Pauline Croft. King James. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. vii + 214 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-333-61395-5.
Reviewed by Arthur Williamson (California State University-Sacramento)
Published on H-Albion (January, 2004)
James VI and I: Visions and Revisions
James VI and I: Visions and Revisions
During the summer of 1583 Scotland's reforming government was overthrown and replaced with a more conservative Protestant regime dominated by the earl of Arran. Episcopal and authoritarian, the new order would be enthusiastically endorsed by the young James VI. In the months ahead leaders of the previous government and eventually many of their supporters--among them such notables as Andrew Melville, Robert Pont, Hume of Godscroft, and the earl of Angus--fled over the border into England.
The new order's leading cleric, Patrick Adamson (now archbishop of St. Andrews) demanded to know why in the world these people had left for Elizabeth's England. She was no friend of reform. Indeed, she was a "rare auditrix of the preaching and except ... few dayes, heares no sermons." King James heard them daily, twice on Sunday. If they were troubled by episcopacy and ceremonies, they should certainly find England and her queen troubling in the extreme.
The minister James Carmichael responded for the exiles. It really did not matter how many sermons the queen attended, she and her government were the hope of the Protestant world, "on whome all the rest of the reformed princes have their eyes fixed to follow as a patrone or rather as a chiftane." Accordingly, here too lay the refuge for persecuted saints everywhere, and not least Scotland's radical emigres.[1]
If in fact Elizabeth's death was long awaited and James's accession greeted with enormous expectations, his rule proved a disappointment, and by the end of his long reign the king found himself once again overshadowed by his predecessor. And so he has largely remained until the late-twentieth century. Revisionist historians have now found James a far more sympathetic figure. In an age increasingly suspect of reform and fearful of most ideology, James's concerns--for authority, stability, inclusive compromise (though not toleration), his efforts ostensibly to lead Europe beyond catastrophic confessional conflict--have all acquired new cogency. Historians like Jenny Wormald, Michael Lynch, W. B. Patterson, and Conrad Russell have stressed these perspectives, emphasizing the success of his rule and the worthiness of his aspirations. Even the king's unsavory career as a demonologist and witch-hunter has assumed a new cast. Stampeded by a "witch-haunted kirk," it is now claimed, James's better nature began to show itself with clerical decline during his last years in Scotland and then grew into a healthy skepticism in England.
Pauline Croft now enters into this context with a splendid new study of King James. Compact, elegant, accessible, Croft's book will doubtless serve as the standard introduction to Jacobean Britain for many years to come. In it she seeks to synthesize the revisionist findings. But she also seeks to do more. She has absorbed the insights of revisionism and yet tries to see beyond them. She undertakes not simply to rehabilitate James against very long-standing criticisms, but to look with fresh eyes at the deep and enduring problems of his reign. The result is at once refreshing and powerful.
The reign's problems are certainly prominent. The king's fiscal irresponsibility, his "Achilles heel" (p. 42), dogged his rule so profoundly and continuously that it shaped an extraordinary range of policy decisions. Among the more arresting ones concerned the constantly receding mirage of a gigantic Spanish dowry that would somehow fix everything. The expenses of court patronage were steep and highly visible. Throughout his life James formed close emotional attachments with favorites for whom he would sacrifice almost anything, seemingly even the realm itself. A pattern emerged with Esme Stewart in 1579, running to Huntly a decade later to Robert Carr in 1607 to George Villiers in 1614. Hugely expensive, both politically and financially, each of these individuals comprised a serious threat to the dynasty and in several instances directly to the country.
Even without favorites and their multifaceted costs, James's relations with parliament rapidly turned poisonous--despite the best efforts of his quite able ministers who recognized the institution's importance. It forced the king to turn to other revenue sources (including the elusive dowery), and created tensions with the nation as a whole--which, Croft indicates, had much more of a public sense than revisionism typically allows. Croft is surely right when she suggests that the king created a political legacy that would culminate in 1641.
Yet it would be his legacy within the church that more than anything laid the foundations for the calamity that eventually engulfed his son and successor. Though always socially conservative, James initially shared with so many of his countrymen the apocalyptic vision of history that had underwritten the Reformation. That vision faded, to be supplanted in the late years of the reign with a program of counter-reform that proved enduringly destabilizing. Croft's discussion of the last and its continuing significance is compelling.
No dimension of revisionism has emerged with greater shrillness than the claims of nationalism. The quest for authority comprises but the other side of the obsession with transcendent identity and authenticity. As civic values decline in our own times, so too has interest in the conflicts from which they arose. Instead, "internal imperialism" has become a growth industry. If revisionism has generally enhanced James's reputation, revisionist readings of the plantations in the Western Isles and Ireland have not. Accordingly Croft incorporates the post-colonialist preoccupations of Irish nationalist historians like N. P. Canny and Brendan Bradshaw, and details the conquest, settlement, and exploitation of Ireland. Yet, here again, Croft is no simple revisionist, no mere practitioner of fashionable victims's history. If the plantation of Ireland created long-term problems that surfaced disastrously with late-nineteenth-century nationalism, the Jacobean involvement in Ireland also led to significant achievement. By the end of the reign, Ireland was "more prosperous than it had been in centuries" (p. 152), more urban than ever. Reformers and Counter-Reformers alike, Croft notes, had nothing but contempt for "barbarous" Irish customs. Neither would they have the least sympathy for the nation's "soul" (if they could even have understood the phrase). But the Reformers, anticipating their Enlightenment successors, expected "civility" to arise from commerce rather than conquest or coerced conversion. The contrast with the Hapsburg conquest of Bohemia could hardly be more arresting.
Croft is at her best when James was at his best, during the early years of his rule from London. To be sure, James's fiscal objectives immediately confronted parliament and common lawyers with what they perceived as constitutional issues of the gravest importance. Yet at the same time the king benefitted from exceptionally able servants, most notably the Englishman Robert Cecil, subsequently first earl of Salisbury, and the Scot George Home, first earl of Dunbar. British governance would never be more competent and effective. Further, the regime enjoyed credibility on both sides of the border from the promise of Prince Henry, probably the only genuinely popular Stuart at any point in the seventeenth century.
Even James's British project possessed more plausibility than is sometimes imagined. Croft recognizes the very real anti-Scottish feeling in England--sentiments that deepened with the king's maladroit (and useless) patronizing of Scots favorites--yet she deftly avoids the characteristic revisionist epithet of racism.[2] As she points out, both James's court and prince Henry's promoted a "Scoto-Britannic" outlook (pp. 140-141). In fact British perspectives reached further than Croft realizes. Tristan Marshall has persuasively argued that if the king's project failed in parliament, it nevertheless stimulated British consciousness within English popular literature and popular opinion. Within a few years of James's assumption of the southern crown, Steve Murdoch has shown, military experience on the continent (and the prospect of British leadership in Europe) fostered wide-reaching British commitment within Scotland. Even so, competing notions of empire and conflicting visions of Britain were available in 1603 and informed the AngloScottish mental world.[3] Croft's observations turn out to be altogether well founded.
With the failure of Great Contract, the decline of parliamentary government, followed by the deaths of Dunbar, Salisbury, and Henry (1611-12), Croft argues, the first and most successful period of the king's British rule drew to a close. Whether those years actually "sparkled" might be debated (p. 86), but that they were the dynasty's best chance remains unassailable. With the triumvirate of James, Charles, and Buckingham, we have crossed into another landscape.
Perhaps no aspect of James's rule has proven more perplexing, then and now, than his bizarre and conflicted foreign policies. And here is one of the very few places where Croft missteps. On the one hand she claims that the king "was first and foremost an agile, practical politician rather than a theorist" (p. 131). Yet she also asserts that, again with external affairs, he "was moralistic rather than pragmatic" (p. 105). In fact James's "dynastic approach"--with its suffocating moralism and legalism--was at best absurd and after 1618 catastrophic. How could the man be so naive? It can be little wonder that contemporaries on both sides of the confessional divide either misread him or dismissed him. Or, worse still, they simply manipulated him. Croft is probably right that we should not take at literal face value Gondomar's letters home to Philip III in which he claimed to control James. Yet the fact remains that the Hapsburgs achieved nearly all of their major objectives in Britain.
Looked at another way, how could James continuously portray himself as a latter-day Constantine, a latter-day Augustus, and even a latter-day Julius Caesar and still be the great, rise-above-it peace-maker? The answer surely lies in James's obsession with legitimacy, and outstandingly his own. At least from the 1590s onward the king constantly speaks of the claims of blood and its authority, of the natural order and its directives, of grace and its prescriptions. People needed to obey him not because he was James Stuart and could raise so many thousands of men, but because he was king by right and inheritance. These preoccupations made sense in a Scotland that had experienced two major revolutions (and any number of coups d'etat), where revolutionary theory and even republicanism could seem persuasive. They made sense in efforts to anchor his claim to the English crown. But they made no sense whatever in the larger diplomatic world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. This would be a world in which James postured but hardly acted.
Virtually all his writings bend in this direction, and not least the notorious Daemonologie (1597). James was a demonologist and took witchcraft seriously, not because he had been terrified by Calvinist clergy, but because demons fit neatly into his severely legitimiste intellectualism, an intellectualism that was part and parcel with his contemporaneous writings, The True Lawe of Free Monarchies (1598) and the Basilikon Doron (1599). Jonathan Pearl has shown that in contemporaneous France demonology was all but exclusively a Catholic phenomenon, promoting traditionalist views of hierarchy, authority, and sacramentalism at the expense of reform. So too in Scotland, conservatives and Catholics--Erskine of Dun, Huntly, and the king--rather than militant reformers led the charge against witchcraft.[4] Croft finds herself less at home with sixteenth-century Scottish politics and cultural life, and her assessment of Scottish revisionism inevitably becomes less shrewd and sure-footed.
As Croft recognizes, James's appalling immobility did as much as anything to discredit his rule with contemporaries. Henry's promise as a Protestant leader made him popular. Henri IV fascinated Britons (and not least the prince), despite his conversion, precisely because he confronted the Hapsburgs and the Counter-Reformation. For just these reasons Elizabeth, however severe her shortcomings, cast a shadow from which James did not ultimately escape. In the end James Carmichael got it right.
Notes
[1]. A. H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979), pp. 43, 160 n. 147.
[2]. E.g., Conrad Russell, The Crisis of Parliaments: English History, 1509-1660 (New York, 1971, and frequently thereafter), pp. 258-259.
[3]. T. Marshall, Theatre and Empire: Great Britain on the London Stages under James VI and I (Manchester, 2000); S. Murdoch and A. Mackillop, eds., Fighting for Identity: Scottish Military Experience, c.1550-1900 (Leiden, 2002), esp. pp. xiii-xx, 3-31; P. J. McGinnis and A. H. Williamson, eds., The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft's De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot, 2002), esp. pp. 1-53; and P. J. McGinnis and A. H. Williamson, eds., George Buchanan The Political Poetry (Edinburgh, 2000), introduction.
[4]. J. L. Pearl, The Crime of Crimes: Demonology and Politics in France, 1560-1620 (Waterloo, Canada, 1999); Julian Goodare, "The Aberdeenshire Witchcraft Panic of 1597," Northern Scotland 21 (2001): pp. 17-37; and Goodare, "The Framework for Scottish Witch-Hunting in the 1590s," Scottish Historical Review 81 (2002): pp. 240-50, esp. 248.
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Citation:
Arthur Williamson. Review of Croft, Pauline, King James.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8681
Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.