the archdukes, whose sustained goodwill after 1599 greatly assisted the making of the peace, Cecil was a pragmatist. The key moment was Tyrone’s surrender in March 1603. Without that, James’s own peaceful inclinations would have been far more difficult to accommodate in an English context, particularly as there was still widespread antagonism to the whole idea of a treaty with Spain. The task then was to manoeuvre England out of the war, without undermining the long-term alliance with the Dutch. James knew the value of Cecil’s achievement, and on 20 August, the day after the final ceremony and banquet, he gave him the title of Viscount Cranborne. Significantly, public opinion did not attribute the momentum towards peace to the king himself. In Calais in August 1604 a pamphlet was circulating claiming to set ‘the reasons which the lord Cecil did use, to induce his Majesty of Yngland to consent to the peace with Spaine’. These reasons were first that peace had been intended by Elizabeth, and more specifically that on his deathbed, Lord Burghley had admonished his son to bring about such a peace. This latter story was not true, but to point to Burghley’s influence in urging peace was both factually accurate and pyschologically convincing. There could be no doubt that his son had followed his policies thereafter. The Elizabethan state was rather like a supertanker that keeps ploughing on in the same direction even after the engines have been switched off. James probably realized that the Elizabethan momentum, personified by Cecil, would bring about a peace in 1604 without his doing much more than agreeing to it. Rex Pacificus could afford to go hunting.

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Notes 1. Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England 1603–1658 (London: Arnold, 1986), p. 98: ‘The death of Elizabeth and the enthronement of the Scottish king, James VI, immediately opened a possibility for peace’. Antonio Feros, Kingship and Favouritism in the Spain of Philip III 1598–1621 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 163. 2. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds, Stuart Royal Proclamations vol 1: Royal Proclamations of King James I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973), pp. 30–1. 3. Malcolm Smuts, ‘The Making of Rex Pacificus: James VI and I and the Problem of Peace in an Age of Religious War’, in Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier, eds, Royal Subjects: Essays on the Writings of James VI and I (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002), p. 371. 4. Robert Cecil, ‘The State and Dignity of a Secretary of State’s Place’, in T. Park, ed., Harleian Miscellany (10 vols, London: John White et al., 1808–1813), vol. 5, pp. 166–8; J. S. Brewer and William Bullan, eds, Calendar of the Carew Manuscripts (6 vols, London: Longmans, 1867–1873), vol. 5, pp. 317–20. 5. The standard narrative of foreign policy in these years is R. B. Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe 1588–1595 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); and Wernham, The Return of the Armadas: The Last Years of the Elizabethan War against Spain 1595–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). There is also valuable material in Wallace MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics 1588–1603 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 6. There is no full study of the Bourbourg negotiations. Cecil’s sketchy diary, British Library, Lansdowne MS 57/24, can be amplified by his letters to his father in T[he] N[ational] A[rchives], SP Holland 84/21. H[istorical] M[anuscripts] C[ommission], Calendar of the Manuscripts of the    Marquess of Salisbury Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire (23 vols, London, HMSO, 1883–1976), vol. 23, p. 14; P. Croft, ‘Brussels and London: The Archdukes, Robert Cecil and James I’, in Luc Duerloo and Werner Thomas, eds, Albert and Isabella: Essays (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 79–86. 7. T.N.A., SP France, 78/41/120. 8. Cecil’s instructions and journal of the 1598 negotiation [hereafter ‘1598 Journal’] are printed in H.M.C., Salisbury, vol. 23, pp. 10–74. 9. A[rchivo] G[eneral de] S[imancas], E[stado] 615/107, 24 February 1598; A.G.S., E 2855, consulta of 14 March 1598. 10. ‘1598 Journal’, 43, 45. P. Laffleur de Kermaingant, L’Ambassade de France en Angleterre sous Henri IV (4 vols, Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1886–1895), vol. 1, pp. 158–295. 11. F. G. Davenport, ed., European Treaties Bearing on the History of the United States (4 vols, Washington: Carnegie Institution, 1917–1937), vol. 1, pp. 235–8. Luc Duerloo and Werner Thomas, eds, Albert et Isabelle 1598–1621: Catalogue (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), pp. 9–15, gives a chronological summary of the careers of the archdukes, invaluable in the absence of the full political study they deserve. 12. G. B. Harrison and R. A. Jones, trans. and eds, A Journal of All that was Accomplished by Monsieur de Maisse, Ambassador in England    1597 (London: Nonesuch, 1931), p. 83. 13. Thomas Wright, Queen Elizabeth and Her Times (2 vols, London: H. Colburn, 1838), vol. 2, pp. 459–60. Wright printed an extensive selection of the correspondence between Burghley and Robert Cecil now in Cambridge University Library; Paul

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33.

34.

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C. Allen, Philip III and the Pax Hispanica 1598–1621: The Failure of Grand Strategy (Yale: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 15. Penry Williams, The Later Tudors: England 1547–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 349, 360–1, 364; Cecil to Burghley, T.N.A., SP France 78/42/13. G. P. V. Akrigg, ed., Letters of King James VI and I (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 200–2. Allen, Philip III, p. 102; J. C. Thewliss, ‘The Peace Policy of Spain 1596–1604’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Durham, 1975), p. 141. T.N.A., SP Spain 94/6/307, 13 November 1599. MacCaffrey, War and Politics, 224–6. Albert continued to use Coomans on missions to England. Sir Ralph Winwood, Memorials of Affairs of State, ed. E. Sawyer (3 vols, London: T. Ward, 1725), vol. 1, p. 171. Wernham, Return of the Armadas, pp. 324, 413. H. S. Scott, ed., ‘The Diary of Sir Roger Wilbraham’, in Camden Miscellany: Volume 10, (London, Royal Historical Society, Camden 3rd Series, v. 4, 1902), pp. 49–50. For the expenses of Ireland, Cecil to Carew, 4 November 1602, Calendar of Carew Manuscripts, vol. 5, p. 375. There is interesting material on Spanish attitudes to Scotland in C. Saenz Cambra, ‘Scotland and Philip II, 1580–1598: Politics, Religion, Diplomacy and Lobbying’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2003). Calendar of Carew Manuscripts, vol. 5, pp. 152, 215, 218, 294. Ibid., pp. 324–5, 344; Allen, Philip III, p. 86. A.G.S., E 1856, Philip III to Duke of Sessa, 12 February 1601. M. A. S. Hume, ed., Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs Preserved Principally in the Archives of Simancas (London: HMSO, 1892–1899), vol. 4, pp. 729–37. Calendar of Carew Manuscripts, vol. 5, pp. 417–18; Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British 1580–1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 165–70. Calendar of Carew Manuscripts, vol. 5, p. 444; Nicholas Canny, ‘The Treaty of Mellifont, 1603’, Irish Sword, 9 (1970), 380–99; Wernham, Return of the Armadas, pp. 402–5. For rumours of the queen’s death in 1599, Allen, Philip III, p. 25. A.G.S., E 622, relation of Nicolas Scorza, 26 April 1603. A. J. Loomie, ‘Philip III and the Stuart Succession in England, 1600–1603’, Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 43 (1965), 507. A.G.S., E 622, King James to the Archdukes, 3/13 April 1603, Latin text and Spanish translation summarised in H. Lonchay and J. Cuvelier, eds, Correspondance de la Cour d’Espagne sur les Affaires des Pays-Bas au xviie siècle (6 vols, Brussels: P. Imbreghts, 1923–1927), vol. 1, pp. 139–40. Charles Carter, The Secret Diplomacy of the Habsburgs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), pp. 12–13, 273. H.M.C., Salisbury, vol. 15, p. 74. A.G.S., E 840/109. H.M.C., Salisbury, vol. 14, pp. 256–7. In April 1603 when Philip III was still considering action, the Constable of Castile injected a note of realism, pointing out that the whole idea was ridiculous as the king had neither a candidate for the throne nor the forces to impose one: Allen, Philip III, p. 107. A.G.S., E 840/109. Albert J. Loomie, ‘Toleration and Diplomacy: The Religious Issue in AngloSpanish Relations 1603–1605’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 53 (1963), 15. Loomie, ‘Toleration’, p. 21; Allen, Philip III, p. 283, n. 66.

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35. R. Brown and H. F. Brown, eds, Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice (38 vols, London: HMSO, 1864–1947), vol. 10, pp. 140, 141–4, 147; Akrigg, ed., Letters of King James VI and I, p. 227. 36. Akrigg, ed., Letters of King James VI and I, p. 233. 37. H.M.C., Salisbury, vol. 16, pp. 203, 208–9, 219. 38. Ibid., pp. 226, 233. 39. Thewliss, ‘Peace Policy’, pp. 201–2, quoting A.G.S., E 841/141. 40. The negotiations are detailed in the journal printed in H.M.C., Eighth Report (London: HMSO, 1881), Appendix One, 95b–98b (manuscripts of the earl of Jersey); and a slightly variant text in Robert Watson, History of the Reign of Philip III of Spain (2 vols, London: G. G. J. & J. Robinson, 2nd edn, 1786), vol. 2, pp. 267–380. The treaty is printed in Davenport, ed., European Treaties, pp. 246–57. 41. For the merchants’ anger in May 1607 and their petition to the House of Commons, where they found much support, Linda Levy Peck, Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (London: Allen & Unwin, 1982), pp. 192–8. 42. Winwood, Memorials, vol. 2, pp. 27–8.

10 1603 and the Discourse of Favouritism Curtis Perry

Once upon a time, scholars had no difficulty characterizing King James’s reign negatively, and thus no difficulty assessing the historical and cultural consequences of his accession in 1603. The most emphatic declaration ever issued on the subject comes from the nineteenth-century historian Thomas Babington, Lord Macaulay, who wrote that ‘on the day of the accession of James the First England descended from the rank which she had hitherto held, and began to be regarded as a power hardly of the second order’.1 This rather abrupt transformation – the very day of his accession! – has a great deal to do, for Macaulay, with what we in the United States like to call ‘the character issue’. Macaulay’s King James is a coward and a pedant, given to hectoring Parliament but weak when push came to shove, ungainly, effeminate and childish: ‘It was no light thing’, quoth Macaulay, ‘that, on the very eve of the decisive struggle between our Kings and their Parliaments, royalty should be exhibited to the world stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears, trembling at a drawn sword, and talking in the style alternately of a buffoon and of a pedagogue.’2 The historical image of King James has of course been rehabilitated considerably in the last twenty years and certainly nobody would write such sentences today.3 Still, the idea of James’s unmanliness has been surprisingly persistent even among scholars who might otherwise approve of, say, a pedagogical streak or a basic dislike for violence. Thus, Michael Young, in his recent book King James and the History of Homosexuality, gives us a more contemporary version of the same basic argument. James, he argues, was a homosexual and was seen as such by his subjects. For this reason, and following a cultural logic that in Young’s account remains unchanged to this day, James and his court were seen as effeminate, for Young takes great pains to argue that ‘effeminate meant then what effeminate means now’.4 Consequently, the argument goes, revulsion at James’s homosexuality inflected perception of his reluctance to go to war, so that (for Young) hawkish Parliamentarians in 1624 wanted to go to war partly in order to shore up a 155

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sense of national masculinity damaged by the spectacle of the homosexual monarch.5 This masculine grievance, for Young, played a crucial role in the gradual desacralization of the monarchy; Charles could never quite get free of the taint originating with his father’s effeminate sexual desires. I do not agree with any of this. But I do think it demonstrates something of the persistence of the image of James as unmanly, and it lays bare the centrality of intimate political favouritism to the traditional negative appraisal of James’s kingcraft. Young’s argument – which, I should say, does draw heavily on memoirs, libels, and satires that did in fact contain both sexual gossip about the king and hostility towards his pacifism – makes James’s propensity for male favourites into the key character issue, the personal weakness that brings down the monarchy. What we see in Young’s book, then, is the latest instance of a habitual metaphoric association by which James’s erotically charged fondness for his male favourites is made into a kind of symbolic shorthand, a trope associated with and representing a more general lack of manly firmness. In G. P. V. Akrigg’s Jacobean Pageant, a book that was routinely cited by literary scholars as a standard authority on matters Jacobean at least into the early 1990s, one can find references to James’s homosexuality referenced in the index under ‘James I’ and the subheading ‘morals’.6 Fawning on favourites is the signature Jacobean failure, at once a symptom of effeminate desire and an example of poor government resulting from weak-mindedness. Hence the famous one-sentence summary of James’s reign in the spoof-history 1066 and All That: ‘James I slobbered at the mouth and had favourites; he was thus a Bad King.’7 ∗

∗

∗

I do not know that James really slobbered – that chestnut comes from the hatchet-job-cum-memoir produced by Anthony Weldon, which describes the royal tongue as too big for the royal mouth – but he did of course have very controversial favourites.8 The Overbury scandal, in which James’s Scottish favourite Robert Carr, earl of Somerset, was convicted of poisoning his associate, and the contretemps surrounding The Duke of Buckingham provide clear enough instances in which Jacobean favouritism can be said to have damaged the crown’s prestige. Such episodes are of cultural significance too insofar as they spill out beyond the world of court and help to confirm and engender popular images of court corruption. Alastair Bellany’s superb recent book on the cultural meaning of the Overbury scandal shows in fascinating detail how accounts of this scandal were circulated and how they drew on and helped shape stereotypes of the wicked court.9 And in addition to the kinds of polemics and epigrams that Bellany discusses, it is worth noting that there are a significant number of Jacobean plays – especially plays written after Somerset’s conviction in 1616 – that deal centrally with the problem of royal favourites as a trope for court corruption. Indeed, one

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thing that interests me about the discourse of favouritism in general is the way that such literary fictions exchange tropes and stereotypes with libels or polemics written about actual figures like Somerset or Buckingham. For the record, I do not think that accusations of effeminacy in Jacobean discourse about favouritism can, as Young suggests, be understood solely within the conceptual vocabulary of modern homophobia. The idea of effeminacy, in the kinds of libels and plays that Young discusses, tends to represent a failure of stoic self-government, the triumph of passion and appetite over moral reason. This idea – effeminacy as intemperance – links erotic desire to tyrannical political misrule because both are conceptualized in terms of the triumph of what Shakespeare, in The Winter’s Tale, calls ‘tyrannous passions’: that is, passions that tyrannize over the king and that lead him simultaneously to tyrannize over his subjects.10 The same basic association between failed self-government, effeminacy, and tyranny explains why overpowering uxorious desire is a feature of literary tyrants dating back to the classical tradition.11 In a great deal of Jacobean literature and libel – the kind of material upon which Young draws – James’s favouritism is cast in terms of sodomy so as to forge the connection between political corruption and the king’s own moral weakness.12 As scholars like Mario DiGangi and Jonathan Goldberg have suggested, sodomy is a political concept in the seventeenth century, a way of stigmatizing political misrule by associating it with a language of sin as intemperance.13 The political category of sodomy, as the legal historian Cynthia Herrup puts it, ‘was less about desiring men than about desiring everything’.14 We can re-think the nature of the associative connection between favouritism and erotic desire by attending to Jacobean plays – like Fletcher’s The Loyal Subject (1618) or Massinger’s The Duke of Milan (1621) – that draw connections between corrupt favouritism and the effeminate desires of rulers but that do so along alternative circuitry. The Loyal Subject, for instance, features a ruler who allows himself (a) to be guided by a corrupt and cowardly favourite and to mistreat the loyal general who is the play’s title character and (b) to fall madly in love with a young man in drag. The two failings are clearly associated within the play’s symbolic logic – both are understood as symptoms of the king’s effeminate moral weakness – but they are not the same thing. Sodomitical desire goes with corrupt favouritism here but not because the king has any particular erotic bond with the corrupting favourite himself. The Duke of Milan draws the same basic connection in still another way. It features a stereotypical Machiavellian favourite-as-villain figure named Francisco who owes his intimacy and influence with the duke his patron to a form of blackmail stemming from the duke’s tyrannous passions. We learn at the conclusion of the play that the duke has seduced and deflowered Francisco’s sister in the play’s prehistory and given him political power to keep him quiet. The effect, here too, is to link corrupt favouritism and the resulting misrule to the ruler’s erotic incontinence but, as with The

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Loyal Subject, there is no suggestion here that the relationship between ruler and favourite is itself an erotic one. Instead of seeing the favourite as the ruler’s lust object, favouritism and lust are in each case twin symptoms of the ruler’s tyrannous passion. I tend to read the eroticized accounts of Jacobean favouritism preserved in memoirs, recorded squibs of gossip, and manuscript libels as symbolic in this same way: not as reporting, but as a strain of anti-court discourse derived from a traditional way of imagining tyranny as a failure of self-government.15 Indeed, part of the importance of this kind of figuration is that it provides an alternative to official discourse in which decorum demands that the king be spared from criticism levelled at his agents and associates. Erotically inflected gossip about the king and the favourite can therefore be thought of as an unofficial language of complaint, one whose function is to insist upon the complicity of effeminate royal will in the political corruption of the realm. This becomes irresistible after the highly publicized Overbury trials, which not only convicted the king’s favourite of poisoning but also raised the spectre of the king’s complicity in a tangled web of erotic excess, treason, and sorcery. As virtually everybody who has ever commented on these trials has remarked, they seemed to conjure up the kinds of lurid court corruption hitherto seen only on stage. And, as Bellany has suggested, they also helped confirm a vocabulary of corruption that was later used to explain and condemn Buckingham.16 This language of complaint, because it boils political corruption down to the king’s tyrannous passions, has had a great deal of influence on the way we have traditionally understood and ascribed importance to James’s character. And, for reasons that are fairly obvious, the character issue has loomed especially large in the sort of historical narrative that treats the reign of a given monarch as the major analytical unit. After all, the one indisputable consequence of the accession of James I in 1603 is that James I became king. And if that means that England was suddenly headed by a man prone to fawn on favourites (to say nothing of the slobbering) then that is perhaps the central cultural consequence as well. To see Jacobean libels about corrupt favourites as part of a language of complaint rather than as transparent reporting, though, should force us to revise this understanding of the significance of 1603. We need to remember at all times that the character issue can be a vehicle for the expression of dissatisfaction rather than its cause. For it is a striking fact that virtually all of the scandal tropes later used to tar Somerset and Buckingham have robust late Elizabethan antecedents. The remarkable and widely circulated libel known as Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584), to give at once the most important and the most obvious example, anticipates several central features of Jacobean libels by painting a portrait of Elizabeth’s great favourite the earl of Leicester as a sexually voracious Machiavel with a bad habit of poisoning his enemies and a sorcery specialist on the payroll. It is not the case that the remarkable

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hostility occasioned by Jacobean favourites is simply a continuation of late Elizabethan political unease, of course, but it is quite striking nevertheless to note the similarities between Elizabethan and Jacobean constructions of corrupt favouritism.17 For example, Elizabeth’s involvement with her favourites provoked erotic gossip just as James’s would later. It was, for instance, rumoured that Elizabeth granted financial reward to favourites like the earl of Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton, and Sir Walter Ralegh strictly on the basis of their varying sexual performance.18 One does not want to ascribe too much importance to what are after all the most ephemeral of popular utterances, but the prevalence of this sort of vulgar gossip does at least point to a habit of imagination that must likewise lie behind the numerous late Elizabethan plays that also associate erotic misrule with corrupt favouritism. These include, for example, Marlowe’s Edward II (1591–1592), Jonson’s Sejanus (1603), and the anonymous chronicle plays Woodstock (1591–1593) and A Knack to Know A Knave (1594). While it is true that outside of popular gossip and Catholic libel there is nothing like the kind of pervasive and overt criticism of the crown one finds in so many Jacobean and Caroline manuscripts, there is nevertheless a real continuity in the figural language with which those instances we do have represent corrupt favouritism. The story of Edward II, in particular, enjoyed something of a boom in the last decade or so of Elizabeth’s reign: in addition to Marlowe’s play we have no less than four significant versions of the story produced by Michael Drayton and an early manuscript version of the verse history of The Life and Death of Edward the Second by Sir Francis Hubert that was later printed in 1628 and again in 1629.19 Erotic gossip about Elizabeth and her favourites – or, more precisely, the habits of thought revealed by this sort of ephemeral gossip – is presumably one context for the popularity of this story.20 At any rate, one need not posit, as more than one critic has done, that a writer like Marlowe took up this material in order to comment on James VI in Scotland, as if it were impossible to imagine erotic favouritism as a home-grown phenomenon.21 Of course, we tend to think very differently about the sexual gossip surrounding Elizabeth and the sexual gossip surrounding her successor King James, and I think this has to do with a number of factors: the generally positive historical image of Elizabeth, the fact that these rumoured amours are heterosexual, and the tension between them and the powerful image of Elizabeth as a virgin queen, a figure for self-control and chastity. But I think it makes a great deal of sense to think of the rumble of erotic gossip about monarchs and their favourites as more or less continuous from at least the 1580s on. This means, I think, that such gossip in and of itself tells us very little about the nature of the relationship between the rulers in question and their various favourites. It makes more sense to think of it as an unofficial language of corruption, used in varying political circumstances, which taps into commonplace

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stoic assumptions about the connection between good government and self-government. This, then, looks like a rather strong confirmation of the argument against the significance of 1603 put forward a few years ago by Rowland Wymer, who locates the impetus for the famously lurid depictions of court in early Jacobean drama in late Elizabethan political dissatisfactions and argues that the very negative image of James I cemented in the traditional historiography of the period has obscured the importance of the 1590s, particularly for literary critics eager to draw historicizing connections between corruption on the early Jacobean stage and English perception of the new court.22 I do think that the accession of James I matters – for the discourse of favouritism among other things – but it is likewise clear that we have to be a great deal more careful than we have in the past about the origin and significance of Jacobean political controversy and in particular about its relation to the personality of the king. ∗

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In order to begin to reassess the significance of attacks on favouritism as a language of corruption, let me offer the following generalization: Elizabethan and early Stuart representations of the problem of favouritism more often than not treat the royal favourite as a kind of embodied creation of unchecked royal will with the scary potential to impinge upon law and custom. In some cases, like the chronicle play Woodstock, where the favourites of Richard II make a mockery of property law and condemn as traitors all those who would ‘set limits to the King’s high pleasure’, corrupt favouritism is linked quite explicitly to the notion that monarchs were not bound by law.23 More often, though, fascination with favouritism registers paranoia about the encroachments of royal will upon the laws and liberties of the ancient constitution in subtler, more figurative ways. I have come, therefore, to think of the royal favourite – not the historical figures who could be described this way so much as the emergent cultural stereotype – in terms of Sir John Fortescue’s famous distinction between the English system, in which the king’s will is corralled by law, and the French monarchy ruling according to a civil tradition whose first premise is that ‘what pleased the prince has the force of law’.24 The latter arrangement, though it might work out in special cases when an individual monarch is exceptionally good, is for Fortescue inferior insofar as it is absolutist and thus tends towards tyranny. By contrast, the English king triumphs as a ruler precisely because he is ‘always’ able to suppress his own potentially tyrannical will: a king is free and powerful who is able to defend his own people against enemies alien and native, and also their goods and property, not only

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against the rapine of their neighbours and fellow-citizens, but against his own oppression and plunder, even though his own passions and necessities struggle for the contrary. For who can be freer and more powerful than he who is able to vanquish not only others but also himself? The king ruling his people politically can and always does do this.25 What interests me about this bit of proscriptive advice is its weirdly ambivalent relation to the personal aspects of government. On the one hand, it praises the English balanced constitution for helping the monarch rein in his nearly inevitable passionate weakness and, on the other, it treats the resulting self-abnegation as a kind of neo-stoic personal triumph of royal character itself. Our kings, Fortescue seems to be saying, are personally great because they govern themselves; and they govern themselves because our institutions govern them. Monarchy is thus conceptualized primarily in terms of the character issue even though the constitutional system Fortescue describes seems motivated primarily by the need to eradicate or control the potential excesses of the king’s own passions. This ambivalence about the meaning of royal will, I would argue, survives more or less intact in the early modern English political imagination, and helps contextualize the period’s anxious uncertainty about the status of royal favourites, powerful political agents, real or imagined, who owe their wealth and influence to their status as that which ‘pleased the prince’. What this means, I think, is that the emergent cultural stereotype of the all-powerful, Machiavellian royal favourite has a great deal to do with questions about the nature of monarchy: about the nature of prerogative, its limits, and about the sometimes uneasy fit between personal rule and the rule of law. Leicester’s Commonwealth is in many ways the ur-text of the early modern discourse of favouritism. It contains, as I have suggested above, most of the scandal tropes later associated with Jacobean favourites, and it was clearly enormously influential, widely read, and constantly alluded to up to and beyond its reprinting, in multiple editions, in 1641. The interesting thing about Leicester’s Commonwealth as a piece of creative writing, it seems to me, lies in the way it depicts the Elizabethan earl as a fully protean and rapacious figure, an upstart from a rebel family completely unrestrained by any larger system of religious or political loyalty. Of course, nobody, not even a Leicester or a Buckingham, could operate politically while floating free of the densely interconnected networks of obligation and affiliation that shaped the horizons of possibility in the close-knit political world of early modern England. But this radically disaffiliated figure, the monstrous progeny of royal affection, is surprisingly prominent in the period’s figurative imagination: think of Jonson’s Sejanus, the former prostitute lifted from nothing to rule Rome, or of Marlowe’s Gaveston, an upstart outsider dedicated solely to pleasure and foisted upon the peers by the will of the king.

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Understanding the figure of the royal favourite in this way – as an ideological fantasy exploring the problematic contours of personal monarchy – helps to explain the continuing prominence of Elizabethan stories about favouritism after the death of Leicester in 1588 and of Sir Christopher Hatton in 1591. There was, of course, a notion of Essex as intimate favourite and of Burghley and Robert Cecil as all-powerful courtiers, but there was nobody whom a historian, describing kinds of careers, would likely slot in beside Leicester, Buckingham, Gaveston, and the like as the great favourite of the 1590s. But, as numerous scholars have suggested, there is something like a constitutional crisis in the 1590s, one stemming from the succession problem, from the emergence of court factionalism, and from the related pressures of the crown’s poverty and penury.26 And what I am suggesting here is that fictions of favouritism are of interest during constitutional crises precisely because they help people ask or explore fundamental constitutional questions. Let me be a bit more precise about this by turning to a specific example. A number of critics, eager to make sense of the topical resonance of Marlowe’s Edward II, have pointed out that the historical legend of the reign, deposition, and murder of Edward II is in fact alluded to in several tracts about the problem of succession.27 The most widely discussed of these is the Jesuit Robert Parsons’s notorious treatise A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England, which was apparently written in 1593 and circulated (under the nom de plume Doleman) in England two years later.28 It is true that the Edward II story features here, though I have to say that it is not especially prominent. As in other contemporary succession tracts, it is one item in a list of precedents showing that the English people can elect and depose kings and thus intended to suggest that they might elect a Catholic successor upon Elizabeth’s death if they were so inclined. But what really catches my eye about Parsons’s argument about election is how it is framed. It opens with a discussion of the relationship between king and law that sounds a great deal like Fortescue or other theorists of the balanced constitution because it derives from that portion of book three of Aristotle’s Politics which is ultimately the source for this tradition. Parsons writes, following and citing Aristotle, that while ‘a Prince ruling by law is more then a man, or a man deified,    a Prince ruling by affection is less then a man, or a man brutified’.29 And, Parsons argues, if the law is a check against the bestial affections of a king, then the law is above the king. This in turn implies that there are national imperatives that trump the personal authority of the king and so authorizes the text’s investigation into the legitimacy of election as a means of securing a successor. What I want to suggest about this is that it illustrates nicely how debates about the succession could open onto fundamental anxieties about monarchy and the nature of prerogative: thinking about the succession problem means thinking about the nature of monarchy in a native

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constitutional tradition. Edward II not only stages a well-known instance of deposition, but it zeros in on a more foundational concern with the conflict between prerogative and law by dramatizing the imbalance caused by (in Parsons’s terms) ‘a Prince ruling by affection’. Reading Edward II alongside A Conference therefore helps unpack the play’s contemporary ideological investments, laying bare the associative link between royal affection on the one hand and questions of prerogative, tyranny, and resistance on the other. This in turn can help us see why fictions of corrupt favouritism might be felt as urgently topical explorations of monarchy during the period (from the mid 1580s on) that John Guy has dubbed ‘the second reign of Elizabeth I’.30 Broadly speaking, Elizabethan and early Stuart writers produced an avalanche of plays, chronicles, verse histories, epigrams, memoirs, prose fictions, and polemics that explored the problem of royal favouritism. The relationship between the figural, ideological work done in these texts and the actual careers of men considered to be royal favourites is sometimes slippery, but it seems clear that, at least to some degree, response to King James’s controversial favourites was mediated or even scripted by what had come before. The Edward II story, for instance, seems to have had special currency during the 1590s and then again in the 1620s.31 Its meaning is closely associated with Buckingham’s career by the latter decade, but the story applied to Buckingham is very materially the legacy of late Elizabethan literary and political discourse. The most concrete example of this is Sir Francis Hubert’s verse history of Life and Death of Edward the Second, which by his own account ‘was conceived and borne in Queene Elizabeths time, but grew to more maturity in King JAMES’s’.32 In fact, we have three different versions of Hubert’s poem: a late Elizabethan manuscript, a version of the poem as revised during the Jacobean period and printed without authorization in 1628, and an authorized version printed in 1629. The poem seems to have achieved some level of notoriety in the 1620s, largely because of interest in the problem of favouritism stemming from controversy surrounding Buckingham, but most of what Hubert wrote in the 1590s survives unedited into the 1629 version. It is quite literally the case in this instance that material conceived of as political commentary in the late 1590s was read and circulated for its urgent topicality in the 1620s. ∗

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I have to this point been discussing the figure of the corrupt, all-powerful royal favourite as a trope used to explore constitutional imbalance, incipient absolutism, and the threat of tyranny from the 1580s on. Though the intensity of hostility towards favourites is ratcheted up in Jacobean England – first by envy of the rewards given to members of the king’s Bedchamber staff and then by resentment of Somerset and Buckingham – the conceptual language in which that hostility is expressed is not distinctly Jacobean. If we

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are looking for an aspect of the discourse surrounding favouritism that is really characteristically Jacobean in origin, I suggest that we shift our attention to the language in which the politics of intimacy was defended. Here is James’s own defence of favouritism, from his much-discussed speech before Parliament in March of 1610: God hath power to create, or destroy, make, or unmake at his pleasure, to give life, or send death, to judge all, and to be judged nor accomptable to none: To raise low things, and to make high things low at his pleasure, and to God are both soule and body due. And the like power have Kings: they make and unmake their subjects: they have power of raising, and casting downe: of life, and of death: Judges over all their subjects and in all causes, and yet accomptable to none but God onely. They have power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the Chesse; A pawne to take a Bishop or a Knight, and to cry up, or downe any of their subjects, as they do their money.33 Though this sounds needlessly strident to my ear – do subjects like being told that their king treats them like chess pieces? – we need to remember that the language of divine right is not incompatible with the idea of constitutional balance or limited prerogative.34 This assertion matters not because it is absolutist or even especially controversial – Elizabethans would have for the most part accepted the idea that kings could ‘exalt low things’ – but because it reframes debate over favouritism in terms of abstract theory and prerogative instead of in terms of practical politics and policy. This is a characteristic Jacobean change of emphasis and it has in the long run the paradoxical effect of weakening the case for the political utility of intimate royal patronage. If we were to take something like a cross-section of the discourse concerning favouritism during ‘the second reign of Elizabeth’, we would find texts like Leicester’s Commonwealth or the various version of the Edward II story coexisting somewhat uneasily with a set of traditional ways of thinking that justify the institution on grounds of morality and policy alike. Of particular importance to positive Elizabethan conceptions of favouritism is the notion that the king’s freedom of affection provides an essential avenue for the reward of meritorious subjects. In Elizabethan England, where there was something of a divide between a largely Protestant court and an aristocracy that still had powerful ties to the Catholic past, it was particularly easy to think of royal favour as a way of counterbalancing the encrusted privilege of the aristocracy. One sees this notion, for instance, in the anonymous True Chronicle History    of Thomas Lord Cromwell (1600), a play in which the title character is raised from obscurity into a position of intimacy with Henry VIII from which he enacts popular reform and from which he is in turn ousted by conniving Catholics.

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This notion of the favourite as Protestant reformer is in some ways the flip side of Catholic libels against the earl of Leicester. Where Leicester’s Commonwealth treats the court favourite as a figure disaffiliated from tradition and community, a text like Cromwell reminds us of another way of thinking in which the freedom from tradition is a positive attribute of such a figure. Late Elizabethan libels and plays concerning corrupt royal favourites coexisted, too, with powerful notions of intimate friendship as a traditional mechanism for securing trustworthy counsel.35 Imagining favouritism according to the exacting humanist idea of friendship meant thinking of the intimate relationship between the king and his friend as an anchor holding both parties firm to the canons of public virtue. And though, as Laurie Shannon has recently argued, there could be real tension between the emphasis on equality within classical friendship theory and the necessarily hierarchical relationship between king and counsellor, it is nevertheless quite common to see the language of friendship deployed to justify the king’s intimate patronage.36 This is what Sir Philip Sidney has in mind in his Arcadia when he describes the wise counsellor Philanax as a friend to Basilius ‘not only in affection but judgment’.37 The language of counsel, together with the language of reward, underlies a set of traditional and pragmatic ways of thinking about royal favouritism that counter-balance the kind of corrosive scepticism about the institution expressed in texts like Leicester’s Commonwealth. For me, discussion of the impact of the accession of James I upon the discourse of favouritism begins with the recognition that the new king destroyed this balance, rendering aspects of the more positive discourse of favour untenable. One thing James did was to create the Bedchamber as the site for his most important intimate service and to staff it with members of his Scottish entourage. This may have been done for perfectly sound reasons, but royal favour granted to uncouth-seeming Scottish intimates was unlikely to evoke the kind of popular support for the institution dramatized in Thomas Lord Cromwell.38 James’s Scottish favourites, rather than being seen as meritorious native opponents of an ingrained Catholic aristocracy, were commonly seen as instruments of social dislocation and (in the case of Somerset) as possible Popish conspirators.39 By the same token, as I have argued elsewhere, James’s public style – the way he emphasized his own discursive authority and thus encouraged subjects to think of him as a dispenser of wisdom rather than a seeker of advice – tended to undercut the idea of intimacy as a basis for counsel.40 The author of Basilikon Doron presents himself offering advice rather than requiring it, and this seems to have been how he was perceived and described by others as well. We see this in the king’s speech of 1610 as well: focusing upon the king’s godlike ability to elevate his subjects de-emphasizes the reciprocal support that intimates might likewise offer the king. The result is a change in tone and rhetoric more

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than anything else, but it undercuts to some degree the language of counsel traditionally bound up with the idea that kings needed intimate friends to assist them. One result of this is that defences of favouritism undertaken by writers eager to follow the king’s discursive cues tend to focus on the king’s right to elevate his minion rather than on the moral or political results he might obtain by doing so. Typical in this regard is Edward Forset, whose early Jacobean treatise A Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique discusses counsellors separately from favourites, defending the latter in no uncertain terms without offering any positive justification for their existence save the king’s need for relaxation. Counsellors are likened to the ‘understanding faculty’, while favourites are likened to the ‘fantasies of the Soule’, and yet for Forset it is nevertheless normal enough that they should gain wealth and position from their proximity to the king: There must be no despitefull envying at the Soveraignes favourites; as they be to him the recreating comforts choicely selected & acceptablie to consort withall; so their enriching, advauncing, and gracing, with the cleerest outward signes of their Soveraignes love, is not onely allowable, but plainely necessarie.41 The king’s favourites in this conception of the state are necessary for the king’s mental health, but are otherwise not especially useful to him in his public capacity. We can see this change in emphasis at work too in Hubert’s revisions to his Life and Death of Edward the Second, that remarkable palimpsest of late Elizabethan and Jacobean political concerns. Here is how the original Elizabethan version comments on the spectacular rise of Gaveston: Yet heare wee boath did erre in pollicie I that did give hee that did take too much For beeing advancd’ to so high dignitie His many tytles made great Lordes to grudge Who scornd’ a night-growne mushrump should be such As myght in tearmes of greatenes match with them So muche doethe Envie woorke in mightie men.42 The point is not that it is right or wrong in the abstract to elevate a minion in this way, but rather that it is poor policy to do so. The unspoken assumption is that rewarding intimates is a normal enough thing that could work out well or badly and that was foolhardy in this case for specific practical reasons.

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The Jacobean version of the poem replaces this editorializing with a block of stanzas that shift the emphasis from policy to theory. In particular, the revised stanzas offer a surprisingly insistent defence of the king’s right in theory to elevate whomever he might choose: Let them bee great whom Kings resolve to grace; It is a Priviledge that is theyr owne: To rayse such as they please to wealth or place Is truely proper to the Kingly throne And hath not bin deny’d to any One. Lewes th’eleventh did say hee spent his Raigne In making and in marring men againe. Some by the Schoole, some by the Lawes do mount, Some by the Sword, and some by Navigation. All streames have heads though not the selfe-same fount; Shall onely Kings admit a Limitation How high, for what desert, or of what Nation They shall advance? It were a wretched thing On that condition to become a King. To make new Creatures Is the Princes due, And without murmer let him have his owne. The danger onely Is to him that’s new, For Envie ever waytes on such an One Both from those men that are not so well growne And from great houses too, who streight wil feare Lest such new Stars should thrust them from theyr Spheare.43 The change in tone here is due, at least in part, to the increasingly audible murmurs provoked by King James’s favourites. Outspoken attacks on royal favourites warrant strident defences of the institution. But Hubert’s shift in emphasis also reflects the impact of the king’s own rhetoric concerning the ‘power to exalt low things’. We can see here too the rhetorical effects of this new language. To discuss favouritism in terms of policy, as Hubert did in the 1590s, is of course to leave open the possibility that the king’s support of intimate subjects might be good policy in other circumstances. By contrast, the Jacobean version’s rather abstract defence of the king’s right to choose his own ‘creatures’ severs discussion of favouritism from questions of political utility and in the process eschews the more traditional policy-based defences of intimate patronage as a useful vehicle for securing counsel and rewarding virtue. At the same time, and not coincidentally, it seems to have become harder and harder for Jacobean playwrights to imagine favouritism – no matter how normal, no matter how unavoidable, and no matter how necessary – as

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anything but corrupting. And though there are a large handful of Jacobean plays that feature morally positive royal favourite figures, they all seem to me to be surprisingly edgy, as if they were testing in one way or another old justifications of favouritism eroding under the pressure of Jacobean circumstance. One example of this is The Queen of Corinth (1616–1617), a play written by Fletcher, Massinger, and Nathan Field that features a queen of unimpeachable stoic self-mastery and a virtuous upstart favourite of impeccable virtue. But the play also features a debauched and predatory court whose sexual corruption alludes to the lurid revelations of the recent Overbury trials. And the gender of the idealized monarch seems designed to invoke the memory of Queen Elizabeth. As a result, insofar as the play imagines favouritism as a positive social institution it does so in a topically complex manner: it invokes as Elizabethan a positive version of favouritism and tests it obliquely against a corrupt present. Also instructive in this regard is another late Jacobean good-favourite play, first printed by the Malone Society from a seventeenth-century manuscript, under the title The Faithful Friends.44 The story of this play, set in pre-Republican Rome, hinges upon the morality of the king and the political legitimacy of his favourite. Its convoluted plot pivots around the scheming of the royal favourite’s rivals and around the possibility that the king himself may turn out to a stereotypical lustful tyrant out to seduce the favourite’s virtuous wife. In the end, the king saves the day, rescuing the favourite while preserving both his marriage and his life. But what is striking about this play is that, though it very aggressively defends the right of kings to have favourites on a number of occasions, it doesn’t really imagine the favourite as essential or even useful in any practical way: the king is sufficient in himself to see through corruption and rescue the innocent. He does not really require counsel or even service. This, then, is the Jacobean defence of favouritism, stripped of all traditional ideas concerning the social or political utility of the institution. ∗

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George Chapman’s Tragedie of Chabot is an especially interesting play to consider in light of this rather threadbare Jacobean defence of favouritism, for its plot hinges on a conflict between a good favourite who conceives of himself as a positive moral force and a king who would rather think of him exclusively as the product of godlike royal generosity. The play was actually printed in 1639, with a title page attributing it to Chapman and James Shirley, but it must have been written first by Chapman and then tinkered with by Shirley for a Caroline revival. Despite Shirley’s intervention, the consensus – on stylistic grounds and because the title character has so much in common with figures like Chapman’s Clermont D’Ambois – has been that the play as we have it is predominantly Chapman’s in its general

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conception.45 Until fairly recently, the play had typically been given a provisional date of 1621 on circumstantial grounds, but recent scholarship has shown that it may have been composed somewhat earlier, perhaps not long after the initial publication of its principal source in 1611.46 Beyond this, specific arguments about the date of composition must rest on speculative foundations. The play hinges upon factional conflict between Chabot – ‘The great, and onely famous Favorite / To Francis first of that Imperiall name’ (1.1.2) – and the followers of a young favourite on the rise named Montmorency, and it seems likely to me that this was intended to evoke the rise of George Villiers (later Duke of Buckingham) and the threat he posed to Somerset, who was himself one of Chapman’s patrons.47 For this reason, a date earlier than 1614 seems unlikely to me. I do not want to place too much emphasis here upon what is a purely speculative dating, but it is worth noting that if the The Tragedie of Chabot was composed as early as 1614 then it (unlike The Queen of Corinth, The Faithful Friends, The Loyal Subject, or The Duke of Milan) may give us access to a Jacobean way of thinking about the problem of royal friendship before the lurid revelations of the Overbury scandal cemented the image of corrupt favouritism in the collective imagination. Chabot is the very epitome of the good favourite. He has been raised to prominence despite relatively lowly birth, and this of course evokes a longstanding defence of favouritism as a mechanism for recognizing merit. And the play goes out of its way to insist that he always operates according to the very strictest and most public-minded canons of justice. Indeed, in the expository exchange that frames the play’s basic situation, he is described as a kind of justice machine, a figure of automatic moral rectitude: There’s no Needle In a sunne Diall plac’d upon his steele In such a tender posture, that doth tremble, The timely Diall being held amisse, And will shake ever, till you hold it right, More tender than himselfe in anything That he concludes in Justice for the State: For as a fever held him, hee will shake When he is signing any things of weight, Least humane frailty should misguide his justice. (1.1.48–57) In the context of the play’s interest in royal favour, this image draws upon the commonplace association between the king and the sun, since ideally the king represents and authorizes the ‘justice for the state’ to which the favourite is so perfectly dedicated. Thus, the image perhaps expresses an ideal

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relationship between favourite and king in which the king shines out justice that the favourite supports. At the same time, this submerged image – the favourite as sundial trembling before the king’s sun – evokes the common conception of courtiers as sycophants. In fact, it seems to me that the dual signification of this image underscores the play’s core concerns about the nature of the good favourite. Can the kind of impersonal, neo-stoic moral virtue demanded by classical friendship theory exist in a courtly world that encourages would-be favourites to act as sundials to the king? From the beginning of the play, Chabot is opposed by a coalition of envious courtiers who are backing his rival Montmorency. The king attempts to reconcile the two favourites, but Montmorency’s supporters urge him instead to undermine his rival and he reluctantly agrees (‘Misery / Of rising Statesmen, I must on!’ [1.1.238–39]). Accordingly, Montmorency’s coalition seeks passage of an unjust bill, knowing full well that Chabot – ever inflexible – will angrily refuse to sign it. This, they hope, will anger King Francis and drive a wedge between the king and his old favourite. The plan works, though not exactly in the manner intended by Chabot’s opponents. What is remarkable in Chapman’s play – and unlike the version of events in his source – is that the king’s trust in Chabot’s moral integrity never really wavers. Chabot’s enemies denounce him to the king, but Francis simply shrugs their accusations off. Instead, the king takes umbrage at the moral absoluteness of his favourite’s denunciation of Montmorency for signing the suspect bill. It angers Francis that Chabot’s code of conduct should place more emphasis upon justice than upon personal loyalty to his royal patron. The more Chabot sticks to his strict sense of justice, the more Francis sees his favourite’s stubbornness as a refusal to acknowledge the priority of royal authority. He says: You will have justice? Is your will so strong Now against mine? your power being so weake, Before my favour gave them both their forces: Of all that ever shar’d in my free graces, You, Philip Chabot, a meane Gentleman, Have not I rais’d you to a supremest Lord, And given you greater dignities than any? (2.3.59–65) Piqued by his favourite’s moral autonomy, Francis authorizes Chabot’s most Machiavellian opponent – Poyet, the Lord Chancellor – to dig up dirt on him. And the king is delighted when the Chancellor subsequently has Chabot tried and convicted of treason on trumped up charges. The point is not that the king wants his favourite executed, but rather that the conviction makes possible a pardon and gives Francis the chance to dramatize, once

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again and forcefully, the favourite’s dependence upon royal favour. Francis explains his position fairly explicitly: I joy This boldnesse is condemn’d, that I may pardon, And therein get some ground in his opinion By so much bounty as saves his life, And me thinks that weigh’d more, should sway the ballance Twixt me and him. (4.1.166–71) The language of bounty is crucial here: Francis objects to Chabot’s independence of judgment and seeks only to force his favourite to acknowledge his complete indebtedness to the favour of his royal patron. Francis’s insistence upon the recognition of his own enormous bounty emphasizes the overwhelming asymmetry of the king/favourite relationship. This in turn makes it impossible to imagine the relationship along humanist lines as a reciprocal exchange of virtuous support among moral equals. We might say, in fact, that the play manufactures this oddly abstract conflict between Chabot and his king in order to lay bare the tension between two fundamental ways of thinking about favouritism. Favouritism as the expression of godlike bounty here comes into conflict with favouritism as a basis for counsel and service. Insofar as favouritism is a form of royal bounty – an expression of the king’s generosity to deserving underlings – it plays a role in the propaganda of monarchy, emphasizing the godlike superfluity of the king as source. As Linda Levy Peck has shown, this conception of royal bounty was central to the performance of Jacobean kingship.48 Such generosity was of course used in practice to secure reciprocal loyalty, but the Jacobean language of bounty emphasized instead the connection between royal and divine superabundance. Implicit in this emphasis is an ideological assertion about the nature of monarchy: that the king is self-sufficient. Chapman’s Francis is thus a bit like Shakespeare’s Lear, eager to make claims on the basis of his own godlike generosity and unwilling to acknowledge the kinds of de facto reciprocity that must attend any relationship between independent agents. Here, though, Chabot stands in the place of Cordelia or Kent, asserting the alternative validity of an idealized conception of humanist court service in which the favourite owes obedience only according to bonds anchored by a larger commitment to justice and virtue. It is no coincidence that such conflicts should preoccupy early Jacobean drama, for they derive in part from interest in the sound and style of the new king. The Tragedie of Chabot illuminates for us the awkwardness of Jacobean thinking about favouritism by demonstrating an emerging conflict between the king’s rhetoric of self-sufficiency (in which kings ‘have power to exalt

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low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the Chesse’) and the humanist notions of service and counsel traditionally used to defend royal intimacy as an integral part of the operation of the state. For a tragedy, Chabot features a remarkable degree of political consensus. Montmorency comes to regret his role in the rivalry and pleads for Chabot’s pardon. The king himself, abashed by his favourite’s moral constancy, recants and admits that he has been wrong: ‘This was too wilde a way to make his merits / Stoope and acknowledge my superior bounties’ (4.1.288–9). The judges who presided over Chabot’s trial testify to the Lord Chancellor’s coercive pressure, and the latter is apprehended and called to justice for his role in the favourite’s prosecution. All seems poised for a happy resolution. But Chabot himself, heartbroken by the king’s betrayal, falls ill and dies. Oddly, despite efforts at reconciliation, the king’s unwarranted violation of the bonds of friendship seems to have demolished Chabot, making it impossible for the good favourite to continue living. Chabot’s hasty demise is not rendered in such a way as to make it seem particularly persuasive at the level of character or psychology, but it makes a great deal of sense as a semiallegorical commentary on the problem of favouritism. The point seems to be that the king’s behaviour has violated more than a private friendship; it has violated the basic premises of Chabot’s worldview and sense of self. Francis’s betrayal opens up a gap between the demands of personal dependency and those of service to the state, thereby implying that the politics of personal favour and the imperatives of public justice are in a sense incompatible. Since Chabot – the sundial – is characterized in terms of his perfect allegiance to both justice and the king, this gap makes it literally impossible for the character to exist. One of the things that makes this particular play remarkable is its depiction of Francis I. He is in many ways a positive character. For one thing, he has had the wisdom to recognize and reward Chabot’s virtue in the first place. For another, he is able to see the error of his ways after Chabot’s trial. Chabot’s eventual fall is not due to perfidious factionalism, monstrous tyranny, or the self-destructiveness of human aspirations, the staples of early modern tragedy. Indeed, the play’s radicalism stems from its insistence that the good favourite’s betrayal happens in spite of the fact that the king is wise, the favourite virtuous, and factionalism contained. This is not really a play about faction or about sin. It is a play about the potentially crippling tension between French absolutism – serving, with its aggrandizement of political agency to the person of the king, as a cautionary exemplum for England – and the idea of the good favourite who serves the crown out of a larger public commitment. Blair Worden, in a highly compressed overview of favourites on the English stage, has suggested in passing that ‘it is a general  seventeenth-century rule that playwrights with connections at court, or with monarchical or Tory sympathies, were those likeliest to portray favourites sympathetically’.49 He

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has in mind, I think, a number of Caroline plays that feature positive constructions of favouritism, plays like Lodowick Carlell’s The Deserving Favourite (1629) or William Davenant’s The Fair Favourite (1638). What is striking about Jacobean good-favourite plays, though, is how poorly this more or less intuitive generalization applies. Instead plays like Chabot, The Queen of Corinth, The Faithful Friends, or indeed plays like The Duke of Milan and The Loyal Subject, each of which feature one good and one bad royal favourite, register the erosion of traditional justifications of the politics of intimacy under the increasing pressure of Jacobean rhetoric and practice. It is also striking, I think, that those Caroline plays that do celebrate favouritism do so in entirely new terms, treating the affection of monarch and favourite as a sub-set of the neo-platonic language of passionate affection for which the Caroline court is notorious. In effect, these plays use court neo-Platonism, with its celebration of passionate attachment as a mode of moral intuition, to replace the stoic language of virtuous friendship prevalent earlier. This has to do, of course, with the ascendancy of Henrietta Maria and with the larger Caroline need to justify personal rule as a category. It also, though, registers a recognition that an earlier language of intimate court service – Chabot’s language – had collapsed.

Notes 1. Macaulay, The Works of Lord Macaulay: Complete, ed. Lady Trevelyan, 8 vols (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1879), vol. 1, p. 54. 2. Ibid., p. 58. 3. See the nicely succinct survey of the historiography in Pauline Croft’s King James (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2003), pp. 4–9. 4. Michael B. Young, King James and the History of Homosexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2000), p. 153. 5. Ibid., p. 101. 6. G. P. V. Akrigg, Jacobean Pageant: The Court of King James I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 423. 7. W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1931), p. 62. 8. Anthony Weldon, The Court and Character of King James (London, 1650), p. 178. 9. Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 10. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. J. H. P. Pafford (1963; London: Routledge, 1988), p. 54, 2.3.28. 11. Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 20–5, 34–6. 12. See Mario DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 100–7; and Curtis Perry, ‘The Politics of Access and Representations of the Sodomite King in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 1054–83. 13. DiGangi, Homoerotics, especially pp. 1–23; Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

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14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

1603 and the Discourse of Favouritism There is by now a very large bibliography on the subject of early modern homoeroticism and/or sodomy. Cynthia B. Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 33. Since there is some debate about the actual erotic content of James’s relationships with favourites, it is worth noting here that gossip and libel concerning royal sodomy can be a figural or ideological construct in this way even if the sexual acts imagined did indeed take place. Francis Osborne’s salacious memoir, for instance, records a process by which public kissing prompts speculation about more private erotic congress, but that in itself suggests an act of imaginative projection which marks the difference between reporting and constructing. Osborne describes James kissing favourites ‘after so lascivious a mode in publick, and upon the Theater as it were of the World’, and adds that this ‘prompted many to imagine some things done in the Tyring-house, that exceed my expressions no less then they do my experience’. I quote Osborne’s memoir, which was first printed in 1658, from The Works of Francis Osborne (London, 1673), p. 535. The best evidence we have of a consummated erotic relationship between James and a favourite is in the letters sent from Buckingham to James, which if not clearly sexual are at least suffused with bodily intensity. See David M. Bergeron, King James & Letters of Homoerotic Desire (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999), pp. 98–143. Bellany, Politics of Court Scandal, pp. 254–61. For a more comprehensive survey of some of the scandal tropes of favouritism and of their Elizabethan and Early Stuart uses, see Robert P. Shephard, ‘Royal Favorites in the Political Discourse of Tudor and Stuart England’, PhD Dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 1985, pp. 276–359. Robert P. Shephard, ‘Sexual Rumours in English Politics’, in Jaqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds, Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), pp. 101–22. The specific allegation about sexual stipends is discussed on pp. 103–4, and is attributed to John Pole, a criminal figure from the same demimonde of spying and information as Christopher Marlowe. Shephard provides numerous instances in which Elizabeth’s political intimacies were gossiped about in sexual terms, and in fact he opines that ‘the frequency and intensity’ of erotic ‘rumours about Elizabeth were much greater than those about James’ (p. 102). See also Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 66–90. Drayton’s Piers Gaveston was printed in 1593, his Mortimeriados in 1596, his 1597 collection of England’s Heroicall Epistles features letters exchanged between Mortimer and Isabella, and The Barons Warres – a revised and expanded version of Mortimeriados recast as epic in the mode of Lucan – appears in 1603. Moreover, Drayton’s 1605 Poems contains a significantly revised version of Piers Gaveston. Simon Shepherd argues that writers used male favourites and male kings to represent the problem of favouritism despite Elizabeth’s gender. See ‘What’s so Funny about Ladies’ Tailors? A Survey of Some Male (Homo)sexual Types in the Renaissance’, Textual Practice, 6 (1992), 23–4. See Lawrence Normand, ‘ “What Passions Call You These?”: Edward II and James VI’, in Daryll Grantley and Peter Roberts, eds, Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996), pp. 172–97. See also Mark Thornton Burnett, ‘Edward II and Elizabethan Politics’, in Paul Whitfield White,

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23. 24.

25. 26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

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ed., Marlowe, History, and Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe (New York: AMS Press, 1998), pp. 89–100; and Goldberg, Sodometries, p. 271, n. 26. Rowland Wymer, ‘Jacobean Pageant or Elizabethan Fin de Siècle? The Political Context of Early Seventeenth-century Tragedy’, in R. H. Wells, G. Burgess, and R. Wymer, eds, Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 138–51. Anon., Thomas of Woodstock or Richard the Second Part One, ed. Peter Corbin and Douglas Sedge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 153, 4.3.40. Sir John Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, ed. Shelley Lockwood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 83. For a more extended discussion of the implications of this conception of favouritism, see Curtis Perry, Literature and Favouritism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Fortescue, On the Laws and Governance of England, pp. 53–4. See for instance the essays collected in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). See Burnett, ‘Edward II and Elizabethan Politics’, pp. 94–6; and Ronald Knowles, ‘The Political Contexts of Deposition and Election in Edward II’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 14 (2001), 105–21. Peter Holmes, ‘The Authorship and Early Reception of A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England’, The Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 415–29. R. Doleman, A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England (‘Imprinted at N.’ [Antwerp], 1594), p. 22. John Guy, ‘The 1590s: The Second Reign of Elizabeth I’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I, pp. 1–19. On the importance of the Edward II story in the 1620s, see Curtis Perry, ‘Yelverton, Buckingham, and the Story of Edward II in the 1620s’, The Review of English Studies, n.s. 54 (2003), 313–35; and Danielle Clarke, ‘ “The Sovereign’s Vice Begets the Subject’s Error”: The Duke of Buckingham, “Sodomy” and Narratives of Edward II, 1622–28’, in Tom Betteridge, ed., Sodomy in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 46–64. Bernard Mellor, ed., The Poems of Sir Francis Hubert (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1961), p. 2. Johann P. Somerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 181. I have silently modernized i/j and u/v. I agree, on the whole, with Glenn Burgess’s account of the speech in The Politics of The Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 152–6. Sir Francis Hubert puts this point explicitly in his Edward II poem, noting that though kings ‘have Prerogatives / Yet there are certain limits to the same / Which keeps not Kings from being superlatives / To sway (as Gods Lieve-tenants) this faire frame’. See Mellor, ed., Poems, p. 10, stanza 25. This stanza is present in each version of the poem. See John Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Dale Hoak, ed., Tudor Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 292–312. Laurie Shannon, Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 125–84. Sir Philip Sidney, The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 5.

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38. The best account is Neil Cuddy, ‘The King’s Chambers: The Bedchamber of James I in Administration and Politcs, 1603–1625’, D.Phil. Thesis, Oxford University, 1987. 39. Bellany, Politics of Court Scandal, pp. 181–211. 40. Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 83–114. 41. Forset, A Comparatiue Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique (London, 1606), p. 15. 42. Mellor’s copy text is the edition of 1629, but he reproduces major Elizabethan variants in his notes. I quote this stanza from the note to stanzas 167–9 in Poems, p. 304. 43. Mellor, ed., Poems, pp. 45–6, stanzas 167–9. 44. Anon., The Faithful Friends, ed. G. M. Pinciss (Oxford: Malone Society, 1975). The play was most likely never performed, and the manuscript is clearly that of a work in progress. Interestingly, the emended and excised passages tend to be accounts of the politics of favouritism, so the manuscript is itself a monument to the Jacobean difficulty with this issue. 45. See G. Blakemore Evans’s introduction in The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies with Sir Gyles Goosecappe, ed. Allan Holaday et al. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1987), pp. 621–2. I am using Evans’s text here, and subsequent citations will be given parenthetically by act, scene, and line. 46. The argument for 1621 is based on the topical reading of the play put forward by Norma Dobie Solve in Stuart Politics in Chapman’s Tragedy of Chabot (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1928). Albert H. Tricomi has argued for a much earlier date of composition (c.1611–1612) in ‘The Dates of the Plays of George Chapman’, English Literary Renaissance, 12 (1982), 242–66. See Evans’s summary of the arguments in The Plays of George Chapman, pp. 618–21. Chapman’s source is a brief moral exemplum in the 1611 edition of Etienne Pasquier’s Les Recherches de la France. Solve provides a detailed account of the relation between the play and its source in Stuart Politics, pp. 63–83. 47. In addition to Solve, Stuart Politics, see Thelma Herring, ‘Chapman and an Aspect of Modern Criticism’, Renaissance Drama, o.s. 8 (1965), 167–79. 48. Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), pp. 12–29. 49. Blair Worden, ‘Favourites on the English Stage’, in J. H. Elliott and L. W. B. Brockliss, eds, The World of the Favourite (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 163.

11 The Essex Myth in Jacobean England Maureen King

William Barlow, in his 1 March 1601 Paul’s Cross sermon on the rebellion and execution of Robert Devereux, 2nd earl of Essex, described the Earl’s unsuccessful 8 February attempt to seize Whitehall and Queen Elizabeth as ‘the most daungerous plotte that euer was hatched within this land’.1 Less than a quarter of a century later, near the end of the reign of King James I, one writer remembered the same executed traitor as ‘Robert, (surnamed the Great) Earle of Essex’.2 The 1603 accession of King James VI of Scotland to the English throne as James I had marked a pivotal moment in the life of the myth of the executed Elizabethan traitor. James’s public attitude towards his former ally Essex was to prove enormously influential in portrayals of Essex for decades to come. The King’s early public promotion of a favourable image of Essex would, ironically, allow later writers to turn it against James, and against James’s own son as it provided the basis for the heroic tradition exploited by the 3rd earl of Essex and fellow Parliamentarians in the 1640s. The tradition capitalized upon by the 3rd Earl as commander of the Parliamentary army was the product of a lengthy, complex, and sometimes contradictory myth-making process beginning largely with King James’s accession in 1603 and achieving its own momentum by his death in 1625. In the intervening years, representations of Essex intensified and their emphases varied in response to and participation in a number of events and crises, among them the accession itself, the 1604 peace with Spain, the trial and eventual execution of Sir Walter Ralegh, the establishment of the court of the Prince of Wales, and the negotiations with Spain in the 1620s. The numerous ballads upon Essex in circulation in the last two years of Elizabeth’s reign indicate that, despite the attempt in two official publications to fix interpretation of Essex as traitor rather than hero or martyr, the executed Earl was already something of a ‘folk hero’3 by the time James arrived in London. But the Essex ‘legend’ might not have grown and flourished had not James himself publicly fostered it in the early years of his reign. Giovanni Carlo Scaramelli, the Venetian Secretary in England, remarked early in James’s reign upon the radical change in royal policy towards the traitor. ‘What is impossible at one period’, Scaramelli observes of James’s 177

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affectionate 1603 reception of the late Earl’s attainted son, ‘becomes easy at another’.4 This observation, while partially accurate, belies the complexity of James’s attitude towards the late Earl, and scholars who quote the King’s public expressions of devotion to Essex neglect other important reports of his less favourable or, at the least, more ambiguous attitude towards the Earl following the rebellion. While various scholars have commented that James rewarded Essex’s followers in 1603 because he regarded Essex as a martyr in the cause of his succession, some evidence suggests that James’s private attitude towards the executed Earl was by this time more ambivalent. For example, the Dean of Limerick, writing to Robert Cecil from Edinburgh at the end of March 1601, informs him that although there is ‘a great show of displeasure for Essex his execution’, he gathers that ‘there is greater show than sorrow’.5 James’s support of Essex’s partisans in 1603 and for a number of years after was probably not entirely the result of his admiration for the Earl and his followers. William Camden records that Essex actually lost much of his credit with James when the late Earl’s enemies showed the King his written confession6 in which the Earl accused his friends and relatives of inciting him to rebellion. Francis Bacon, writing to the earl of Northumberland in the spring of 1603, detected an ulterior motive in James’s favourable treatment of the survivors of the Essex faction, claiming that James ‘affecteth Popularity by gracing such as he hath heard to be popular, and not by any fashions of his own’.7 And grace them he did, perhaps partially for the opportunistic reason Bacon suggests. One of James’s first acts as English sovereign was to order to the release from the Tower of the earl of Southampton and Sir Henry Neville, the last Essex conspirators who remained imprisoned. In a 1 April 1603 letter, James writes of his desire to have an opportunity to declare his estimation of Southampton.8 Southampton, Essex’s chief co-conspirator, was released from the Tower just over a week later, and continued to find favour with James in the early years of his reign. One of the newly restored Earl’s most financially and symbolically significant rewards was the August 1603 grant of the farm of the custom of sweet wines.9 Elizabeth’s refusal in 1600 to renew the patent for Essex was a severe financial blow to the Earl, and proof that his disgrace was complete. John Chamberlain had remarked upon the significance of Elizabeth’s refusal to renew this ‘substantiall favour’,10 and Jacobean observers must surely have understood the significance of the King’s bestowal of this favour upon Southampton. The display of favour that made the greatest impression upon Scaramelli, the Venetian Secretary, was James’s spring 1603 reception of the late Earl’s young son. He writes that James has received the twelve-year-old son of the earl of Essex and taken him in his arms and kissed him, openly and loudly declaring him the son of the

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most noble knight that English land has ever begotten. He has appointed the lad to bear the sword before him on his entry into the city, and has destined him to be the eternal companion of the Prince of Wales.11 The young 3rd Earl was restored in blood and honours by a 1604 act of Parliament.12 The King’s display of affection for the late Earl’s young son and his rewards to others involved in the Essex rebellion encouraged the appearance of a great number of pro-Essex texts that were important in the early Jacobean rehabilitation of Essex. The truth of Scaramelli’s observation that ‘what is impossible at one period becomes easy at another’ is perhaps most apparent in Richard Williams’s sympathetic 66-stanza biographical poem ‘The Life and Death of Essex’, in which he portrays Essex, ‘bright Honors sonne’, as a lamb led to the slaughter by ‘enviose men’.13 Williams dedicates the poem to James, and indicates that it circulated among friends during Elizabeth’s lifetime.14 What a poet could say only privately about Essex in 1601 he could apparently dedicate to the King in 1603. Elizabeth and her ministers had attempted to suppress such sympathetic representations of Essex, and the scrutiny of unauthorized discussions, however seemingly insignificant, is very apparent in the final two years of Elizabeth’s reign. Richard Williams, more secure in referring to the Essex rebellion, had taken careful note of James’s recent treatment of Southampton and the 3rd earl of Essex, and refers directly to the King’s ‘love’ of Essex and his friends.15 His account of the Earl’s life, like those in the ballads circulating immediately after Essex’s death but unpublished until early in James’s reign, is highly romanticized, omitting many of the controversial elements of his various military campaigns. The Earl here is victim of influential men who ‘sought his ruyne and decaye’.16 One of the foes whom Williams specifically accuses of engineering Essex’s downfall is Sir Walter Ralegh, which links the work to one of the crucial points in the life of the Essex myth in Jacobean England: the fall of Ralegh. From the efforts of Robert Cecil and Lord Henry Howard to turn Elizabeth’s probable successor against Ralegh to the vitriolic attacks of anonymous writers to the harsh words of the Attorney-General at Ralegh’s treason trial, Essex appears again and again in the ruin of Ralegh’s career under James. Although the King himself may have, very late in Essex’s life, harboured his own doubts about Essex’s loyalty and the purpose of his revolt, the Earl proved useful in the condemnation of Ralegh. The heroic image of Essex that emerged in early Jacobean England gained lustre and impetus from the enlistment of Essex in the cause of toppling his old rival. Between the death of Essex and James’s accession, part of Cecil and Howard’s strategy to reinforce the King’s growing conviction that Cecil now provided his surest means to the English throne was to vilify courtiers who might represent an alternative source of influence.17 Among Howard’s

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venomous writings, with their ‘convoluted insinuations’ about Ralegh and Lord Cobham,18 are frequent references to the fate of Essex. Howard portrayed the two men to the King as persecutors of the imprisoned Southampton, saying, for example, that they sought to ‘scant the scope of his liberty’ and encouraged the Queen to ruin Southampton financially.19 The efficacy of Howard’s poisonous letters was apparent immediately upon James’s accession to the English throne. Ralegh’s eclipse under James was swift, and within a few short months of the accession, Ralegh was under arrest for treason. And throughout his disgrace, trial, and eventual execution, Essex is always there. The executed Earl appears very early on in reports about Ralegh’s treason. Scaramelli mentions in early August 1603, about three weeks after Ralegh’s arrest, that The conspirators are all lodged in the Tower. The reason why his Majesty has never looked favourably on any of them is because they had a hand in the death of Essex, who was in secret understanding with the King and working for his cause.20 The disgrace of Ralegh prompted a number of vitriolic attacks with a strong pro-Essex orientation. The poem beginning ‘Wilye watt, wilie wat’ curses Ralegh for Essex’s death and keenly anticipates his downfall: ‘Essex for vengeance cries / his bloud upon thee lies’.21 Another anonymous verse attack beginning ‘Watt I wot well thy ouerweeninge witt’ suggests that Essex’s angry spirit pursues Ralegh and demands vengeance, and the heavens, on his behalf, enact this tragedy.22 One poem which treats the supposed role of Ralegh in the fall of Essex in considerable detail is the remarkable anonymous 39-stanza poem entitled ‘The dispairinge Complainte of wretched Rawleigh for his Trecheries wrought against the Worthy Essex’.23 The poem provides a detailed account of the events of the final two years of the Earl’s life and of Ralegh’s part in his ruin. The elaborate account of careful and cunning conspiracy sounds remarkably like the Earl’s own version of events towards the end of his life. Ralegh ‘confesses’ his malicious and conspiratorial part in, among other things, Essex’s disastrous command in Ireland,24 the removal of the Earl from his offices,25 and the ‘forged instigacion’26 to rebellion by which Ralegh and his associates wrought Essex’s ‘vtter dissolution’.27 The poem portrays Ralegh’s own treason as revenge for Essex; Ralegh acknowledges that God has used the means of his own ‘fowle offense / to giue [him] righteous recompense’.28 Another pro-Essex document vilifying Ralegh at the time of his disgrace is the anonymous prose work ‘Sir Walter Rauleigh’s stabb’. This work, which compares Ralegh unfavourably with Essex, is absurdly flattering to the late Earl, virtually granting him the status of a martyr: ‘at this hower a certayne

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man weares a litell neckbone of his, which the giddie executioner at the first unluckie stroake forsest from the rebound of his valiant and hardie neck’.29 The author also claims that upon the spot where the Earl died is a bloody circle in which the grass, loathe to disturb the blood of one who had suffered so already, refuses to grow.30 These vitriolic condemnations of Ralegh were not merely wishful thinking, for the use of Essex to condemn Ralegh is also apparent in the treason trial of November 1603. Attorney-General Edward Coke, who at Essex’s trial had accused the Earl of ‘hipocrisie in Religion’ and of countenancing ‘all sortes of Religion’,31 now called Ralegh a ‘damnable atheist’ and contrasted him with Essex, who, he said, ‘died the child of God, God honoured him at his death’.32 Coke also repeated the common charge, which Ralegh would answer at his execution fifteen years later, that he had gloated nearby when Essex died. To this charge, Coke added, ‘Et lupus et turpes instant morientibus Ursae’33 (‘Both the wolf and the loathsome she-bears press upon those dying’). While various writers, James himself, and the Attorney-General might thus make politic use of Essex’s memory, the soldier Robert Pricket’s poem Honors Fame in Triumph Riding. Or, the Life and Death of the Late Honorable Earle of Essex,34 published in 1604, reveals that, publicly at least, what one might say in favour of Essex had its limits. Pricket, who mentions the King’s regard for Essex’s young son, clearly believed, as had Richard Williams, that in 1604 a laudatory poem about Essex would be welcome. He writes ‘a priuate consideration made me thinke, that it might now be a time in which the praise of honours worthiness might haue his place, and not any longer by a violent imposition be taxed with undeserved euill’.35 Pricket’s poem, celebrating Essex’s military glories and ascribing his downfall to envious rivals, defies in many ways the official late Elizabethan accounts of the Earl’s Irish campaign, rebellion, and execution. He goes so far as to openly question the verdict of treason, boldly claiming of Essex, ‘He died for treason; yet no Traytor’.36 The publication of Pricket’s complimentary poem on Essex would not have been possible between the Earl’s execution and Queen Elizabeth’s death. The poem’s details, in fact, bear striking resemblance to those of a 1601 declamation in Latin which resulted in the confinement of the orator, a student at Oxford.37 Even in the more Essex-friendly political climate of the early years of James’s reign, however, Pricket’s Honors Fame occasioned considerable trouble, as the poem was recalled, the publisher interrogated,38 and Pricket himself for a time imprisoned. In the preface to his next published work, which he dedicates to the members of the Privy Council, he indicates that he was imprisoned for daring in his earlier poem to ‘call in question, things formerly determined, by the justices of the Law, prudent wisdome of a kingdoms most honourable Councellors’.39 James’s favour towards Essex’s family, friends, and supporters might be well known, but Attorney-General Coke, even as he used Essex to condemn Ralegh at the latter’s trial, was

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careful to admonish that ‘The king himself spake these words; “He that shall say, Essex died not for Treason, is punishable.” ’40 Praise of Essex, which suited the King’s interests for a time, was a doubleedged sword. The portrayal of the Earl as Protestant warrior and scourge of Spain, so prominent in early Jacobean celebrations of Essex encouraged by James’s treatment of the Earl’s family and friends, was a potential vehicle for later expressions of discontent with James’s policies of pacific kingship and religious moderation. The early Jacobean portrayal of Essex which most strongly suggests this potential is that of George Carleton in his ‘Devoraxeidos Liber Unus’,41 (‘The First Book of Devereux’), a Latin mini-epic published in 1603 after Elizabeth’s death. The poem, in which a heroic Essex looms large, is the most detailed of the Elizabethan and Jacobean verse accounts of the 1596 Cadiz voyage. The epic begins with the exultation of the Spanish upon the news of the death of Sir Francis Drake, and after considerable anti-Spanish invective, proceeds to an effusive description of Drake’s even greater successor Essex, ‘Ostrosaxonides’ (‘Descendent of the East Saxons’), ‘the new glory of the age’.42 The poem goes on to describe how the ‘sword of Devereux’ attacks the Spanish cities ‘with the courage of Hector and the strength of Hercules’.43 At this very early point in James’s reign, before the peace with Spain, such a work does not necessarily indicate criticism of the new King’s policies – Curtis Perry notes that early Jacobean texts can ‘endorse Elizabethan military imperialism and anti-Spanish sentiment without being openly critical of the policies of the new Rex Pacificus’44 – but the virulence of the anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic sentiment, considered with the accompanying ‘Carmen Panegyricum’ on James, which repeatedly urges against the deceit, tyranny, and abomination of Rome,45 suggests that praise of Essex might prove incompatible with later developments in James’s Spanish policy. Indeed, before the end of the first decade of James’s reign, poets began to produce celebrations of Essex in response to a somewhat different agenda. There is a ‘specific tone of political disquiet’46 in William Harbert of Glamorgan’s 1606 Englands Sorrowe Or, A Farewell to Essex, a series of verse laments upon the deaths of the great Elizabethan Protestant soldiers: Essex himself, his step-father the earl of Leicester, and his friend Sir Philip Sidney. Harbert’s rhapsody on the Earl’s ‘Spanish overthrow’47 seems rather pointed in its emphasis when combined with his comment on the ‘grave advise’, rather than ‘ignoble ease’, with which Elizabeth’s chief counsellors secured England.48 Englands Sorrowe, while it does not overtly deploy Essex against James, may represent an early stage in the appropriation of Essex’s image for oppositional purposes. Of considerable importance in the development of Essex’s image towards the end of the first decade of James’s reign was the ‘neo-Elizabethan strain’49 of the mythology surrounding James’s eldest son, Henry, particularly between his 1610 investiture as Prince of Wales and his 1612

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death. Roy Strong places the Prince in an ‘extreme Protestant and antiSpanish’ ideological line of descent, his predecessors Leicester, Sidney, and most immediately, the earl of Essex.50 Many former Essex associates – including various nobles, ecclesiastics, foreign agents, historiographers, playwrights, and poets – ‘gravitated’ to Henry’s household and there gained key positions.51 Essex figures in several ways in the mythology created for and by the young Prince. The late Earl is very much in evidence, for example, in Henry Peacham’s 1612 Minerva Britannia, an emblem book dedicated to the Prince and which did much to ‘feed his myth’.52 This retrospective celebration of the tournament imprese of the ‘Patrones of Chivalry’ who ‘seru’d ELIZA in her raigne’53 contains a number of emblems based upon Essex’s imprese in the Accession Day tournaments. Peacham includes one Essex impresa consisting of a cannon outweighed on a scale by a pen, and featuring the inscription ‘Et tamen vincor’,54 (‘And nevertheless I shall be conquered’). Essex probably employed the device during his conflict with Elizabeth and the Cecils over the direction of England’s war policy in the 1590s.55 Peacham’s inclusion of such an emblem is entirely appropriate, considering that Henry, in entertainments like his Barriers, sought to cast himself, as Essex had done, as hero of the tournaments. The appropriation of Essex in the interests of cultivating Prince Henry as the reviver of the fiercely Protestant and anti-Spanish Elizabethan war party ended with the Prince’s death in 1612, but even at that time poets explicitly linked Essex and Henry. The poet William Browne, seeking in one of the elegies on the death of the Prince for a precedent for such a devastating blow to England, names as a specific possibility only that occasion ‘When our HEROE, honour’d ESSEX dyde’.56 In 1613, the same year in which he published his elegy on the death of Prince Henry, Browne returns to Essex, including him in his Britannias Pastorals as a Protestant hero, uniting him with Ralegh in the Solitary Vale and reconciling the two men ‘within the nostalgic vision of Elizabethan militancy’.57 Essex and Ralegh were linked again, not necessarily in a united front, when Ralegh was executed on the old charge of treason in 1618. Among Ralegh’s last words on the scaffold were denials of the predatory behaviour towards Essex of which Coke had accused him at his trial. Ralegh linked himself with Essex, saying, ‘I knew, that my L[or]d of Essex was a noble gent[leman], & that it would be worse with me when he was gone; for those, that sett me vpp against him, did afterwards sett themselves against me’.58 Various poems upon Ralegh’s death return to the old rivalry. In the anonymous ‘On Sir Walter Rawleigh’, Ralegh acknowledges to Essex, ‘I died (as all see) / not to satisfie to the law, but thee’.59 Essex remained very much in evidence following the death of Ralegh, particularly in the early 1620s, when James’s desire for alliance with Spain and the marriage of Prince Charles to the Spanish Infanta was increasingly

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unpopular. As well as the strategic republication of earlier ballads celebrating Essex’s efforts against Spain, this period saw the prominent appearance of Essex in the genre of ‘ghost’ literature60 in which a host of dead Elizabethans variously criticize James and offer him advice. Essex appears most prominently in the tract Robert Earle of Essex His Ghost, by Vox Populi author Thomas Scott. Much of this first-person address wherein Essex dispenses advice from heaven consists of near-verbatim reproduction of Essex’s own lengthy 1598 Apologie of the Earle of Essex, written in defence of his opposition to peace negotiations with Spain. Scott’s Essex bitterly condemns ‘the miserable and distracted present estate’ of England,61 decries the Spanish match, and urges a declaration of war on Spain. When the negotiations with Spain ended, writers found a new purpose for which to resurrect Essex: attracting volunteers and money for the aid sent to the Dutch against Spain in the summer of 1624. Gervase Markham published Honour in His Perfection, a panegyric containing histories of the noble families of the expedition’s leaders. Markham’s rehearsal of Essex’s military campaigns is a familiar one, although his praise is excessive even by the standards of Essex admirers. This glorious remembrance of Essex, whose son the 3rd Earl was one of the leaders of the expedition, makes no mention of his disgrace, rebellion, and execution, and instead dwells particularly on his activities against Spain, carefully eliding, as George Carleton had done before him, the controversial elements of those activities. Markham’s designation of the late Earl as ‘Robert (surnamed the Great) Earle of Essex’ is the culmination of the complex and often contradictory process by which Essex, in the quarter-century after his traitor’s death, emerged as a hero. The earl of Southampton, whom Markham praises particularly as Essex’s ‘faithful comrade-in-arms’,62 died of illness in November 1624 during the Dutch campaign, and King James himself, so crucial to the early formation of the image of Essex as hero, was dead less than six months later. The heroic version of his father upon which the 3rd earl of Essex and others capitalized in the 1640s was largely the product of the Jacobean period. The 2nd Earl’s usefulness in promoting various agendas during James’s reign ensured that the Essex myth would survive into, and serve other purposes in, the years – and crises – to come.

Notes 1. William Barlow, A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse    With a Short Discourse of the Late Earle of Essex (London, 1601), E1r . 2. Gervase Markham, Honour in His Perfection (London, 1624), p. 16. 3. Arthur F. Kinney, ‘Imagination and Ideology in Macbeth’, in The Witness of Times: Manifestations of Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England, Katherine Z. Keller and Gerald J. Schiffhorst, eds (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1993), 148–73: p. 172.

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4. Calendar of State Papers and Manuscripts, Relating to English Affairs, Existing in the Archives and Collections of Venice, and in Other Libraries of Northern Italy [hereafter CSP Venetian], 38 vols (London: HMSO, 1864–1947), vol. 10, p. 26. 5. Calendar of State Papers Relating to Ireland and of the Reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary, and Elizabeth, 11 vols (London: HMSO, 1860–1912), vol. 10, p. 243. 6. William Camden, The Historie of the Life and Reigne of that Famous Princess Elizabeth (London, 1634), p. 323. 7. Francis Bacon, Letters of Sir Francis Bacon    Written During the Reign of King James I (London, 1702), p. 14. 8. Bodleian MS Tanner 76 f. 96v . 9. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I. 1603–1610 (Nendeln, Liechtenstein: Kraus, 1967), p. 34. 10. Norman Egbert McClure, The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), vol. 1, p. 107. 11. CSP Venetian, vol. 10, p. 26. 12. Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel: The Life of Robert Devereux, the Third Earl of Essex, 1591–1646 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), p. 22. 13. Richard Williams, ‘The Life and Death of Essex’, in F. J. Furnivall and W. R. Morfill, eds, Ballads From Manuscripts, 2 vols (Hertford, 1873), vol. 2, pp. 23–37, ll. 246, 150. 14. Ibid., p. 23. 15. Ibid., l. 328. 16. Ibid., l. 174. 17. Linda Levy Peck, Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (London: Allen, 1982), p. 19. 18. Ibid., p. 21. 19. David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, The Secret Correspondence of Sir Robert Cecil With James VI of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1766), p. 59. 20. CSP Venetian, vol. 10, p. 74. 21. British Library MS Additional 22601 f. 63r , ll. 21–2. 22. British Library MS Additional 22601 ff. 64r –65v . 23. Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37, ff. 11r –14r . 24. Ibid., ll. 155–89. 25. Ibid., ll. 211–17. 26. Ibid., l. 240. 27. Ibid., l. 245. 28. Ibid., ll. 117–18. 29. ‘Sir Walter Rauleigh’s stab’, in John Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset (Westminster, 1873), vol. 4, p. 219. 30. Ibid., pp. 218–19. 31. State Trials Political and Social, ed. H. L. Stephen, 3 vols (London: Duckworth, 1902), vol. 3, p. 61. 32. T. B. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials for High Treason and Other Crimes, 34 vols (London, 1809–28), vol. 2, p. 28. 33. Ibid. 34. Robert Pricket, Honors Fame in Triumph Riding. Or, the Life and Death of the Late Honorable Earle of Essex (London, 1604). 35. Ibid., A2r . 36. Ibid., l. 253. 37. Public Record Office State Papers 12/279 no. 67 ff. 119r –120v .

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38. G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), p. 139. 39. Robert Pricket, Times Anotomie (London, 1606). 40. Charles Edward Lloyd, State Trials of Mary Queen of Scots, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Captain William Kidd (Chicago, 1899), p. 112. 41. George Carleton, ‘Devoraxeidos Liber Unus’, in Heroici Characteres (Oxford, 1603), pp. 19–42. 42. Translation by Dr Margaret Drummond of the Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, in Maureen King, ‘ “Essex, that could vary himself into all shapes for a time”: The Second Earl of Essex in Jacobean England’, University of Alberta PhD dissertation, 2000, p. 335. 43. Ibid., p. 336. 44. Curtis Perry, ‘The Citizen Politics of Nostalgia: Queen Elizabeth in Early Jacobean London’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23 (1993), 89–111: p. 100. 45. Carleton, Heroici Characteres, pp. 10–17. 46. Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 116. 47. William Harbert, Englands Sorrowe; Or, a Farewell to Essex (London, 1606), B4r . 48. Ibid., D2r . 49. Roy Strong, Henry, Prince of Wales, and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames, 1986), p. 41. 50. Ibid., p. 223. 51. J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’, in Linda Levy Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 169–88: p. 176. 52. J. W. Williamson, The Myth of the Conqueror: Prince Henry Stuart: A Study of 17th Century Personation (New York: AMS, 1978), p. 192. 53. Henry Peacham, Minerva Britannia (London, 1612), p. 212. 54. Ibid., p. 44. 55. Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 203. 56. William Browne, An Elegie on the Bewailed Death of the Truly Beloued and Most Virtuous Henry, Prince of Wales (London, 1613), E1r . 57. Michelle Frances O’ Callaghan, ‘Three Jacobean Spenserians: William Browne, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke’, University of Oxford D. Phil. thesis, 1994, p. 170. 58. Bodleian MS Tanner 299 f. 28r . 59. Bodleian MS English Poetical e.14 f. 95v . 60. D. R. Woolf, ‘Two Elizabeths? James I and the Late Queen’s Famous Memory’, Canadian Journal of History, 20 (1985), 167–91: p. 181. 61. Thomas Scott, Robert Earle of Essex His Ghost (London, 1624), A2r . 62. Margot Heinemann, ‘Rebel Lords, Popular Playwrights, and Political Culture: Notes on the Jacobean Patronage of the Earl of Southampton’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991), 63–86: pp. 84–5.

12 The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke’s British Jurisprudence Daniel J. Hulsebosch

One of the great ironies in Anglo-American constitutional history is that Sir Edward Coke, the seventeenth-century mythologist of the ‘ancient constitution’1 and the English jurist most celebrated in early America, did not believe that subjects enjoyed the common law and many related liberties of Englishmen while overseas. The ancient constitution was an English constitution and, though non-English subjects of the English king could enjoy its liberties and privileges while in England, it did not apply to anyone outside that realm. Whether or not the ancient constitution existed time out of mind, it did not extend to land out of sight. While the ancient constitution was for England, Coke did suggest that central elements of common law culture, such as real property tenures and the right to representative government, might migrate to the king’s other dominions. In Calvin’s Case, he and the other royal judges held that the king’s subjects outside England had access to the common law in the literal sense that they could sue in the English common law courts, but only for subject matter over which those courts had jurisdiction, like land located in England. They could not litigate in the English common law courts over subject matter in royal territories outside England. But Coke did consider the predicament of English subjects who travelled to the colonies and wished to provide them some legal protection, though not the entire constitutional canon. In judicial dicta here and ambiguous statements there, he suggested that some English liberties might travel with Britons outside England and into the king’s other territories. Coke, an architect of the gothic English constitution, also sketched the outline of a minimalist imperial constitution. This is not how Americans have viewed Coke, not in the early modern period and not in recent historiography. In American legal culture, Coke is a champion of the common law, constitutional liberty, and judicial review. There is, in short, a myth of Sir Edward Coke, with much historical reality to 187

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support it. But that myth also incorporates glosses on Coke’s work added in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to resist imperial regulation and that have been confirmed by modern historians. While Coke’s focus was on the English nation, his myth became most powerful on the British Empire’s periphery. This chapter examines the assumption that Coke believed that his common law jurisprudence extended to the colonies and attempts to recover the original intent, as it were, of the ancient constitution in the mind of one of its framers. A reevaluation of Coke’s imperial jurisprudence in its context helps recast that question in terms of how common law culture was packaged for export, how it circulated through the Atlantic world, and how English-speakers drew upon it in concrete controversies. Coke’s work in the early seventeenth century was critical to Atlantic legal history. At the same time that the English began expanding beyond the realm to create what became known as an empire, they also innovated upon old scripts of fundamental law to define their national constitution – to define the English nation. Constitutional ideas and imperial expansion developed simultaneously and reciprocally. Situating Coke’s understanding of the relation between realm and dominions, between English liberties and imperial law, in its early modern context will enable us to approach colonial American legal culture free of anachronism and appreciate its creative eclecticism. Coke was born in 1552 and served as a Member of Parliament, solicitor general, attorney general, chief justice of Common Pleas, and chief justice of King’s Bench. He wrote extensively about English law and published most of his works in English, which marked the beginning of vernacular legal literature in England.2 In addition, his jurisprudence symbolized the establishment of core common law liberties as constitutional liberties. Although Coke’s obsessive style has always frustrated critics, he did seek to transform the practices of English law and governance into a system of jurisprudence. He conveyed that jurisprudence to future generations of lawyers in the fourvolume Institutes of the Laws of England, the prefaces to eleven volumes of Coke’s Reports, and his own published judicial opinions, which figure large in his Reports.3 Among these ‘leading cases’ was Calvin’s Case (1608), which Coke called ‘the greatest case that ever was argued in the hall of Westminster’ and that remains a cornerstone of the Anglo-American law of citizenship.4 In these writings, he celebrated parliamentary government and sought to limit the royal prerogative, the Crown’s discretionary authority outside Parliament and beyond the common law. Coke’s support of representative government and judicial power were intertwined; they were two ways of vindicating legal liberty. In sum, Coke’s work helped create the Anglo-American idea of a constitution: a national legal environment anterior to the positive law of kings, their courts, and legislatures. In this sense, he was a ‘framer’ of the English constitution.

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To Americans, the notion of a framer in a legal world without a written constitution is difficult to comprehend. But early modern Englishmen used framing metaphors to describe their legal order, and Coke was the most creative constitutional thinker of his day.5 Coke’s ‘frame of the ancient common laws of this realm’ was a canon of iconic common law institutions (preeminently the jury), core rules (like an heir’s right to inherit property), and historic statutes (the most famous being Magna Carta).6 Like most canons, it was dynamic: some elements dropped off and others were added over time. Soon, this canon was known as the ancient constitution – though Coke never used that term.7 However, Coke’s opinion in Calvin’s Case and his other writings demonstrate that his ancient constitution was England’s constitution. He never intended it to operate in the other royal dominions. Coke’s bounded conception of common law and English liberty did not expand, and may have contracted, between Calvin’s Case and his death in 1634. Throughout his life Coke retained a medieval conception of law as primarily jurisdictional rather than jurisprudential, meaning that the common law was inseparable from the institutions that applied, practised, and taught the common law: the Westminster courts, their circuits, the common law bar, and the Inns of Court. The common law was its mechanisms of enforcement. Jurisprudence, on the other hand, refers to a rationally organized body of rules and principles defined primarily in reference to each other, not to the remedies and personnel enforcing them. Jurisdictional and jurisprudential conceptions of law probably exist simultaneously in every legal system at most times, but, like dominant and recessive genes, one overshadows the other at any particular point in time. In the early seventeenth century, the common law was conceived in primarily jurisdictional terms as the craft wisdom of a particular court system and the legal community that served it. For Coke, the ‘common law’ was still the customary law operative within the English common law courts, which had limited jurisdiction.8 It was not an abstract system of jurisprudence exportable to all of the king’s dominions. However, Coke contributed substantially to the conceptual transformation of the common law from procedural doctrine for vindicating English legal liberties to a substantive jurisprudence of political liberty – the ancient constitution.9 Again, Coke helped draft this constitution for England. But in Calvin’s Case he did look abroad and crafted a brief statement intended to constrain the king’s governance of Englishmen who travelled to the other royal territories. Coke’s design for imperial liberty was rough and unfinished, and his commitment to the project remains unclear – perhaps remained unclear to him too. This ambivalence and ambiguity made his work a rich resource for colonial advocates throughout the empire, beginning a few years after his death in 1634 and continuing at least until the American Revolution.

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Britain’s legal pluralism and the constitutionalization of the common law When King James VI of Scotland became James I of England, he established a commission to recommend reforms that would facilitate trade between the two kingdoms. The commissioners proposed three changes: the abrogation of ‘hostile lawes’ in each nation targeting the other; the creation of uniform commercial law; and the treatment of natural subjects in one nation as natural subjects in the other, a kind of equal protection measure to ensure that Scots and Englishmen could migrate into either kingdom with immunity from discrimination on the basis of nationality.10 The union commissioners sent the proposals to the parliament of each kingdom. The Scottish Parliament accepted them all, but members of the English Parliament balked at the third: the Commons did not consider Scots to be English subjects. King James issued a royal proclamation in support of all three proposals and added, upon the advice of ‘divers sages of the law’, that English law already recognized Scots as English subjects. While most agreed that people born in one kingdom before James ascended the English throne (antenati) could not be treated as natural subjects in the other kingdom, opinion was divided about the status of those born after the union (postnati). A conference committee of leaders of the English House of Lords and Commons concluded that, under English law, subjects of one kingdom were not automatically subjects of the other.11 Parliamentarians endorsed expansion but hesitated to treat the inhabitants of new territories as equal to themselves within England. They also feared setting a precedent. Scottish equality, argued M.P. Sir Edwin Sandys, ‘might give a dangerous example for mutual naturalizing of all nations that hereafter fall into the subjection of the king, although they be very remote, in that their mutual commonalty of privileges may disorder the settled government of every of the particulars’. Each constituent nation of the king’s expanding dominions had its own ‘privileges’ and ‘birthright’, which had been ‘acquired for patrimony by their antecessors of that place’.12 Again, parliamentarians favoured expansion. Sandys, for example, was a founding member of the Virginia Company and its leader from 1618 to 1624, when it was converted into a royal colony.13 But they distinguished the realm of England from the dominions. In part, parliamentarians feared an influx of poor Scots, a theme that ran through British political culture for the next two centuries. More important, they believed that reciprocal subjectship would erase jurisdictional borders, which were coming to be seen as national borders, between the king’s multiplying kingdoms.14 According to classical republican theory, permitting foreigners to become citizens weakened a republic and its liberty.15 Indeed, the periphery would exert reverse, negative influence on England and, by the operation of something like Gresham’s law, level down legal privileges throughout the king’s lands: weak notions of

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liberty would push out strong. Overseas dominions, by the example of their governments and through the immigration of their peoples, might send England into despotism. The realm – the nation – needed insulation. Two aspects of the parliamentary protest are notable. First, parliamentarians presumed that England was the centre of the royal territories and that English law was superior to the others. The new Scottish king, they feared, might view things from a different perspective. The script of the ancient English liberties was revised amidst uncertainty about whether the foreign king would try to impose a regressive legal order on England.16 Second, the Houses were not concerned about the legal culture of the territories outside England. Although English law might be superior to others, it did not operate outside the realm. Exporting cherished English liberties was no priority. Martial law, for example, was used by the governors of the Virginia Company at the same time that these same men were decrying its use at home in England.17 Liberties were national, meaning native, and once earned they became a form of property, purchased with the blood of ancestors and held in trust for posterity. Nations existed along a chain of being measured in degrees of liberty; each got as much as it deserved. English national identity depended on this constitutional alterity within and outside the Empire. If legal pluralism characterized England’s emergent empire, it also marked the English nation itself, as James’s proclamation and parliamentary opposition to it revealed. No institution had a monopoly on legal interpretation. The king speaking alone or through his Privy Council was one interpreter of law, the common law judiciary was another, and Parliament, embracing the king and two Houses, still one more. A major theme of English legal history is this struggle among institutions for concurrent or exclusive jurisdiction and for the power to define the law of England.18 In the fourth volume of his Institutes, Coke drew a ‘map’ of ‘all the high, honourable, venerable, and necessary tribunals, and courts of justice within his majesties realms and dominions’. These comprised about one hundred English courts and several others in Scotland and Ireland.19 The jurisdictional politics among these ‘severall courts’ reflected all the tensions of Jacobean England and contributed to the Civil War, or ‘the War of the Three Kingdoms’, in the 1640s.20 Indeed, the legal discourse of proper jurisdiction was a primary language of politics in early modern England and a rich legacy bequeathed to its colonies. In addition to these jurisdictional politics, England also contained multiple sources of law. English law was not a body of rules or principles located in a statute book, code, or treatise. ‘There be divers lawes within the realm of England’, Coke wrote in his Institutes, and common law was only one of them, though the most important and ‘sometimes called lex terrae’.21 This label – ‘law of the land’ – was ambiguous. Common law was indisputably the land law of England. But Coke listed fourteen other types of law besides common law, from ‘lex coronae’ to local customs. Despite this legal pluralism, common lawyers and parliamentarians argued in the early seventeenth

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century that the common law was ‘the law of the land’ in the broader sense that it embraced all others.22 The goal was to erect a barrier against absolute monarchy. Some common lawyers feared that the Stuart kings might impose the Roman-derived civil law on England. The threat was actually minimal. There was no such coherent programme, and the difference between English and continental law was exaggerated.23 Nonetheless the fear helped generate the political fiction of a timeless legal framework guaranteeing the liberty of the subject.24 At the core of this constitution were common law institutions that, like the jury and secure land tenure, provided ballast against royal governance. The main reason why common law became the law of the land is that it provided the land law of England. Property still conferred sovereignty. Coke called property law the ‘marrow of English law’ because it determined the relative rights of landholders at a time when property rights still carried governmental powers.25 Landholders were ballast against a king many in the Commons viewed as foreign and dangerous. Throughout early modern Europe, only natural or naturalized subjects could hold land in each kingdom. Coke listed several reasons for this restriction. First, aliens might discover ‘the secrets of the realm’. Second, ‘[t]he revenues of the realm (the sinews of war, and ornaments of peace) should [not] be taken and enjoyed by strangers born’. Third, alien landholding would ‘tend toward the destruction of the realm’. It might also endanger ‘justice’: juries were drawn from freeholders, and if aliens were allowed to hold land, there might not be enough natural freeholders to fill a jury. At base, the fear was that alien landholders would form a ‘Trojan horse’ ever ‘ready to set fire on the common-wealth’.26 But were Scots ‘aliens’? It was an early modern borders debate in which many parliamentarians feared that the right to hold land might attract immigrants from the north and elsewhere. Aliens would become freeholders and enjoy a host of related privileges in the universities, trades, and church.27 The Scottish king of England would be able to organize a Scottish faction in the heart of the commonwealth.

Calvin’s Case: Reciprocal subjectship and the limits of English liberties The question in Calvin v. Smith was whether a Scotsman born after James inherited the English throne could sue in the common law courts to vindicate title to land in England. The case was a collusive effort to reverse the Commons’ conclusion that Scots were not subjects of the English king and thus settle the legal consequences of the union of crowns. Robert Calvin was a Scottish infant born after James’s accession to the English throne. He claimed an inheritance of land in England; English possessors of the land blocked his entry. Calvin’s guardian brought an action against these men

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under the assize of novel disseisin, a medieval statute allowing a plaintiff ‘recently disseised’ of land to sue in the common law courts for repossession. The Englishmen’s defence was that Calvin had no rightful claim because he was an alien. Calvin’s attorneys denied that Calvin was an alien. A parallel action for another parcel began in the Chancery courts. Because of the issue’s gravity, the king commissioned a special court composed of the Lord Chancellor and all the judges from the three common law courts (Exchequer, King’s Bench, and Common Pleas) to hear both cases.28 Everyone agreed that an alien ‘can have no real or personal action for or concerning land’ and that antenati were aliens. The only issue was whether postnati were in a different legal position, not aliens but rather subjects of the king as an English king. The court answered affirmatively.29 Coke’s opinion emerged as authoritative because he published it (and only it) in his Reports. The court rejected the Englishmen’s argument that a subject was bound to the king’s political rather than natural person. It instead held that ‘ligeance’ was a personal bond between the natural subject and the person of the king, not between the subject and the king in his ‘politick capacity’ as head of a particular kingdom.30 Ligeance was a function of natural law, which Coke claimed was part of the common law, and supported by precedent: [I]f the obedience and ligeance of the subject to his sovereign be due by the law of nature, if that law be parcel of the laws, as well of England as of all other nations, and is immutable, and that Postnati and we of England are united by birthright in obedience and ligeance, which is the true cause of natural subjection, by the law of nature.31 As a result of this bond, Calvin owed loyalty to the king as a natural man, who at Calvin’s birth was both James VI of Scotland and James I of England. He was ‘subject to all services and public charges within this realm, as any Englishman’, and in turn enjoyed common law rights to land and access to the king’s courts in England.32 This ligeance was created upon birth within the king’s territory from parents who were under the king’s obedience.33 A feudal logic lay behind this birthright: property was the root of sovereignty and legal authority; it provided the bond between lord and tenant, king and subject. Reciprocally, the king was bound to protect the property claims of his subjects on his land.34 Calvin was no alien and could obtain a remedy from the English common law courts. The jurisprudential upshot of this holding was that the king’s natural subjects in any royal territory could hold land in England and file suit in the king’s royal courts for that English land, unless they were born before the English king obtained that territory. When in England, those subjects owed obedience to the king as an English king and were entitled to common law rights in England. But the court did not hold that these subjects enjoyed

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English liberties in those other dominions. In other words, the king-incouncil had jurisdiction over all inhabitants in those other dominions but his common law courts did not. While subjects coming to England would enjoy English liberties, English liberties did not follow Englishmen abroad. Coke’s ancient constitution remained an English constitution. This was the holding of the case and no more was necessary for the decision. The decision seems limited today, amidst claims of human rights and calls for universal jurisdiction. But the doctrine of ligeance was radical for its time because it encouraged mobility throughout the king’s composite monarchy. Here is the British aspect of Calvin’s Case: a natural subject born in another royal territory, like Scotland or Virginia, could come to England, and if he bought or inherited land there he could sue in the English common law courts to vindicate his title. This was the meaning of British liberty, and the court made it law despite parliamentary fear of immigration. Between the two republican strategies for securing liberty – stability and expansion – the judges leaned toward the latter. But English liberty was still for England. In Coke’s legal world, remedy defined right, and the common law’s remedial writs went no farther than the English border. Given this jurisdictional conception of law, no one in the early seventeenth century interpreted Calvin’s Case to mean that the common law and liberties of Englishmen were exported to the king’s other dominions. However, Coke added obiter dicta to elaborate the decision’s ramifications, although these did not constitute the reasons for the decision of the individual judge, let alone of the whole court. In these dicta he sketched the outlines of a constitutional jurisprudence for the overseas territories that helped guide legal development in the Empire. Coke focused on England, but he also looked abroad. It could not have been otherwise in Jacobean England.

Coke’s imperial constitution: Consent and property In the first decade of the seventeenth century, all of London was interested in the fortunes of Virginia, named in memory of the recently deceased queen. This enormous colony was viewed by imperial promoters as a ‘New Britain’ to be settled by both ‘Scots and English’, an offshoot of the newly united kingdoms. Similarly, the colony of Ulster in northern Ireland was established in 1607, another experiment in transplanting Britons outside Britain.35 At the same time that the rechartered Virginia Company planned a new voyage to North America, Calvin’s Case made its way through the royal courts. There is no explicit reference to the transatlantic project in the case; Coke did not, for example, mention North America.36 But he had drafted the company’s original charter, and the dicta in his opinion contained a disquisition on the legal relationship between the realm of England and other royal dominions. Those dicta educated lawyers and others trying to

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comprehend the legal status of the colonies when they read the case in the Inns of Court or elsewhere in preparation for careers in law, enterprise, or royal administration. For generations, imperial officials and colonists went to school on Coke’s opinion.37 Three aspects of Coke’s ruminations on overseas dominions influenced British legal culture: his reasoning style; his distinction between inherited and conquered territories; and his remarks on the legal rights of emigrant settlers. First, Coke used the same sort of reasoning when analyzing non-English territories that characterized his approach to English law: he championed the ‘artificial reason’ of the legal community above the natural reason of the individual.38 In other words, law was the customary knowledge and reasoning ability of trained lawyers. The law’s reason differed from ‘the reason of the wisest man’ and could only be grasped ‘by diligent study and long experience and observation’. A close student of the laws could see that ‘[t]here be multitudes of examples, precedents, judgments, and resolutions in the laws of England, the true and unrestrained reason whereof doth decide this question’.39 Those precedents concerned the old Norman provinces, the Channel Islands, and Ireland.40 Here as elsewhere, Coke engaged in a low level of rationalization, which characterized most attempts to understand the empire for centuries. Often viewed as the last gasp of medieval reasoning, Coke’s notion of dynamic custom offered early modern English speakers a way to resist new ideas of unitary sovereignty. It remained the most sophisticated legal interpretation of the British Empire for at least two centuries. Coke’s ‘map’ of the empire’s jurisdictions was authoritative. New discoveries had to be fitted within its medieval dimensions. Second, Coke categorized all overseas territories as either inherited or conquered, a distinction that derived from Roman law.41 Inherited lands, like Scotland, enjoyed more legal autonomy than those obtained through conquest. In those obtained by descent, the king ‘cannot change [the] laws of himself, without consent of parliament’. Until he changed the laws of an inherited dominion with ‘consent of parliament’, the laws extant before the inheritance remained in force.42 Conquered lands were different. Coke subdivided conquered territories into Christian and infidel. The king could, upon conquest, abrogate the native laws of infidel lands immediately because they were ‘not only against Christianity, but against the law of God and nature’. Accordingly, ‘until certain laws be established among them’, the king could govern infidel lands by ‘natural equity, in such sort as Kings in ancient time did with their kingdoms, before any certain municipal laws were given’.43 In contrast, the laws of a conquered Christian people, such as the Irish, remained in force until the conqueror changed them. And if he introduced the laws of England into a Christian land, as John did in Ireland, then ‘no succeeding king could alter the same without parliament’.44 The king could change native laws in many ways, but if he chose to replace them with English laws he restricted his freedom to change them again in the future.

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This second aspect of Coke’s British jurisprudence has received much commentary in the United States because it relates to the Revolutionary claim that the American colonies were outside the British Parliament’s jurisdiction and could only be governed by the king-in-council. In particular, what Coke meant by the ‘consent of parliament’ has been controverted for generations. Many historians, following Robert L. Schuyler, believe that Coke was referring to the English Parliament. If so, Coke was silent about the form of governance within overseas dominions.45 But Barbara A. Black, building upon Charles H. McIlwain’s constitutional analysis of the American Revolution, interprets Coke to mean that the king had to rule most of his overseas colonies with the consent of a local parliament rather than alone or through the English Parliament.46 ‘Coke’s position’, Black argues, ‘was that of a parliament-man, not a Parliament-man.’47 If so, the Revolutionaries rested on good authority. A number of inferences are necessary to conclude either that Coke envisioned that the king would govern his colonies only through a local parliament or that he envisioned the king governing without local consent, through the metropolitan Parliament or his Privy Council. The most important step in ‘the case for the colonists’ is to demonstrate that these alternatives are exclusive. In fact, Coke detailed several examples in which the king governed alternatively by a local parliament and by Parliament. Ireland, for example, had a local legislature, the Irish Parliament, but was also subject to the English Parliament when named in its statutes. Other conquered dominions, like the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, were similarly constrained.48 Some historians explain these anomalies as the legacy of an earlier, conciliar conception of the English Parliament. As a medieval council, Parliament had helped govern non-English dominions. This conciliar conception faded in the early modern period, but the parliamentary practice of legislating for some overseas territories persisted. Those who defend parliamentary jurisdiction on the basis of medieval precedents, the argument proceeds, ignore the changing nature of Parliament, which was no longer a royal council but rather a national legislature.49 Little can be resolved on the basis of Coke’s few words on the matter. Given his jurisdictional orientation, when he stated that the king could make no new law in an inherited land except with the ‘consent of parliament’, he could well have meant a local representative body, not the English Parliament. But Coke did not explain which kind of parliament he intended; and if he meant a local parliament, he did not specify whether this precluded the king from governing through the metropolitan Parliament. This equivocation, or lack of specificity, reflected the legal pluralism of early modern Britain. Royal governance through a local parliament, the metropolitan Parliament, or the Privy Council were not exclusive alternatives. While Coke probably intended to say that the king could not alter the

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native laws of an inherited kingdom without the consent of its own local parliament (the Scottish Parliament, for example, in the inherited kingdom of Scotland), and that the same was true in conquered lands where the king introduced English law (such as Ireland), he probably envisioned areas of governance not affecting native laws where the king could govern without local consent and with or without the metropolitan Parliament. In fact, this approximates the imperial modus vivendi that developed over the next century.50 Here as elsewhere, Coke was content to list the precedents for parliamentary jurisdiction overseas rather than build a theory justifying it, guiding its exercise, or treating the examples as exceptions. Consequently, the historiographical problem of parliamentary jurisdiction abroad remains irresolvable not because historians are ‘asking a constitutionalist question of a “pre-constitutionalist” society’51 but rather because there was no articulate theory behind the practice of parliamentary jurisdiction overseas and no mechanism for settling it as constitutional or not. Early modern England was a constitutional society; that is why Coke and his generation thought that Calvin’s Case was momentous. They were, however, interested in demonstrating that England was a constitutional society. The problem of parliamentary jurisdiction overseas was not a priority, then. Whether or not the king governed abroad by his Privy Council or through the metropolitan Parliament depended on domestic and imperial politics rather than on constitutional principles located in the writings of Sir Edward Coke. The irony is that Coke identified precedents for English Parliamentary power to legislate for overseas dominions at the same time that he and the other English judges maintained that the common law courts’ jurisdiction did not extend outside the realm of England.52 The former was a knotty problem; the latter was not. Soon after Coke died, colonists began to argue just the reverse: that they enjoyed the common law and the liberties of Englishmen but were not subject to parliamentary legislation.53 At the dawn of transatlantic colonization, English jurists were less concerned with mapping the constitutional rights of the peripheries of the emergent empire than with mapping those constitutional rights and duties within England. In the Anglocentric formulation of Calvin’s Case, Coke’s paragraph on the integrity of the legal regimes of inherited and conquered Christian dominions seemed to counsel the English king to respect Scottish law and political institutions. However, it also meant that the Scottish king (who after all inherited England, not the converse) had to respect English legal and political institutions. While handing King James a political victory over the House of Commons, Coke told him that he had to respect English legal ways, including its ancient constitution. Even when cosmopolitan, Coke kept England first. He agreed with James that Scottish and English subjects should enjoy reciprocal rights but was also sympathetic to those English parliamentarians like Sandys who feared that the union would endanger the emerging sense of English nationality. The burning legal issue of expansion

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was the status of immigrants from the new dominions in England. Because they envisioned England as an importer rather exporter of people, Coke and his generation were less concerned about the rights of Englishmen who emigrated to the other dominions. The third part of Coke’s opinion that was intended to influence the legal culture of the empire, and did, was his assertion that some of the rights of Englishmen emigrated with natural subjects (English or other) who settled in newly conquered lands. Coke suggested that there were core English liberties – property rights and consent – that the king had to respect whenever settlers travelled to his non-English dominions. The former meant that emigrant Englishmen should be able to hold property in the same tenures available in England. Under the latter, emigrants would benefit from parliamentary government. These core liberties attached at birth within a territory and were not limited to that territory. Here, Coke was on the verge of recognizing a new kind of imperial subjectship. The right to parliamentary governance was implicit in the ambiguous dictum suggesting that the king would, in kingdoms obtained through descent or Christian lands got by conquest, rule with the ‘consent of parliament’. Again, Coke did not elaborate upon this mandate’s form – council of notables? representative assembly? – but it does seem that he was a ‘parliament-man’. Emigrant settlers as well as natives in those overseas territories would benefit from the right to some form of parliamentary rule – whether local or metropolitan. The property rights strand of Coke’s exportable core of English liberty was unequivocal and more important to the spread of common law culture. All of the king’s subjects, Coke wrote, ‘are capable of lands in the kingdom or country conquered, and may maintain any real [that is, property] action, and have the like privileges and benefits there, as they may have in England’.54 Therefore, all emigrants to conquered kingdoms could enjoy the same secure land tenures that Englishmen enjoyed in England. Coke did not mean that those emigrants could sue for colonial land in the English common law courts, for Coke made clear that remedial writs from those courts did not run outside the realm of England, and these common law property actions were remedial.55 But he did not specify how emigrants would vindicate these property rights. Was the king obligated to establish colonial courts along the lines of his English common law courts to administer common law actions? Or could the king hear cases himself, through his governors and the Privy Council? In practice, there was a mixture. Formally, the Privy Council delegated its power to hear disputes to local executive courts while reserving the right to review questions of law by writ of error.56 In practice, lawyers and judges in those local courts gradually replicated many common law rules and procedures.57 The right to hold property by common law tenure – the ‘marrow of English law’ contained in Littleton’s Tenures and glossed in Coke’s First Institute – went abroad even though the jurisdiction of the common law courts did not.

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Here is a clue to the conceptual transformation Coke catalyzed and that went farthest fastest in the colonies: the shift from a predominantly jurisdictional to a substantive understanding of the common law. Again, Coke wrote of emigrants’ ability to ‘maintain any real action’; he did not write of a transcendent common law. However, he linked ‘real actions’ and ‘privileges and benefits’ in the same sentence. Syntactically and logically, remedy still preceded right, but the remedy was being liberated from the jurisdiction of the court system in which it had been created. The unsystematic mass of common law property writs were flowering into rules that could be understood apart from the executive directives in which they originated. Writs were becoming rights.58 Coke’s outline of an imperial constitution lacked many details. Most curious is the tacit assumption of dual property systems: emigrant British settlers in conquered Christian lands would enjoy a property regime that mimicked the common law, while native inhabitants would enjoy their traditional land regime.59 In many colonies, this too is what developed. The availability of ‘real actions’ to vindicate property interests may not seem momentous four centuries later. Some of those actions never went abroad. For example, it does not appear that advowson, the right to nominate a minister for a church office, ever migrated to North America. Others, like the right to devise property by will, emerged gradually but are now taken for granted, even naturalized. These rights are so ingrained in liberal legal culture that it may be forgotten that in the middle ages they were matters of the king’s grace that slowly became routinized into privileges vindicable in the king’s courts, and then spread across oceans with the early modern empire as rights. J. H. Baker remarks that ‘[l]iberty and freedom will not be found as titles in the books of common law before 1600’. English lawyers spoke unsystematically of plural ‘liberties’ and ‘franchises’ as ‘specific privileges or exemptions’ from royal jurisdiction.60 Baker concludes that the general concept of liberty, of freedom writ large, ‘developed through the cumulative effects of decisions which were not widely known to outsiders and became unknown to posterity save through laborious research’.61 Through time the controversies that gave rise to those cases, and even their holdings, were forgotten; the abstracted meanings, detached from their germinal context, gained clarity and were remembered. In Coke’s report of Calvin’s Case, English common law liberties began to escape their jurisdictional matrix and started to become a jurisprudence of British liberty. He initiated this process of abstraction. Later generations appropriated his handiwork for their own purposes. A major reason for this abstraction was the substantive gloss that Coke placed on English law. The cases he reported were subtle and slow to yield general principles. But the idea that law was principled was an important prerequisite to the creation of a new conception of common law as the national repository of constitutional rights. In the didactic prefaces to his

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Reports, Coke frequently used property law metaphors to explain the purpose of his publishing project: ‘the ancient and excellent laws of England are the birthright, and the most ancient and best inheritance that the subjects of this realm have, for by them he enjoyeth not only his inheritance and goods in peace and quietness, but his life and his most dear country in safety’.62 Later, in the parliamentary debate over the Petition of Right, Coke invoked a series of ‘fundamental laws’ demonstrating that the king could not take property from or imprison his subjects without due process of law. The last was the boldest: ‘the common law hath so admeasured the King’s prerogative, as he cannot prejudice any man in his inheritance; and the greatest inheritance a man hath is the liberty of his person, for all others are accessory to it’.63 The right of inheritance was vindicable in common law courts, and on this analogy the king could not take away a person’s liberty in a general sense. Once more Coke used a property maxim about the right to vindicate inheritance to elaborate political liberty. Through Coke’s writings, the metaphor of liberty as property – a birthright – circulated through the empire and wrought consequences he never intended.64 There is a final irony in Coke’s attempt to relate the English constitution to the new empire. Late in his life, during the tumultuous Parliament of 1628, Coke helped draft the Petition of Right. The Commons’ grievances included imprisonment without cause shown, non-parliamentary taxation, billeting of troops, the application of martial law to civilians, and abuses by deputy lieutenants.65 All of these were defined as violations of the rights of Englishmen. The petition was presented as a declaration of fundamentals, but like most such instruments was more creative than declaratory.66 It was bold, too bold for export, as Coke realized. A colleague asked him whether the declaration that the king could not impose martial law on English civilians would extend to the overseas colonies, where martial law had been applied. Coke assured the Commons that the petition would not affect the colonies because it dealt with common law rights, and ‘[t]he common law meddles with nothing that is done beyond the seas’.67 His response merely confirmed the jurisdictional connotation of the common law. But it also suggests a reluctance to treat English common law liberties as British liberties. Perhaps his qualification was calculated to limit the reach of these new rights dressed in ancient clothing, a negotiating strategy to allow the Crown to accept in England that which no one thought it could grant abroad. In any case, it confirmed what most Englishmen at the time took for granted: the common law was a local system of law becoming a national treasure; it was not a body of rights available to all the king’s subjects anywhere in the empire. It was not time in 1628 to put forth a programme of British liberty for all of the king’s territories, at least it was not in Coke’s interest to do so. His outlook was even more English and less British in that ominous year

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than two decades earlier. The English constitution had emerged simultaneously with the empire and helped guarantee some measure of liberty in the overseas dominions. But it was also defined against the dominions. English legal nationalism was in part a response to imperial expansion and it would contribute to the Civil War several years later.68 Whatever Coke’s intent had been, by the early eighteenth century his version of English liberties became the main source of British law in its two dimensions: on the British Isles and beyond them. The first dimension had fairly clear borders and was, increasingly, national. In Britain, the once separate kingdoms of England and Scotland (in Linda Colley’s phrase) forged a nation, though things ‘British’, including law and politics, were defined in a London accent.69 The second dimension was more cultural than territorial and was captured in the doctrine of settlement: an Englishman (or any Briton) carried English law with him wherever he went. Beyond the Isle’s borders, colonists pushed the equation between their law and English law as far as they could, though no farther than they wished. This last element – provincial control over provincial law – is what most distinguished the two dimensions of British law. It helps explain the absence of a unitary law for the empire and why, in the early modern period, there never was a ‘Greater Britain’ comprising all the settler colonies and that could inspire, or at least enforce, their loyalty.70 Jurists in the first British Empire never developed a coherent body of imperial law or liberties. The empire remained a byzantine network of territories, jurisdictions, institutions, and peoples, which hindered the emergence of a unified imperial law. The English nation had developed out of similar unsystematic expansion and this did not prevent the emergence of a national common law, which Coke’s jurisprudence symbolized. Time may just have run short, at least to keep thirteen of the North American colonies in the empire. But many revolutionaries learned the lesson, as was shown when legal thinkers in the early United States forged federal constitutional law and some national private law too. Indeed, Coke’s writings, and the Revolutionary image of him as a firebrand of liberty, contributed to the national legal culture of the United States.

Conclusion: Coke in the American legal mind The Coke explored here is not the Coke of American legal folklore. That more familiar figure appears as a proto-Revolutionary whose jurisprudence supported colonial resistance to parliamentary regulation and sowed the seeds of judicial review. Again, there is something to this myth. Colonial legal thinkers drew heavily on Coke, especially in the generation before the Revolution, and his work remained a primary resource for American law into the early republic.71 Typically we are told that some English laws were adopted, other adapted, and many abandoned before and after the American

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Revolution, which is true yet unsatisfying. A host of demographic, religious, environmental, and political factors were at work in these individual stories of reception and reconstruction. But the basic corpus of common law property rights travelled well in the new lands, not least because they were available in Coke’s First Institute, which was ubiquitous in the Atlantic world after the Restoration. From the late seventeenth century until the early nineteenth, Americans learned property law from Coke’s treatise without regard to the court system in which those rules arose, which magnified the conceptual division between remedy and right, jurisdiction and jurisprudence, the Westminster courts and the common law. Consequently, Coke’s work contributed more to the spread of common law culture than he could have imagined, let alone intended. American lawyers who invoked Coke did so without respecting the jurisdictional limits of the common law that for him made it the national law of England. Coke had contributed to the sense that English law, especially the common law of property, went abroad, but he never envisioned the common law as a free-floating jurisprudence that could be invoked as a shield against royal administration. This jurisdictional limit on Coke’s jurisprudence was lost as his books circulated through the Atlantic world. The medieval map of courts and dominion borders that Coke sketched in Calvin’s Case and the Fourth Institute was not internalized abroad; powerful statements of the liberties of Englishmen and judicial ‘controul’ over parliamentary statutes were. Early Americans encountered Coke’s work in an environment that was close enough to his for basic comprehension and far enough away, in space, time, and political context, to facilitate creative reinterpretation. They were at once constrained by metropolitan legal institutions and discourses and able to appropriate them for advantage. Long after Coke’s legal and imperial worlds passed, his literature remained. American lawyers found in it, more than in natural jurisprudence or other sources of law, the discourse of resistance and reconstitution. This approach to the colonial use of the English constitutional canon, which has affinities with postcolonial studies,72 differs from the conventional analysis of whether the colonists enjoyed English law and raises the threshold problem of how the common law became detached from its territorial jurisdiction. For the colonists to claim the common law, they had to conceive it as an abstract jurisprudence operative in all of the Crown’s dominions, not as a system of licenses to sue in territorially bounded courts. Substantive notions of liberty travelled well, like negotiable instruments, and became transatlantic currency that could be traded anywhere English was spoken.73 Coke minted most of his currency for England, but it all circulated wide and far. In the end, there was a kind of reverse Gresham’s law under which the American colonists appropriated the best of the English constitutional canon for their purposes and hid away its less valuable legacies. This jurisprudence

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of liberty could be used in many ways: imperial and integrative here, provincial and disintegrative there; liberating in one place and enslaving in another – liberating and enslaving in some places at the same time. To understand the legal culture of the empire and its colonies, we must understand the intellectual transformation in the idea of law on which colonial resistance was premised: the shift from jurisdiction to jurisprudence, the rules in a legal system to the rule of law, English liberties to Liberty. This chapter has sought to locate one catalyst of that abstraction in the inchoate imperial jurisprudence of Sir Edward Coke.

Notes A different version of this essay appears in Law and History Review, 21 (2003), 439–82. 1. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century: A Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 2. R. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 63–104; W. S. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, 17 vols (London: Methuen, 1903–1972), vol. 5, pp. 456–90. 3. See T. F. T. Plucknett, ‘The Genesis of Coke’s Reports’, Cornell Law Quarterly, 27 (1942), 212; E. Coke, The Institutes of the Law of England, 4 vols (London: W. Clarke, 1817); E. Coke, The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, ed. J. H. Thomas and J. F. Fraser, new edn, 13 parts in 6 vols (London: J. Butterworth and Son, 1826). On ‘leading cases’, see A. W. B. Simpson, Leading Cases in the Common Law (New York: Clarendon Press, 1995). 4. E. Coke, preface to Coke’s Reports, vol. 7, p. iii. See J. H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 16–28; P. Price, ‘Natural Law and Birthright Citizenship in Calvin’s Case (1608)’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, 9 (1997), 73–145. 5. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law; G. Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought 1603–1642 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992). 6. E. Coke, preface to The Ninth Part of the Reports of Sir Edward Coke, ed. J. Fraser (London, 1826), p. iv. 7. See generally J. W. Gough, Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955). Pocock concedes that the word constitution ‘has not been systematically cleared of anachronism’ as applied to Coke’s age because few people used the word ‘constitution’ in the modern sense before 1660. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, p. 261 n. 8. See also G. Stourzh, ‘Constitution: Changing Meanings of the Term from the Early Seventeenth to the Late Eighteenth Century’, in T. Ball and J. G. A. Pocock (eds), Conceptual Change and the Constitution (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), pp. 35–54. 8. See J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History (London: Butterworths, 3rd edn, 1990), pp. 14–62. 9. E. Coke, preface to Coke’s Reports, vol. 9, p. iv; preface to Coke’s Reports, vol. 8, p. xviii.

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10. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870, pp. 16–28; Price, ‘Natural Law and Birthright Citizenship in Calvin’s Case (1608)’, 73–145. 11. ‘Moore’s Report’, T. B. Howell (comp.), A Complete Collection of State Trials, 34 vols (London, 1816–1828), vol. 2, col. 562–3. 12. Ibid., col. 564. 13. T. K. Rabb, Jacobean Gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561–1629 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 319–85; W. F. Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1932), pp. 81 ff. 14. For this form of polity, characteristic of the early modern period, see H. G. Koenigsberger, ‘Dominium Regale or Dominium Politicum et Regale: Monarchies and Parliaments in Early Modern Europe’, in Koenigsberger, ed., Politicians and Virtuousi: Essays in Early Modern History (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), pp. 1–25. 15. See D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 128. 16. See J. Wormald, ‘James VI and I: Two Kings or One?’, History, 68 (1983), 187–209. 17. Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 37; E. S. Morgan, American Slavery/American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), pp. 79–80. At home, the Crown’s use of martial law on civilians led to a grievance in the 1628 Petition of Right. J. P. Kenyon (ed.), The Stuart Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), pp. 83–4; L. Boynton, ‘Martial Law and the Petition of Right’, English Historical Review, 79 (1964), 255–84. By that time, however, martial law had been abandoned in Virginia. Craven, The Dissolution of the Virginia Company, p. 70. 18. See S. F. C. Milsom, Historical Foundations of the Common Law (London: Butterworths, 2nd edn, 1981), pp. 11–36. 19. E. Coke, proeme to The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England; Concerning the Jurisdiction of the Courts (1644; reprint, London, 1817), unpaginated. 20. See M. A. Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought in England, 1603–1645 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949). See also J. P. Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London: Longman, 2nd edn, 1999), pp. 81–100. On the Civil War as ‘The War of the Three Kingdoms’, see J. C. Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, 1603–1923 (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), pp. 82–103; C. Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Lauren Benton defines jurisdictional politics as ‘conflicts over the preservation, creation, nature, and extent of different legal forums and authorities’: L. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 10. 21. E. Coke, The First Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, ed. F. Hargrave and C. Butler, 2 vols (1628; London, 18th edn, 1823), p. 11b. 22. H. J. Berman, ‘The Origins of Historical Jurisprudence: Coke, Selden, Hale’, Yale Law Journal, 103 (1994), 1651–1738. 23. See J. H. Baker, ‘English Law and the Renaissance’, in Baker, ed., The Legal Profession and the Common Law: Historical Essays (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), pp. 461–76. 24. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, pp. 66–7. 25. E. Coke, preface to Coke’s Reports, vol. 10, p. xxviii. 26. State Trials, vol. 2, col. 640, 77 Eng. Rep. at 399.

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27. W. Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England, vol. 1 (London, 1806), pp. 1082–3. 28. The Stuart kings commissioned this special court – ‘the Exchequer Chamber’ – several times in the early seventeenth century to obtain definitive public law rules that would have effect throughout their territories. H. S. Pawlisch, Sir John Davies and the Conquest of Ireland: A Study in Legal Imperialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 43–4. 29. Two justices, Walmsley and Foster, dissented. See State Papers 14/34 (microfilm), Public Record Office, Kew Gardens, London. 30. State Trials, vol. 2 col. 624, 77 Eng. Rep. at 388. 31. Ibid., 77 Eng. Rep. at 394. For analysis of Coke’s resort to natural law, see K. Kim, ‘Calvin’s Case (1608) and the Law of Alien Status’, Journal of Legal History, 17 (1996), 155–71. 32. State Trials, vol. 2, col. 655, 77 Eng. Rep. at 408. 33. Ligeance was spatial, temporal, and genetic. First, the parents of the person had to be ‘under the actual obedience of the king’ at the time of birth. Second, the person had to be born ‘within the king’s dominion’. (There was an exception for those born to Englishmen, such as military and diplomatic personnel, serving abroad.) Third, time distinguished antenati from postnati: ‘for he cannot be a subject born of one kingdom that was born under the ligeance of a king of another’: State Trials, vol. 2, cols 639–40, 77 Eng. Rep. at 408. 34. Aliens could become subjects or denizens with the right to hold land. Naturalization was by act of Parliament; endenization was by the king alone and conveyed fewer rights. However, naturalization in one of the king’s dominions beyond England did not transfer into his other dominions. Once naturalized by the Irish Parliament or in the American colonies, for example, one was not an English subject who could hold land in England: Craw V. Ramsey, 174 Eng. Rep. at 1072 (1670). A 1740 Act of Parliament permitted colonial naturalization to have effect throughout the empire upon Board of Trade review: Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870, p. 103. 35. [R. Johnson], Nova Britannia: Offering Most Excellent Fruites by Planting in Virginia (London, 1609); Beckett, The Making of Modern Ireland, pp. 45–8. 36. Attorney General Francis Bacon referred to the Indies once in argument. State Trials, vol. 2, cols 590–1. 37. See F. Madden, ‘Some Origins and Purposes in the Formation of British Colonial Government’, in K. Robinson and F. Madden, eds, Essays in Imperial Government Presented to Margery Perham (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1963), p. 10. 38. Berman, ‘Origins of Historical Jurisprudence’, 1678–1689. 39. State Trials, vol. 2, col. 641. See also State Trials, vol. 2, col. 612, 77 Eng. Rep. at 400. 40. See A. F. McC. Madden, ‘1066, 1776, and All That: the Relevance of the English Medieval Experience of “Empire” to Later Constitutional Issues’, in J. E. Flint and G. Williams, eds, Perspectives of Empire: Essays Presented to Gerald S. Graham (London: Longman, 1973), pp. 9–26; J. Goebel Jr, ‘The Matrix of Empire’, introduction to J. H. Smith, Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Plantations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950), pp. xii–lxi. 41. The doctrine of conquest was ‘among the accepted leading ideas of European civilization’: D. Sutherland, ‘Conquest and Law’, Studia Gratiana, 15 (1972), 33–51. See also H. S. Pawlisch, ‘Sir John Davies, the Ancient Constitution and Civil Law’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 689–702.

206 42. 43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

61.

The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire State Trials, vol. 2, cols 638–9, 77 Eng. Rep. at 398. Ibid., col. 638, 77 Eng. Rep. at 398. Ibid., col. 639, 77 Eng. Rep. at 398. See R. L. Schuyler, Parliament and the British Empire: Some Constitutional Controversies Concerning Imperial Legislative Jurisdiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1929), pp. 1–39; J. Goebel Jr., ‘Book Review: Parliament and the British Empire, by R. L. Schuyler’, Columbia Law Review, 30 (1930), 273–6. B. A. Black, ‘The Constitution of Empire: The Case for the Colonists’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 124 (1976), 1157, 1175–84; See, e.g., C. H. McIlwain, The American Revolution: A Constitutional Interpretation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1923). Black, ‘The Constitution of Empire’, p. 1181. See also J. P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: An Interpretation of British–American Constitutional Development, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), pp. 23–4. State Trials, vol. 2, cols. 640–7, 77 Eng. Rep. at 399–404. Barbara Black describes the position well in ‘The Constitution of Empire’, 1168–74. See J. P. Reid, The Constitutional History of the American Revolution: The Authority to Legislate (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 32. H. Wheeler, ‘Calvin’s Case (1608) and the McIlwain-Schuyler Debate’, American Historical Review, 61 (1955–1956), 597. See Smith, Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Plantations, pp. 10–11. The exception was the controversial practice whereby the English King’s Bench took writs of error from Ireland until such jurisdiction was abolished in 1783. State Trials, vol. 2, col. 639, 77 Eng. Rep., at 398; Schuyler, Parliament and the British Empire, pp. 64–7, 82–3, 87, 99–100. The first were Barbadian royalists during the Civil War. Schuyler, Parliament and the British Empire, pp. 106–16. State Trials, vol. 2, col. 639, 77 Eng. Rep. at 398. Ibid., col. 643, 77 Eng. Rep. at 401. Note that, according to Coke, only emigrants to conquered ‘Christian kingdom[s]’ would enjoy these property rights. State Trials, vol. 2, col. 639, 77 Eng. Rep. at 398. But the logic could extend to other dominions too. For this process, see Smith, Appeals to the Privy Council from the American Plantations. See J. M. Murrin, ‘The Legal Transformation: The Bench and Bar of Eighteenthcentury Massachusetts’, in S. N. Katz and J. M. Murrin, eds, Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development (New York: Knopf, 3rd edn, 1983); E. Moglen, ‘Settling the Law: Legal Development in Provincial New York, 1664–1776’ (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1993). See also D. J. Hulsebosch, ‘Writs to Rights: “Navigability” and the Transformation of the Common Law in the Nineteenth Century’, Cardozo Law Review, 23 (2002), 1049–1106; S. F. C. Milsom, ‘The Nature of Blackstone’s Achievement’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 1 (1981), 4. State Trials, vol. 2, col. 638. J. H. Baker, ‘Personal Liberty under the Common Law of England’, in R. W. Davis, ed., The Origins of Modern Freedom in the West (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 178–202. An excellent example is the abstraction of Darcy v. Allen to stand for the proposition that the common law abhorred monopoly and even that monopolies

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62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

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were illegal under English law. Coke’s report of the decision abetted the more abstract interpretation. Jacob I. Corre, ‘The Argument, Decision, and Reports of Darcy v. Allen’, Emory Law Journal, 45 (1996), 1261–1327. E. Coke, preface to Coke’s Reports, vol. 5, p. v. R. C. Johnson et al., eds, Commons Debates, 1628, 6 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977–1983), vol. 2, pp. 357–8. On the equation of liberty with property in early America, see J. P. Reid, The Constitutional History of the American Revolution, pp. 103–13; J. N. Rakove, Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), p. 20. S. D. White, Sir Edward Coke and ‘The Grievances of the Commonwealth’, 1621–1628 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), p. 216. Ibid., pp. 213–74. Commons Debates, 1628, vol. 3, p. 487. See Russell, The Causes of the English Civil War, pp. 26–57; Sommerville, Royalists and Patriots, pp. 134–75. L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). For the concept of a ‘Greater Britain’ of white settler colonies, see J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (1833; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 8. See also D. Armitage, ‘Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?’ American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 427–45; E. H. Gould, ‘A Virtual Nation: Greater Britain and the Imperial Legacy of the American Revolution’, American Historical Review, 104 (1999), 476–89. B. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 176–8; J. Goebel Jr et al., eds, The Law Practice of Alexander Hamilton: Documents and Commentary, 5 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969–1981), vol. 1, pp. 357, 358. I have in mind the strand of postcolonial studies that examines white settler colony cultures, or what Alan Lawson calls the empire’s ‘second world’ relative to the first world of Great Britain and the third of the nonwhite colonies: A. Lawson, ‘Comparative Studies and Post-colonial Settler Cultures’, AustralianCanadian Studies, 10 (1992), 153–9; A. Lawson, ‘A Cultural Paradigm for the Second World’, Australian-Canadian Studies, 9 (1991), 68. Harold A. Innis’s thesis that printed media travel well across space but lose integrity through time is suggestive here. Innis, Empire and Communications, rev. M. Q. Innis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).

Index

absolutism, xvi, xviii, 2, 7–8, 54–5, 63, 76–7, 85n, 162–4, 172, 188 Akrigg, G. P. V., 156 Albert, archduke of Austria, 142–4, 147–8 Alexander, Sir William, xxi, 83, 88–9, 91 Aurora, 90 Alleyn, Edward, 16 Amery, Leo, 3 Angus, ninth earl of, see Douglas, William, ninth earl of Angus Anne of Denmark, Queen to James I, xxii, 17, 52, 89, 92, 144, 149 Anne, Queen of England, 5 Argyll, seventh earl of, see Campbell, Archibald, seventh earl of Argyll Aristotle Politics, 51, 162 Armin, Robert, xxii, 117, 124–5, 130 Valiant Welshman, The, 115–18, 122–6 Arran, earl of, see Stewart, James, earl of Arran Atholl, fifth earl of, see Stewart, John, fifth earl of Atholl Atkinson, David, 97 Ayton, Andrew, 89 Ayton, Sir Robert, xxi, 83, 89–90, 92–7, 99 De Rebus Bohemicis, 92 Panegyris, 90 Babington, Thomas, Lord Macaulay, 155 Bacon, Sir Francis, 4–5, 7, 10, 35, 45, 178 Baker, J. H., 199 Bancroft, Bishop Richard, 81 Barlow, William, 177 Bartas, Guillaume du, 91 Baynham, Matthew, xxii Bean, Sean, 110 Bellamy, Anne, 102–3 Bellamy, Thomas, 103 Bellany, Alastair, 156, 158 Bembo, Pietro, 90, 97 Rime, 90

Benton, Lauren, 204n Bergeron, David, 15–19, 24–5, 30n Berkeley, Sir Maurice, 2 Bermingham, Richard, 66n Bess of Hardwick, 144 Binning, lord, see Hamilton, Thomas, Lord Binning and earl of Melrose Black, Barbara A., 196 Blair, Tony, xvii, 10, 57 Blount, Charles, eighth Lord Mountjoy and first earl of Devonshire, xxiii, 145–7, 149 Boece, Hector, 116 Boethius, Hector, 124 Bosc´an Almog´aver, Juan, 90–1, 97 Bothwell, earl of, see Stewart, Francis, earl of Bothwell Boyle, Roger, first Earl of Orrery, 134 Bradbrook, M. C., 25 Brenton, Howard, 120, 126, 130 The Romans in Britain, 113–15, 120–2, 126 Britten, Benjamin A Ceremony of Carols, 104 Brown, Keith, 7 Browne, William, 183 Brownlow, F. W., 102 Bruce, Edward, Lord Kinloss, 1 Buccleuch, first earl of, see Scott, Walter, first earl of Buccleuch Buchanan, George, xv, xx, 49–52, 54, 57, 60, 62, 65–6n, 76–7, 136n De jure regni apud Scotos: Dialogus, 49–51 Rerum Scoticarum Historia, 52 Buckingham, first duke of, see Villiers, George, first duke of Buckingham Burgess, Glenn, 175n Burghley, Baron, see Cecil, William, Baron Burghley Calderwood, David, xiii, 80, 82 Callahan, Jim, 57

208

Index Calvin, Robert, 192–4 Calvin’s Case, xix, xxv, 9, 187–9, 192–4, 197, 199, 202 Camden, William, 126, 178 Britannia, 21, 113–14 Campbell, Archibald, seventh earl of Argyll, 75 Campbell, Thomas, Lord Mayor, 26 Carey, Sir Robert, xiii, 74 Carlell, Lodowick Deserving Favourite, The, 173 Carleton, George, 184 ‘Devorax-eidos Liber Unus’, 182 Carr, Robert, Earl of Somerset, xxiv, 92, 156–8, 163, 165, 169 Castiglione, Baldassare, 90 Catholicism, xiii, xvii, xxii, 54, 60, 63, 70–1, 77, 80–3, 92, 94, 96, 101–11, 114, 117, 119–21, 125, 137n, 143–4, 146, 148, 159, 162, 164–5, 182 Cavell, Stanley, 45 Caxton, William The Golden Legend, 119 Cecil, Sir Robert, Viscount Cranborne and first earl of Salisbury, xiii, xxiii, 4, 7–8, 75, 123, 140–51, 162, 178–9, 183 Cecil, William, Baron Burghley, 72, 114, 141, 143, 145, 151, 162, 183 Chamberlain, John, 82, 178 Chapman, George, 168–9 Tragedie of Chabot, xxiv, 168–73 Charles I, King of England, xxi, 32n, 74–5, 77, 81–2, 84–5, 92, 133, 156, 177, 183 Charles II, King of England, 81–2 Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 142 Clement VIII, Pope, 143 Cobham, Lord, 148, 180 Coke, Sir Edward, xix, xxv, 4, 7, 11–12, 179, 181–3, 187–9, 191–203, 206–7n Institutes of the Laws of England, xxv, 188, 191, 198, 202 see also Calvin’s Case Colley, Linda, 201 Collinson, Patrick, 48 Cook, Robin, 12 Coomans, Jerome, 144 Corns, Tom, 20, 22, 28 Craig, Alexander, 88–9

209

Craig, Sir Thomas, xix, 5–6, 8, 11, 19, 35, 45 Croft, Pauline, xvi, xxiii Crofts, Cicely, 95 Daniel, Samuel, xxi–xxii, 91 First Part of the Historie of England, The, 135n Tethys Festival, 127–8 Davenant, William Fair Favourite, The, 173 Davies, John of Hereford, 46n, 117 Davies, John of Mallwyd Antiquae linguae Britannicae, 136n Davies, Richard, 118–19, 131 Davison, William, 48 Defoe, Daniel Colonel Jack, 134 Dekker, Thomas, 16, 20, 22, 24, 32n Magnificent Entertainment, The (with Ben Jonson), 15, 20, 22, 24, 27 Whore of Babylon, The, 101 Deloney, Thomas, 137n The Gentle Craft, 119 Dempster, Thomas, 89 Derby, fourth earl of, see Stanley, Henry, fourth earl of Derby Desportes, xxi, 97–8 d’Estr´ee, Gabrielle, marquise de Monceaux, 93 Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex, xviii, xxiii–xxiv, 117, 145, 150, 162, 177–84 Apologie of the Earle of Essex, 184 Devereux, Robert, third earl of Essex, xxiv, 177, 179, 181, 184 Devonshire, first earl of, see Blount, Charles, eighth Lord Mountjoy and first earl of Devonshire DiGangi, Mario, 157 Dillon, Janette, 16–17 Diocletian, 114, 119 ‘dispairinge Complainte of wretched Rawleigh for his Trecheries wrought against the Worthy Essex, The’, anonymous, 180 Doderidge, Sir John, Solicitor General, 2 Donald, Peter, 75 Donaldson, Gordon, 48 Doncaster, viscount, see Hay, Sir James, viscount Doncaster

210

Index

Donne, John, 90–2, 98 Douglas, William, ninth earl of Angus, 54 Drake, Sir Francis, 182 Drayton, Michael, 91, 159 Poly-Olbion, 114, 136–7n Drummond, John, 89 Drummond, William, xxi, 83, 89–93, 97–9, 138n Flowres of Sion, 97–8 Poems, 89 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester, 48, 158–9, 161–2, 165, 182–3 Dunbar, earl of, see Hume, George, earl of Dunbar Dunfermline, earl of, see Seton, Alexander, Lord Fyvie and earl of Dunfermline Dutton, Richard, 17–18, 21, 24, 29n Edmondes, Thomas, 145 Edward I, king of England, 57, 116 Edward II, king of England, xxiv, 159, 162–4 Edward III, king of England, 23 Edward VI, king of England, 8 Egerton, Thomas, Lord Ellesmere and viscount Brackley, 4 Elizabeth I, queen of England, xiii, xvii–xviii, xxiii–xxiv, xxviin, 4–5, 16, 24, 73, 88, 103, 140–8, 151, 158–9, 162–4, 168, 174n, 177–83 Ellesmere, Lord, see Egerton, Thomas, Lord Ellesmere and viscount Brackley Elton, G. R., 6 Empedocles, 107 Erskine, John, second earl of Mar, 1, 75, 84 Erskine, Thomas, Viscount Fenton, 88–9 Essex, second and third earls of, see Devereux, Robert, second earl of Essex Faithful Friends, The, anonymous, 168–9, 173, 176n Farnese, Alessandro, duke of Parma, 141 favouritism of James I, xvii, xxiii–xxiv, 75, 156–73, 174n, 176n Fawkes, Guy, 2

Fenton, Viscount, see Erskine, Thomas, Viscount Fenton Field, John, 48 Field, Nathan Queen of Corinth, The (with John Fletcher and Philip Massinger), 168–9, 173 Flaminio, 90 Fletcher, John, xxii, 122, 124 Bonduca, 115, 117, 120, 122, 125–6 Loyal Subject, The, xxiv, 157–8, 169, 173 Queen of Corinth, The (with Philip Massinger and Nathan Field), 168–9, 173 Forbes, Patrick, bishop of Aberdeen, 82 Forbes, William, 84 Forset, Edward, 166 Comparative Discourse of the Bodies Natural and Politique, A, 166 Fortescue, Sir John, 160–2 Foster, Justice, 9 Fowler, Sir William, xxi, 83, 89, 92 Foxe, John, 114, 119–20 Actes and Monuments, 120 Frederick, Elector Palatine, 92 Fuimus Troies, 114 Fuller, Nicholas, 4, 7–8, 11 Fyvie, Lord Chancellor, see Seton, Alexander, Lord Fyvie and earl of Dunfermline Garcilaso, de la Vega, 90–1, 97 Garnet, Henry, xxii, 101–3, 106 A Treatise of Equivocation, 102 Gaunt, John of, 143 Geoffrey of Monmouth, xx, 21, 34, 36, 46n, 113–15, 118, 130, 134n Historia Regum Britanniae, 113 George VI, king of England, 5 Gledstanes, George, archbishop of St Andrews, 81 Glynd∧ wr, Owain, 116 Goldberg, Jonathan, 157 Goodare, J., 85n Gordon, Andrew, 20, 27, 31n Gordon, George, sixth earl of Huntly, 72 Gowrie, third earl of, see Ruthven, John, Third earl of Gowrie Greenwood, Arthur, 3

Index Greville, Fulke, 63 Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney, 54 Mustapha, 63 Guarini, Giovanni Battista Il Pastor Fido, 93 Gullans, Charles B., 93, 95 Gunpowder Plot, The, xvii, xxii, 2, 31n, 101–3, 106–7, 111 Guy, John, 163 Hamilton, James, third marquis and first duke of Hamilton, 76 Hamilton, Thomas, Lord Binning and earl of Melrose, 73–4, 80–1 Harbert, William, xx, 36–8, 40, 139n Englands Sorrowe, or a Farewell to Essex, xxiv, 37–9, 182 Prophesie of Cadwallader, Last King of the Britaines, A, 36, 39 Harrison, Stephen, 27 Harry, George Owen, 36, 40, 116 Hart, Andrew, 89 Hatton, Sir Christopher, 159, 162 Hay, Sir James, viscount Doncaster, 75, 92, 128, 133 Hayman, Robert, 46n Hedley, Thomas, 3, 10 Henri IV, king of France, 63, 93, 141–3 Henrietta Maria, queen to Charles I, 92, 95, 173 Henry IV, king of England, 69, 116 Henry V, king of England, 12 Henry VI, king of England, 23 Henry VII, king of England, 24, 127 Henry VIII, king of England, 4–5, 114–15, 118, 120, 143, 164 Henry, Prince of Wales, son of James I and Anne, xxiv, 16, 18, 24, 26, 32n, 63, 76, 81, 83, 92, 116–17, 128, 133, 136n, 182–3 Henslowe, Philip, 18, 30n Herbert, Philip, fourth earl of Pembroke and first earl of Montgomery, 138–9n Herbert, William, third earl of Pembroke, 128, 132, 138–9n Herrup, Cynthia, 157 Heywood, Thomas, 16, 28 I Edward IV, 28 Hill, Tracey, xix, xx, 3

211

Hirst, Derek, 140 Hobart, Sir Henry, Attorney General, 2 Hoby, Edward, 10 Holinshed, Raphael, 115, 122–3, 125, 137n Chronicles, xxii, 21, 124, 133, 138n Holland, Robert, 136n Holles, Sir John, 4 Holliday, Sir Leonard, Lord Mayor of London, xx, 20–1, 25, 31n Homer, 91 Horace, 61, 91 Howard, Frances, countess of Essex, 92 Howard, Henry, first earl of Northampton, 149, 179–80 Howell, James, 136n Hubert, Sir Francis, xxiv, 163, 166–7, 175n Life and Death of Edward the Second, The, 159, 163, 166–7, 175n Hulsebosch, Daniel, xxv Hume, David of Godscroft, xv–xvi, xx–xxi, 48–9, 53–63, 64n, 66–7n, 76 Daphn’Amaryllis, 63 De unione insulae Britannicae, xx, 55–63 Hume, George, earl of Dunbar, 73–4 Huntly, earl of, see Gordon, George, sixth earl of Huntly Hyde, Laurence, 10 Ireland, xvii–xviii, xxi, xxiii, xxv, 2, 53, 114–15, 132, 134, 137n, 143–7, 191, 194–7, 206n Isabella, Infanta-Archduchess, 142–4, 146, 148, 183 James I, king of England, xiii–xxv, xxvin–xxviin, 1–8, 11–12, 15–28, 30–2n, 34–9, 41–2, 47n, 55, 57, 59, 63, 69–84, 86n, 88–90, 92–3, 95, 97, 99, 115–17, 121, 123, 125, 127–8, 133–4, 136n, 138n, 140, 144–51, 155–61, 163–7, 174n, 177–84, 190–3, 197 Basilikon Doron, xxi, 55–6, 59, 72, 76, 136n, 165 Counterblaste to Tobacco, 93 Daemonologie, 55 Triplici Nodo, Triplex Cuneus, 92 True Lawe of Free Monarchies, xx–xxi, 5, 55–6, 76

212

Index

James I, king of Scotland, 78 James IV, king of Scotland, 71, 83 James V, king of Scotland, 72, 83 Johnston, Arthur, 91 Jonson, Ben, xvii, xxviin, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, 27, 30n, 83, 89, 91 Case is Altered, The, 18 Epigrams, xvii For the Honour of Wales, 136n Magnificent Entertainment, The (with Thomas Dekker), 15, 20, 22, 24, 27 Masque of Blackness, The, 18 Sejanus, 159, 161 Joseph of Arimathea, 118, 137n Kastner, L. E., 98 Kerrigan, John, xxii–xxiii King and Queenes Entertainement at Richmond, anonymous, 135n King Leir, anonymous, 40 King, Maureen, xxiv–xxv Kinloss, Lord, see Bruce, Edward, Lord Kinloss Kinney, Arthur, 15, 21 Knack to Know a Knave, A, anonymous, 159 Knowles, James, xx, 15, 29n, 32n Lake, Sir Thomas, 82, 150 Lamb, Charles, 44 Languet, Hubert, 54 Laud, William, 82 Lawson, Alan, 207n Lawson, James, 48 Leicester, earl of, see Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester Leicester’s Commonwealth, xxiv, 158, 161, 164–5 Leinwand, Theodore, 17, 29n Lennox, second duke of, see Stuart, Ludovick, second duke of Lennox Leslie, George, earl of Rothes, 82 Levack, Brian P., 9, 19, 31n Ligne, Prince Jean de, Count of Arembergh, 141, 147–9 Linlithgow, earl of, see Livingstone, Lord Alexander, earl of Linlithgow Lipsius, Justus, 55–6 Livingstone, Lord Alexander, earl of Linlithgow, 73

Livy, 66n Llwyd, Humphrey, 116–17, 131, 136n Lobanov-Rostovsky, Sergei, 32n Lowin, John, 29n Lyall, Roderick J., xxi–xxii MacDonald, Robert H., 90 McIlwain, Charles H., 196 Maitland, John, 72–3 Maitland, Richard, 73 Maitland, William, 72–3 Major, John, Prime Minister, 3 Major, John, theologian, 85n Mar, second earl of, see Erskine, John, second earl of Mar Marcus, Leah, 17, 23, 127, 138n Marino, Giambattista, xxi, 97 Rime, 90 Markham, Gervase, 184 Honour in His Perfection, xxv, 184 Marlowe, Christopher, 159, 174n Edward II, 159, 161–3 Marston, John Malcontent, The, 91 Marvell, Andrew, 96, 134 Mary I, Queen of England, 119 Mary of Guise, 51 Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, 23, 49, 70, 77, 83 Massinger, Philip Duke of Milan, The, xxiv, 157–8, 169, 173 Queen of Corinth, The (with John Fletcher and Nathan Field), 168–9, 173 Meagher, John, 33n Melrose, earl of, see Hamilton, Thomas, Lord Binning and earl of Melrose Melville, Andrew, xx, 52–4, 57, 63, 65–6n, 76, 78, 80–1 ‘Gathelus’, 52–3 Middleton, Thomas, 16, 32n Revenger’s Tragedy, The, xviii Milne, A. A., 3 Milton, John, 27, 114, 117, 124, 134 Comus, 117, 137n Maske, 118 Misfortunes of Arthur, The, 42 Montagu, Walter Shepherd’s Paradise, The, 95

Index Montaigne, Michel de, 55–6 Montemayor, Jorge de Diana, 90 Montgomerie, Alexander, 93, 99n Montgomery, first earl of, see Herbert, Philip, fourth earl of Pembroke and first earl of Montgomery Moore, Helen, 16 Moray, third earl of, see Stewart, James, third earl of Moray Mordaunt, Lord, 150 More, Sir George, 8 Moro, Mauritio, 97 Muir, Kenneth, 105 Mullaney, Steven, 16 Munday, Anthony, xix–xx, 3, 15–28, 29–32n, 37–8, 47n Chruso-thriambos, 17, 23, 26 Chrysanaleia, 27 Londons Love, to the Royal Prince Henrie, 16, 18, 26 Metropolis Coronata, 25, 27 Sidero-Thriambos, 20, 123 Survey of London (by John Stow, 1618 edition), 19, 24 Survey of London (by John Stow, 1633 edition), 17 Triumphes of Re-united Britania, The, xix, 3, 15, 17–26, 37, 39, 45 Murray, John, 92 Muzio, Manfredi, 90 naturalization, xiv, xix, xxv, 7, 11, 12, 45, 79, 128, 190, 192, 205n Neville, Sir Henry, 178 Norden, John, 31n Northampton, first earl of, see Howard, Henry, first earl of Northampton Northumberland, ninth earl of, see Percy, Henry, ninth earl of Northumberland O’Donnell, Rory, earl of Tyrconnell, 147 O’Neill, Hugh, second earl of Tyrone, xxiii, 143, 145–7, 151 Orrery, first earl of, see Boyle, Roger, first Earl of Orrery Osborne, Francis, 174n Overbury, Sir Thomas, xxiv, 92, 156, 158, 168–9

213

Ovid, 91 Metamorphoses, 107 Owen, George, see Harry, George Owen Owen, John, 35 Owen, Sir Roger, 2, 10 Paradise of Dainty Devices, The, 90 Parker, Matthew, archbishop of Canterbury, 119, 121 Parma, duke of, see Farnese, Alessandro, duke of Parma Parsons, Robert, 162–3 Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England, A, 162–3 Passerat, 90, 97 Paster, Gail Kern, 17, 27 Peacham, Henry, 183 Minerva Britannia, xxiv, 183 Peck, Linda Levy, 171 Pembroke, third and fourth earls of, see Herbert, William, third earl of Pembroke Percy, Henry, ninth earl of Northumberland, 178 Perry, Curtis, xvii, xxiii–xxiv, 88 Petrarch, 91, 97 Canzoniere, 97 Rime, 90 Phelips, Sir Edward, Speaker of the House of Commons, 11 Philip II, king of Spain, 69, 140–3, 149 Philip III, king of Spain, 63, 66n, 143–8, 150, 153n Plessis-Mornay, Philip du, 54 Plutarch, 107 Pocock, J. G. A., 203n Polanski, Roman Macbeth, 110 Pole, John, 174n Poole, Adrian, 109 Porch`eres, Laugier de, 93 Powel, David, 116 The History of Cambria, 116 Powell, George, 123 Pricket, Robert, xxiv, 181 Honors Fame in Triumph Riding. Or, the Life and Death of the Late Honorable Earle of Essex, xxiv, 181 Protestantism, xiii, xv–xvi, 42, 48, 52–3, 55–6, 58, 70–2, 77–8, 80–3, 114, 118–21, 125, 137n, 164–5, 182–3

214

Index

Queen, Ellery, 12 Ralegh, Sir Walter, xxiv, 159, 177, 179–81, 183 Ramsay, Allan, 88 Randolph, Thomas Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery, 131 republicanism, xv, xx, 27, 49, 54–6, 62 Richard II, king of England, 23, 69 Richard III, king of England, 23, 26, 32n Richardot sire de Barly, Jean, 141–2, 145, 148–9 Rinaldi, Cesare, 90 Robert of Shrewsbury Vita, 137n Ronsard, Pierre de, 90–1 Rothes, earl of, see Leslie, George, earl of Rothes Rovida, Alessandro, 149 Row, John, 82 Rowley, William, xxii, 118–21, 137n Shoo-maker a Gentleman, A, xxii, 115–16, 118–21, 125 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, 63 Russell, Conrad, xiv, xix, xxv Ruthven, John, Third earl of Gowrie, 72 Said, Edward, 65n Saint-Amant, Marc-Antoine Girard de, 92–3 St Augustine, 118 St John, Lord, 150 Salisbury, first earl of, see Cecil, Sir Robert, Viscount Cranborne and first earl of Salisbury Sandys, Edwin, xix, 3–7, 10, 12, 190, 197 Sannazaro, Jacopo, 97 Arcadia, 90 Rime, 90 Scaramelli, Giovanni Carlo, 177–80 Schuyler, Robert L., 196 Schwyzer, Philip, xix–xx, 137n Scotland, xiii–xxii, xxv, 1–12, 19–20, 23, 25, 34–6, 38, 45, 48–63, 69–84, 88–90, 93, 99, 114–17, 123–5, 127–8, 132–4, 136–7n, 145, 165, 190–2, 194–5, 197, 201 Scott, Alexander, 93

Scott, Thomas Robert Earle of Essex His Ghost, 184 Scott, Walter, first earl of Buccleuch, 76 Selden, John, 136–7n Seton, Alexander, Lord Fyvie and earl of Dunfermline, 4, 7, 14n, 73–4, 84 Seton, Robert, earl of Winton, 73 sexuality of James I, xix, xxiii–xxiv, 75, 155–9, 174n Seymour, Edward, first duke of Somerset, xiii Shakespeare, William, xvii–xviii, xx, xxii, xxviin, 38–42, 44–5, 82, 102, 105–8, 111, 126–8, 130–3, 139n Cymbeline, xviii, xxii–xxiii, 40, 115–17, 122–34 Hamlet, xvii, 37, 44 Henry V, xviii, 44 Julius Caesar, 44 King Lear, xviii, xx, 38–45, 120, 128, 171 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 91 Macbeth, xviii, xxii, 3, 23, 44, 82, 101–11, 128, 136n Midsummer Night’s Dream, A, 91 Romeo and Juliet, 91 Sonnets, xvii Venus and Adonis, 107 Winter’s Tale, The, 132, 157 Shannon, Laurie, 165 Shepherd, Simon, 174n Shirley, James, 168 Sidney, Sir Philip, 48, 54, 62, 91, 165, 182–3 Arcadia, 90, 165 ‘Sir Walter Rauleigh’s stabb’, anonymous, xxiv, 180–1 Somerset, duke of, see Seymour, Edward, first duke of Somerset Somerset, earl of, see Carr, Robert, Earl of Somerset Southampton, second earl of, see Wriothesley, Henry, second earl of Southampton Southwell, Robert, xxii, 102–8, 111 Burning Babe, The, xxii, 104–5 New heauen: new warre, xxii, 104–5, 107 St Peter’s Complaint, 107

Index Spain, xiii, xvi, xxiii–xxv, 6–7, 9, 63, 79, 115, 117, 133–4, 140–51, 177, 182–4 Speed, John History of Great Britaine, 132 Spenser, Edmund, 54, 63 Amoretti, 90–1 Ruines of Time, 37, 114, 125 Shepheardes Calender, The, 118 Spottiswoode, John, archbishop of St Andrews, 82 Stanley, Henry, fourth earl of Derby, 141 Stewart, Francis, earl of Bothwell, 72–3 Stewart, James, earl of Arran, 48 Stewart, James, third earl of Moray, 75 Stewart, John, fifth earl of Atholl, 72 Stone, Lawrence, xiii Stow, John Survey of London (1618 edition), 19, 24 Survey of London (1633 edition), 17 Strong, Roy, 183 Stuart, Arbella, 144 Stuart, Ludovick, second duke of Lennox, 75 Sullivan, Garrett, 28 Tacitus, 113–14 Taliesin, 118 Tassis, Juan Bautista de, 148–50 Tasso, Torquato, xxi, 97 Aminta, 90 Taylor, Gary, 107 Thornborough, John, bishop of Bristol, xx, 35–6, 38, 40, 45 Topcliffe, Richard, 102–3 True Chronicle History    of Thomas Lord Cromwell, anonymous, 164–5 Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques, 48 Tyard, Pontus de, 90 Tyrconnell, earl of, see O’Donnell, Rory, earl of Tyrconnell Tyrone, second earl of, see O’Neill, Hugh, second earl of Tyrone union, the, xiii–xxi, 1–12, 18–22, 25, 34–42, 44–5, 48–9, 53–4, 56–63, 69–77, 79, 81–4, 117, 120–1, 123, 127–8, 132–4, 190–2, 197, 201

215

Valois, Elisabeth de, 143 Velasco, Juan de, Duke of Frias and Constable of Castile, 148–50, 153n Vergil, Polydore, 118 Anglica Historica, 113 Verreyken, Louis de, 142, 145, 149 Villiers, George, first duke of Buckingham, xxiv, 75, 156–8, 161–3, 169, 174n Virgil, 91 Eclogues, 130 Wales, xix, xxii, xxv, 2, 10, 35–6, 39, 41, 69–70, 114–28, 131–3, 136–7n Walmsley, Justice, 4, 9 Walsham, Alexandra, 137n Walsingham, Francis, 48–9, 54 Warner, William Albions England, 124 Watson, James, 88 Webster, John, 16, 32n Weldon, Anthony, 156 Wentworth, Thomas, 9 Whitgift, archbishop John, 81 Wickham, Glynne, 17 Williams, Richard, 179, 181 ‘Life and Death of Essex, The’, xxiv, 179 Williams, Sheila, 30n Williamson, Arthur, xv, xx–xxi, 70 Wills, Garry, 101, 104–5 Wilson, Richard, xxii, 101, 106–7 Wilson, Thomas, 4 Winton, earl of, see Seton, Robert, earl of Winton Winwood, Sir Ralph, 82, 151 Wood, Michael, 106 In Search of Shakespeare, 106 Woodstock, anonymous, 159–60 Worden, Blair, 172–3 Wormald, Jenny, xvi, xxi, 4, 65n Wriothesley, Henry, second earl of Southampton, xviii, xxiv, 178–80, 184 Wyatt, Sir Thomas, 94 Wymer, Rowland, 160 Young, Michael, 155–7