James I (1603–1625)
From the death of Elizabeth in 1603 until 1714, England was nominally ruled by the Scottish dynasty, of whom James I was the first king. By the end of that era she had become the largest trading and colonizing nation in the world. Her dauntless countrymen, who had been great seamen in Elizabeth’s reign, turned into colonists under the Stuarts. They settled the greater part of the east coast of North America and most of the West Indies, and had trading stations from west Africa to India. As this notable expansion in trade began to enrich the non-noble or middling classes, the financiers, the merchants, the businessmen and the lawyers, inevitably it enhanced the House of Commons’ sense of its own power. Conscious of the wealth they commanded, these classes desired more of a hand in government. Yet this conflicted with the new dynasty’s profound belief that Parliament, the law and the Church should be subservient to the crown.
During eighty years of convulsion and upheaval, driven by religious conviction, Englishmen struggled to decide whether the king’s will should be supreme or Parliament’s. It took a bloody civil war, a republican experiment after the execution of one king, then the deposition of another, to settle the question permanently in Parliament’s favour. From William and Mary onwards the line of succession passed into the gift of Parliament, and Protestantism became an unconditional qualification of the English monarchy. By the end of the seventeenth century Protestantism had become synonymous with the rule of Parliament and liberty, while Catholicism was identified with tyranny and royal absolutism.
But in the early days of James I’s reign there were few indications of the conflict that awaited his descendants. The arrival of the House of Stuart on the English throne unified the kingdom as never before. Thanks to the recently completed Tudor conquest of Ireland, James I was king of the western island in fact as well as in name, which his predecessors had never been. Like Elizabeth, he benefited from the good advice of Robert Cecil (created Earl of Salisbury in 1605), and he persisted with most of the old queen’s policies. But there was one considerable difference: James, who liked to think of himself as a great peacemaker, ended the war with Spain as soon as he came to the throne.
In many ways James’s greatest problem was that he was Scottish, and the Scots had been the traditional English enemy since time immemorial. He was a tactless Scottish king at that, too ready to offer niggling criticisms of his magnificent predecessor though he had depended on her pension for the previous quarter-century. James’s sensible idea to unify Scotland and England into one kingdom–Great Britain as he called it–by having one Parliament and one legal system was treated with derision by the English Parliament. Despite efforts to do so under Cromwell, it was not achieved until a hundred years later, in the reign of Queen Anne. All that James was able to effect in his lifetime was that every Scots man and woman born after he ascended the throne became English citizens; he also invented a flag for the unified country called the Union Jack–the crosses of St George and St Andrew combined.
Despite the smooth Salisbury’s best efforts, James’s promotion of Scottish rights got him off on the wrong foot with the court and the country. So did the very obvious way he reserved his closest friendships for a gaggle of Scottish favourites who made it clear that they were looking forward to plucking the rich southern goose for all it was worth. In spite of his erudition James’s attitude to his new country was perhaps not much more sophisticated than that of a Scots border raider looking south and spying the rich lands of the English. On his way south James had already shown his lack of interest in English customs by hanging a thief without trial by jury.
The English, who were used to Elizabeth’s commanding, glamorous and autocratic court, were moreover embarrassed by the informal and undignified ways of the Scottish king. Though he was the only child of the beautiful Queen of Scots and the elegant Lord Darnley, James I was not such a perfect physical specimen. Once-popular descriptions of his grotesque appearance and personal habits–a tendency to dribble because his tongue was too long, greasy hands because his skin was too delicate to wash–have been exposed as satire. But in the seventeenth century, when a king was supposed to be a warlike and masculine figure, his new subjects were contemptuous of James having his doublet and breeches specially padded against daggers because he was so fearful of being assassinated, and they were scandalized by his habit of always having good-looking young men about him. A weakness in his legs from childhood rickets meant he liked to lean on other men’s arms, and this only increased his reputation for effeminacy.
Although initially the English were predisposed in favour of a man as ruler, and one with a large number of children, James I was incapable of making the effort to endear himself to his new people. Everything he did annoyed the English, especially his refusal to attempt to learn or understand their customs. They also detested his self-important habit of lecturing all and sundry–he went so far as to describe himself as ‘the great schoolmaster of the whole land’.
Unlike the usurper Tudors, the Stuarts were highly conscious of their hereditary right to rule, their family having already been kings of Scotland for over two centuries. But James I combined scholarship with kingship, and was an immensely erudite author. His particular interest in theology drew him to many excited conclusions about the nature of royal government, which he published at length in books and pamphlets in the course of his reign. According to the ‘Divine Right of Kings’, a doctrine James had deduced for himself, the fact that God had provided kings to act as His representatives on earth entitled them to control every institution in the kingdom from the laws to Parliament. There was no place for Parliament in James’s scheme of things unless it was totally subservient to the king. A king, James earnestly told the House of Commons in one of his many lectures to that body, ‘is the supremest thing upon earth: for kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods’.
James tended to dilate on this idea at every opportunity, whether at court or to Parliament, in his irritating Scottish accent. He had it promoted in Sunday sermons through the English Church. Unfortunately it clashed with the reality of life in England, which the Scottish king was loath to understand. Although the autocratic and God-like Tudors clearly believed in something along the lines of Divine Right, they had been far too cunning to put it into words, or to do anything without appearing to consult Parliament. The learned James strangely lacked the Tudor shrewdness for seeing what was under his nose. Welcome or not, the Tudors had acknowledged that during the previous three centuries Parliament had become something like the partner of the king. Thanks to its control of money bills the king could not govern without it. In return MPs expected to have their say on most matters in the kingdom–where, as they would tell the disbelieving James, there was a tradition of free speech. They had grown used to debating foreign policy, which fortunately in Elizabeth’s reign had largely jibed with their deeply Protestant patriotism, and to running affairs in the Commons with little interference from the king.
But James refused to see their point of view. From the beginning to the end of his reign he managed to offend and be offended every time he met MPs. The boldness of their demands amazed him and affronted the royal dignity which he was determined to uphold. For unlike Scotland, where he had been at the mercy of the Kirk (the Church) and the powerful Scots nobles who had kidnapped him twice, England had a reputation for strong monarchs. He spent a good deal of time complaining about the House of Commons to anyone who would listen, not least the delighted Spanish ambassador. The highly educated James persisted in addressing MPs in a condescending fashion as if they were his children, and his inability to see any point of view other than his own truly merited the French king Henry IV’s description of him as ‘the wisest fool in Christendom’.
James I’s reign was almost immediately marked by drama and discontent. There were two factions at court, one led by Robert Cecil, the other by the great Elizabethan gallant, explorer and poet Sir Walter Raleigh. Raleigh found himself a casualty of James’s favouring Cecil when he was removed from his prestigious position as Captain of the Guard. In the heady atmosphere of the new regime the impulsive and now embittered Raleigh was drawn into a conspiracy known as the Main Plot, to abduct Cecil.
No sooner had the Main Plot been discovered than the Bye Plot emerged. Wilder spirits among the Catholics, who were disappointed that the son of the martyred Mary Queen of Scots had not immediately suspended the draconian Elizabethan penal laws against them, planned to kidnap James and replace him on the throne with a Catholic cousin. With the uncovering of this plot, Catholics were treated even worse than before. While Raleigh himself was condemned to a life in the Tower for the next thirteen years (where he wrote A History of the World and much poetry), the very Puritan House of Commons enforced the penalties against Catholics to a level which brought them to despair.
Henceforth if any Catholic fell behind in paying the monthly fine of twenty pounds for not attending Protestant services, they incurred the crippling penalty of forfeiting two-thirds of their property. As the fines worked out at £240 a year, which was beyond the reach of men in respectable but moderate circumstances, quite soon the ordinary Catholic was ruined. A real element of persecution came into play, and there were night-time searches of private houses by armed soldiers looking for priests. The Church of England clergy became spies in their own parishes, required to denounce to the authorities all those who were not attending Protestant service on Sunday in their local church. A final insult awaited Catholics when they were refused burial in Protestant graveyards.
Even the wealthier Catholics had their lives destroyed for their faith. Protestant bishops were bound to excommunicate prominent Catholics in their dioceses and then certify their names in Chancery, which prevented Catholics from leaving money to relatives by deed or will. To add to the Catholics’ terrors, rumours were circulating that in the next Parliament measures would be taken to ensure the total extirpation of their faith. Hostile statements from the king and the fierce language of the Bishop of London in a sermon at St Paul’s Cross seemed proof to the exhausted Catholics that the rumours were true. It also convinced the extremists among them that something would have to be done. They decided that their best hope was to blow up the Puritan Houses of Parliament on 5 November 1605 when the king would open Parliament for that term. Having kidnapped the king’s daughter Princess Elizabeth, they would proclaim her queen on condition that the Roman Catholic religion was restored.
The leader of the plot was a Warwickshire gentleman named Robert Catesby, but the man who laid the gunpowder trail in the cellars of the Houses of Parliament on the night of 4 November was Guy Fawkes, a soldier of fortune who had fought in the Netherlands. From his name derives the tradition of giving ‘a penny for the old guy’, and it is he who is burned in effigy every 5 November. Fawkes was discovered crouching by the barrels of gunpowder with his dark lantern–one of the Catholic peers, Lord Mounteagle, having warned Salisbury, his conscience stricken by the thought of his fellow Catholic peers being blown up. It has since become part of the tradition of the Opening of Parliament for Beefeaters to conduct a ceremonial search of the cellars.
Appalled by the near miss, the government acted with great swiftness and savagery. In order to get to the bottom of the conspiracy, the authorities arrested any Catholic they had suspicions of, without troubling to obtain proof of their involvement. Guy Fawkes himself was hideously tortured and the Catholic community was scoured from top to bottom. In fact the whole country, including ordinary Catholics, was thrown into a state of shock by the sheer enormity of the assassination attempt. This was reflected in Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, written during the plot’s aftermath and performed six months later, which reverberates with the horror of an attack on the Lord’s Anointed. The government was particularly keen to get its hands on the Jesuits, who ever since their formation had been regarded as dangerous enemies of the English state. The authorities moved to arrest three prominent Jesuits who were important leaders of the Catholic community, Father Gerard, Father Garnet and Father Greenway.
Although Father Gerard and Father Greenway escaped to the continent, Father Garnet managed only to get to a house called Hindlip near Worcester which belonged to Thomas Habington, brother-in-law of Lord Mounteagle. There he lived in fear and trembling, sending protestations of innocence to Cecil, hiding in one of the many priest-holes constructed a generation before by a Catholic carpenter sworn to secrecy. Despite Mrs Habington’s brave attempts to mislead local magistrates who had been tipped off that he was in their vicinity, Father Garnet was found lying in a tiny chamber carved out under the hearth of a fireplace.
As a result of the Gunpowder Plot, all Catholics had become deeply unpopular. But with the arrest and interrogation of Father Garnet the idea that Catholics were natural traitors took a much stronger grip on the English imagination, and proved hard to eradicate. Loyalty to foreigners, whether Philip of Spain or the pope, had put a question mark over the Catholic community ever since England turned Protestant. When it emerged that Garnet had actually known about the plan to blow up Parliament because under the seal of the confessional another priest had told him of Catesby’s own confession three months earlier, public opinion turned even more dramatically against Catholics, many of whom decided to seek a less hostile environment on the continent.
New laws forbade Catholics to appear at court or to dwell within ten miles of the boundaries of London. They could not move more than five miles from home without a special licence which had to be signed by four neighbouring magistrates. A career in the professions was barred to them–there could be no Catholic doctors, surgeons, lawyers, executors, guardians, judges or members of any town corporation. To remain a Catholic meant in effect renouncing society or refusing to be part of it–hence the word ‘recusant’ used of old Catholic families (from the Latin verb recusare, which means to refuse). And those recusant families clung on somehow to their religion, but in the process became very poor and unworldly and remained so for over two centuries, until the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829.
Enormous fines were imposed if a child was not baptized into the Protestant faith within a month of its birth. James’s royal favourites and the Exchequer soon got in the habit of exploiting Catholic recusant estates as a useful source of income, eagerly enforcing sequestration of two-thirds of their property for non-payment of fines. That worldlywise king Henry IV warned James I from across the Channel that religion was ‘a flame which burns with increasing fierceness in proportion to the violence used to extinguish it’, and that such severe laws would lay him open to worse plots. But, strange to say, it did not. Catholics, perhaps because their religion encouraged them to turn the other cheek, sank meekly into second-class citizenship.
In fact it was from the Puritans that James had most to fear. Extremely well represented in the unruly House of Commons, they had the boldness to accost the new king on his journey south from Scotland to take up his new position, presenting what is called the Millenary Petition because it was signed by a thousand Puritans. This requested the king to end the Elizabethan oppression of their beliefs through the enforcement of uniformity and to make changes to the prayer book. Confident of his ability to debate with them and pleased with his theological learning James promised that the next year there would be a conference to debate all these issues. But when the meeting took place at Hampton Court the Puritan divines realized they had picked the wrong audience. Despite or perhaps because of his fierce Scots Presbyterian background, the new king was just as much the enemy of all attempts to introduce the Presbyterian system (from ‘presbyter’, the Greek for elder) to England as Elizabeth had been. In fact James was mightily in favour of bishops as a prop of royal authority, and had every intention of reintroducing them to Scotland. As he remarked to the divines, ‘Scottish Presbytery agreeth as well with monarchy as God with the devil.’ He would put it even more pithily in his summing up of the High Church position: ‘No bishop, no king.’
The best the Puritans got out of the king was the decision to undertake a new translation of the Bible. In 1611 the beautiful Authorized Version, the product of forty-seven scholars, which we know as the King James Bible became the universally preferred version in Protestant services and Protestant homes. Using much of William Tyndale’s wording, it is a remarkable piece of scholarship, and remains one of the masterpieces of English literature, its phrasing having had an incalculable effect on the English language.
To all the Puritans’ pleas for a more solemn way of life, especially on the Sabbath, the king made it clear that this was not what he had in mind for England. Indeed under him the Church of England began to take on a distinctly conservative tinge, especially when Richard Bancroft became Archbishop of Canterbury after Whitgift’s death. But the greatest exponent of movement back towards the Catholicism of Henry VIII’s time was William Laud, who became Bishop of London, and at lastin 1633, under James’s son Charles I, Archbishop of Canterbury.
Thanks to Laud’s influence the Church of England revolted against the overwhelming Calvinism of the Puritans. Instead it adopted the ideas of a Dutch professor named Arminius which stressed its fellowship with the ancient Church at Rome. Over the next twenty years as the battle for authority was waged between Parliament and king, Puritans tended to gravitate towards joining the House of Commons and pressing for their rights there, while the Church of England became the leading supporter of royal autocracy. Led by their bishops, parish priests preached that it was wrong to resist a ruler who was appointed by God and above the law. Thus religious and constitutional issues became completely interwoven as the Stuart kings made a habit of overriding the law of the land and ruling without Parliament.
It was really only around the time of Salisbury’s death in 1612 that James’s autocratic tendencies came more and more to the fore and his struggle to extend his power at the expense of Parliamentary liberties began in earnest. There had been some acrimonious skirmishes earlier in the reign: James was angered and amazed by Parliament’s refusal in 1607 to give Scotsmen the full rights of Englishmen or to agree to freedom of trade between the two countries. He was affronted when the Commons told him in no uncertain terms that his insufficiently Protestant foreign policy and his peace with Spain dismayed them, a peace made more suspect by his wife Anne of Denmark’s known Catholicism. James’s attempt to interfere in the election in Buckinghamshire of a felon named Shirley on the ground that all privileges derived from the king was successfully resisted. The Commons sent him such a vehement and furious petition insisting that its ancient liberties such as the right to free election had nothing to do with the royal power and were the longstanding birthright of the English people that he backed off. Under Elizabeth the Commons would never have dared address the monarch in this fashion, but James’s being a foreigner gave it a chance to assert itself, and indeed at first it attributed his behaviour to his ignorance of the way the country worked.
But seven years into his reign the king was no longer so foreign and he was much less timorous. By 1610 he had had enough of Parliament’s hectoring him, and was determined to raise his income. Following a decision in the courts that it was legal for the king to change the rates of customs charges without reference to Parliament, James took the opportunity to issue a whole new slew of taxes on his own authority. And when there was an outcry from the Commons he simply closed Parliament down. It would become the pattern in the reigns of both James and his son Charles to live by raising money outside Parliament so as not to have to deal with the Commons. In 1614 James tried to manage it through what were called ‘Undertakers’, MPs who would attempt to influence votes on the king’s behalf, but this ‘Addled Parliament’ was so enraged by the Undertakers and recalcitrant in its attitudes that he dissolved it after three weeks. For most of the next eleven years he ruled without Parliament.
Nevertheless, the king could not rule without money. At first he resorted to bribing gentlemen to become baronets if they gave him a thousand pounds; if they paid 10,000 pounds they could become lords. But his extravagant lifestyle forced him into more desperate courses. When the Spanish ambassador Gondomar dangled the prospect of a six-figure marriage dowry if James’s second son Charles married a Spanish infanta, the king became increasingly fixated on the thought of the great dowry which would get him the income to enable him never to call Parliament again–and he grew obsessed with developing a foreign policy to please Spain. The death of his elder son, the talented, deeply Protestant and popular Prince Henry, in the same year that Salisbury died, removed a last restraining influence on the king, for the new Prince of Wales, Prince Charles, was shy and retiring, and spoke with a stammer. Disregarding the fervent anti-Spanish feeling in England, James allowed Gondomar to become one of his most influential advisers.
For all his pomposity, James was also frivolous and rather lazy. He preferred to spend most of his time hunting and, after Salisbury’s death, left government business in the hands of a stream of inappropriate favourites like Robert Ker, Viscount Rochester. Ker was a handsome aristocrat chosen like all James’s favourites for his looks rather than his grasp of English foreign policy. Leading a hermetically sealed existence at the court, the Earl of Somerset (as he became in 1613) saw nothing wrong with the growth of Spanish power at court and in fact encouraged it. Somerset and his notorious wife Frances soon involved James in scandal when they were both tried in the House of Lords for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Though both were found guilty and condemned to death, even greater odium was incurred when the king used his royal powers to pardon and free them.
The sense that English standards were being unacceptably lowered and corrupted was reinforced when in 1616 the lord chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas, Sir Edward Coke, was dismissed for trying to prevent the king from interfering in law cases. According to James, divine right entitled him to suspend the law when it suited him. He was backed up by his lord chancellor, the ambitious Sir Francis Bacon, who believed that judges should be the supporters of the royal prerogative or will. But Coke, who was immensely influential among lawyers and MPs both in his lifetime and after, had arrived at the conclusion from his study of jurisprudence that even the king should be subject to the common law.
The last nail in the coffin of James’s reputation was the execution in 1618 of the Elizabethan hero Sir Walter Raleigh on trumped-up charges relating to the Main Plot of fifteen years before. The real reason Raleigh, the last relic of the golden years of Elizabethan England, was executed was to please Spain. To quench James’s thirst for gold Raleigh had been released from the Tower to search for the treasure said to be at the bottom of a lake in the fabled land of El Dorado, somewhere in Guiana, and the old Elizabethan had been unable to resist burning a Spanish settlement that was blocking his route. It was now evident that the king would do anything to placate the Spanish. English policy seemed to be in the hands of the Spanish ambassador.
How harmful this was was thrown into relief at the outset of the Thirty Years War, which began in 1618. James’s son-in-law Frederick, the Elector Palatine of the Rhine in Germany and a notable Protestant, was offered the crown of Protestant Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic) in place of the Catholic Habsburg overlord the emperor Ferdinand II. At the battle of the White Mountain in 1620 Frederick and the Bohemians were defeated, and with the Spanish having invaded the Palatinate, he and James’s daughter Elizabeth now found themselves without a home. Their plight aroused enormous popular interest in England. By 1622 the Commons was formally petitioning for war with Spain, for a Protestant marriage to be arranged for Prince Charles, and for further penal laws to be imposed on Catholics. In spite of all these straws in the wind, James remained so anxious to ally himself with wealthy Spain and arrange the ever tantalizing Spanish marriage for which he had sacrificed Raleigh that he continued to negotiate with Gondomar. He believed that only by such means could the Spanish be persuaded to withdraw from the Palatinate and restore Frederick to his throne.
Meanwhile accurate rumours began to circulate that the price to be paid for the Spanish infanta was the conversion of England by the back door: the conditions laid down by Spain were that the marriage was to be no hole-and-corner affair. It had to have the approval of Parliament, and the penal laws against Catholics had to have been suspended for three years before it could take place. All the children of the marriage were to be brought up as Catholics, and their Catholicism would not interfere with their right to the throne.
Public feeling deepened against the king with the rise of his new favourite, the vain and frivolous Duke of Buckingham, whose notoriety eclipsed even that of the Somersets and whose willingness to accept bribes became a byword. By the end of James’s reign the all-controlling Buckingham seemed to be the real ruler of England, not least because he was coming to have just as great an influence over the future king Charles I as over his father. Undeterred by the popular hostility to the Spanish marriage, in 1623 Buckingham and Charles set off in disguise on a madcap romantic adventure to speed up negotiations which had been hovering in the balance for eight years and bring back the Spanish infanta. But neither the glamorous Buckingham nor the small, nervous Charles had any success in Madrid. There were just more delays while the stiff Spanish court made it clear that it was displeased by the lack of formality of the young Stuart and his friend and laid down further conditions for the Catholic education of the royal children and the composition of the infanta’s personal household: a bishop and no fewer than twenty priests were to be constantly in attendance.
In the end the marriage came to nothing, owing to the predicament of Charles’s sister Elizabeth (known as the Winter Queen after her brief seasonal reign in Bohemia). Although James clearly could not quite bring himself to sacrifice the Spanish marriage for his daughter’s happiness, his son Charles could. When the Prince of Wales finally asked point-blank whether Spain would fight the emperor Ferdinand to restore the Palatinate, and was given the answer no, Charles lost his temper. To the great relief of the English public he sailed home without the infanta, and now that diplomacy had failed was furiously determined on war to save his sister.
The House of Commons, which had been dreading the Spanish match for years, fearing that it would spell the end to Protestantism both in England and abroad, delightedly voted supplies. An alliance against Spain was made with France, for Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII’s chief adviser, had ambitions to see his country advance at the expense of the Habsburg influence in Spain and Austria. Instead of the infanta the Prince of Wales was engaged to Henrietta Maria, the French king’s sister, who like the king was small, but gay and spirited.
Nevertheless, the attempts to send help to the Palatinate in 1624 were unsuccessful. The expedition did not go well, even with French help under the leadership of the German soldier of fortune Count Mansfeld. It was poorly prepared, without proper quarter mastering, so that food supplies and clothing were inadequate and thousands of soldiers died without even fighting. Its failure seemed of a piece with the general hopelessness of the administration and with its poor calibre, given that government positions were secured by bribes to Buckingham. The Commons longed to call the gorgeous favourite before them to account for his actions, but he was untouchable.
Instead James I’s reign drew to an end with further quarrels: the Commons once more demanded a check to the monopoly system, which in the licensing of public houses was becoming a serious source of income for royal courtiers. The Commons also impeached the lord chancellor Sir Francis Bacon for taking bribes. Bacon admitted the offences, resigned and was imprisoned, only to be released by James–who, whatever his failings as a king, was kind to his friends. The king died in March 1625, leaving the Commons determined to remove Buckingham from power.
Not all was gloom, though, for the new king. The crown might be beleaguered in Parliament but by the beginning of Charles I’s reign English rule extended firmly over lands which had been mere spaces on Elizabethan maps. And for the first time, under the rule of Charles Blount, Ireland had a peace that held, aided by a series of strategically sited forts from Sligo Bay in the north-west to Carrick Fergus on Belfast Loch. Blount, who was rewarded with the title Earl of Mountjoy, took over from Essex as lord deputy in Ireland in 1600 and, once Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone and Hugh O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnell had been forced to seek refuge in France–in what is known as the Flight of the Earls–the real subjugation of Ireland began. In 1610 Tyrone’s lands were divided among mainly Scots Presbyterian settlers as a Protestant garrison in what is called the Ulster Plantation, confirming Mountjoy’s thoroughgoing conquest of the country. They were given the fertile eastern parts, while the barren and wild north-west was all that was allowed to the native inhabitants. The new settlers were bitterly resented by the old Irish and the Norman Irish; relations between the new Ulstermen and the old would be the source of much trouble right down to the present day.
Elizabeth I would have known about the East India Company now flourishing on the west coast of India because, like the trading stations on the west coast of Africa in Gambia and Sierra Leone, it had been founded in her reign. In 1600 the Company had set out to take a share in the spice trade in the East Indies or Malay Archipelago. The Dutch had arrived five years earlier and were the area’s dominant presence, having seized most of the old Portuguese settlements as part of their war with Spain, so the English chose to concentrate on the mainland of India. Thanks to the good relations achieved by the diplomat Sir Thomas Rowe with the Moghal emperor, who ruled most of India by 1612, the East India Company had concessions in southern India at Surat and Madras and was setting up factories (the seventeenth-century term for trading posts). Such small beginnings were the starting point for the British Empire in India.
But the most striking developments of all in James’s reign were the English settlements planted in America after the disappointments of Raleigh’s colony at Roanoke in Virginia. Urged on by the popularizing writings of Richard Hakluyt, especially his book relating Elizabethan voyages of discovery, Principal Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, England woke up to the possibilities of the New World, which was already resounding to Spanish, French and Dutch accents. Most of the English settlers in the first part of the seventeenth century were Puritans, who founded the group of colonies several hundred miles north of Virginia known collectively as New England, where they could worship after their own fashion.
A group of Separatists from Scrooby in Nottinghamshire began the settlement of New England when they set sail in the Mayflower and founded Plymouth colony in 1620. In the decade preceding the Civil War, perhaps as many as 5,000 Englishmen and women a year emigrated to Plymouth’s neighbouring colony of Massachusetts, established in 1629 by a group of Puritan lawyers led by John Winthrop as a reaction against the increasingly ferocious measures taken by Charles I and Archbishop Laud to wipe Puritan practice from the face of England. Other colonies along the eastern seaboard followed during Charles’s reign, including Vermont, Connecticut and Rhode Island. The penalties against Catholics inspired Lord Baltimore to establish the Catholic colony of Maryland in 1632 just north of Virginia, named in honour of Charles I’s wife Queen Henrietta Maria. While the northerners depended on exporting fish and skins for their livelihood, the southerners soon depended on importing African slaves from the English traders on the west coast to work their large tobacco and cotton plantations, since like the Spanish they believed their European constitutions prevented them from labouring in the humid heat.
A Virginian ship washed up on an island began the settlement of the Bermudas in 1609 and many islands in the Caribbean followed. There too the English settlers began to import African slaves to work their plantations. Since the ancient Greeks, honey had been used for sweetening, but the discovery of sugar cane and its superior taste resulted in the Caribbean specializing in cultivating it. The slave trade begun by Jack Hawkins developed into a longstanding and degrading institution. Manufactures from England such as textiles were sold to west Africa in exchange for slaves, who were then transported in the dangerously unhealthy confines of slave ships to the West Indies and the southern colonies such as Virginia. To pay for the slaves sugar, cotton and tobacco were sent back to England’s most important ports, Bristol and Liverpool. Many respectable English merchant families made their fortunes in this convenient triangular trade.
But though all these developments were changing the lives of the English–so that by the end of the century Englishwomen in the most obscure parts of the country could sweeten their new drink, tea, with West Indian sugar while their husbands and brothers smoked pipes of American tobacco–the new king had immediate problems close at hand. Though Charles I disliked Parliament as much as his father had done, he was at its mercy, for he needed supplies to pay for the continuing war against Spain.