Power and Glory: Jacobean England and the Making of the King James Bible. Adam Nicolson
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There was to be a single currency in which the 20-shilling gold piece was to be called âThe Uniteâ, with âOur pictureâ on one side and âOur Armes Crownedâ on the other, emblazoned with the Latin motto Faciam eos in gentem unam, I shall make them into one nation. Here, in a practical and symbolic programme, the dream of authority and wholeness was, in Jamesâs vision at least, to become reality.
The new king would soon discover, however, that seventeenth-century Englishmen had about as much love for union, whether fiscal or political, as their modern descendants. The dream of unity â an abstract, intellectualised, Scottish and hence European ideal of political togetherness â would within a year fall foul of an English conservatism which valued its own hard-won freedoms far above any high-falutinâ ideas of political unity. England was England, the rosbifs dominated parliament, civilisation stopped at the Cheviots and the English Channel and ever, alas, would it remain so.
For the time being, life was a holiday. Largesse had been pouring in an unending fountain from Jamesâs hand. He had, in places, literally showered the streets with gold coins. Teams of the gentry were queueing up to be knighted, 237 of them in the first six weeks of the reign, 906 in the first four months, a sudden gush from the Fount of Honour, which under Elizabethâs last years had run virtually dry.
Then, on 21 April, as the pageant arrived at Newark in Lincolnshire, James made his first mistake. It was a bad one.
In this Towne, and in the Court, was taken a cut-purse doing the deed; and being a base pilfering theefe, yet was a Gentleman-like in the outside. This fellow had good store of coyne found about him; and upon examination confessed that he had from Barwick to that place plaied the cut-purse in the Court ⦠His Majestie hearing of this nimming gallant directed a warrant presently to the Recorder of New-warke, to have him hanged, which was accordingly executed.
What can have possessed James? Perhaps he was rattled by the presence of a thief in the midst of all this springtime hope and optimism? Maybe he assumed that the English king, so much more powerful than the Scottish, could from time to time behave with autocratic authority? Maybe, in a complex and troubled personality, it was simply a blip, an aberration? He could certainly behave very oddly at times. (Later in his reign, travelling back to Scotland, he dismounted at the border between the two countries and lay down across it to demonstrate to his courtiers how two kingdoms could exist in one person.) Whatever the cause, here in Newark he made the wrong decision.
Summary execution was not done in England, nor had it been for centuries. The government habitually tortured and executed people and displayed their heads (hard-boiled, so that the skin went black and had some resistance to the weather) on spikes at the south end of London Bridge, but none of this was done without going through the proper procedures. The Privy Council alone could authorise torture and execution. Jamesâs summary justice made all the talk of peacemaking and constitutional kingship look hollow. The courtiers were appalled. âI heare our new Kinge hath hanged one man before he was tryed,â Sir John Harington wrote. âTis strangely done; now if the wynde bloweth thus, why not a man be tryed before he hath offended?â A doubt was sown that James did not really comprehend the promised land in which he had arrived. Was the Scottish king suddenly out of his depth in the more evolved world of English politics? Was he likely to override or ignore the long established rule of the common law, of which the English were deeply proud? Harington would play it carefully. âI wyll keepe companie with my oves and boves, and go to Bathe and drinke sacke.â Or so he told his friends; in fact, he had sent James an elaborate and expensive astrological lantern by which the king could tell his fortune, and composed elegant, supplicatory letters to his new sovereign. Nothing was entirely as it seemed.
The thief dead, the show went on. James appeared one day as Robin Hood, âhis clothes as green as the grass he trod onâ. At Exton in Rutland he hunted âlive hares in basketsâ. Outside Stamford, visible from miles away, âan hundred high men, that seemed like the Patagones, huge long fellows of twelve and fourteene feet high, that are reported to live on the Mayne of Brasil, neere to the Streights of Megallaneâ turned out to be âa company of poore honest suitors, all going upon high stiltsâ. Outside Huntingdon, a crowd on their knees begged James to reopen some common land which had been enclosed and denied to them. The king ignored the request. Another crowd from Godmanchester greeted him with seventy ploughs, drawn by seventy plough-teams, but that too was just a show, another means, however oblique, of asking for money.
This was not the serious business, not the power-playing which would become more intense and more real once the cavalcade reached London. For now it was play-acting. For a few days, the king and the itinerant court stayed at Hinchinbrooke Abbey outside Huntingdon. It was the house of Sir Oliver Cromwell, MP, himself a loyal monarchist, drainer of the Fens, and subscriber to the planting and cultivating of Virginia. Cromwell put on a spectacular show for the new king and for the crowds, providing âbread and beefe for the poorestâ, meat and wine âand those not riffe-ruffe, but ever the best of the kindeâ for the gentry. Cromwell gave the king a gold cup, âsome goodly horsesâ, a pack of âflete and deep-mouthed houndesâ as well as âdivers hawkes of excellent wingeâ. Everything was calculated to make England look like an Arcadia of riches, and James appeared to believe the propaganda.
England was salivating over James, submissive and obsequious in turns, in a way that is so unabashed that it strikes us as odd. But this too requires an act of the imagination. Submissiveness and obsequiousness were signals of the social order at work. Social differences between men were not an unfortunate result of economics or power politics, nor a distortion of how things ought to be but a sign that society was well ordered. Life, happily, was arranged on a slope as steeply pitched as a church spire. What looks to us now like the most unctuous kind of self-abasement was symbolic of civilisation. A man making a request to his superior happily knelt before him, as a straightforward sign of submission. Plaintiffs knelt in court, children to their fathers, MPs and bishops when addressing the king. When John Donne hoped he might become Dean of St Paulâs Cathedral in London, a position in the gift of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the kingâs favourite, Donne wrote to him:
All that I mean in usinge thys boldnes, of puttinge myselfe into your Lordshipâs presence by thys ragge of paper, ys to tell your Lordship that I ly in a corner, as a clodd of clay, attendinge what kinde of vessell yt shall please you to make of Your Lordshipâs humblest and thankfullest and devotedst servant.
The âpoore wormeâ who wrote this letter was no pitiable youth; Donne was almost fifty and probably accompanied the letter with a bribe.
There was biblical sanction for all of this. Paul in his Epistle to the Romans, a favourite text for Jacobean England, says quite straightforwardly: âLet euery soule bee subject vnto the higher powers: For there is no power but of God. The powers that be are ordeined of God. Whosoeuer therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist, shall receiue to themselues damnation.â
The condition in Eden had been one of obedience; a steeply raked social structure was ordained by God; and so crawling to the great could be holy in England too.
The climax of Jamesâs journey into his new kingdom came on 3 May when he arrived at the enormous, multi-winged, many-towered palace of Theobalds in Hertfordshire. This was no royal residence, although Elizabeth had often treated the house as if she owned it. Theobalds in fact belonged to Robert Cecil. James, who had scarcely before been outside Scotland, was overwhelmed by the riches of England and the welcome of its people. Cushioned by the grande luxe of Theobalds â the nearest comparison is a great nineteenth-century hotel, or a liner: the Titanic had several public rooms decorated in a wildly overblown Jacobean style â all the gratitude he had felt to Cecil during their secret correspondence, he now poured out to the nation as a whole: âa people so loving, so dutifull, and so deere unto us, may know and feele that we are as desirous to make them happy by our Justice and grace towards them in all reasonable things, as they have been redy to increase our comfort and contentment in yeelding their loyalty and obedienceâ. Monopolists were to be obliged to give up their monopolies, creditors to pay their