← Not Just the Tudors
Not Just the Tudors
Succession 1625: James I to Charles I
00:49:03
400 years ago James VI & I died and his son Charles I inherited a throne mired in political turmoil and social unrest.
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
- [00:32]
Professor Clare Jackson
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- [01:43]
Paige
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- [02:17]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. March 2025 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of King James VI and first at his Tybalt's estate in Hertfordshire. Crowned the King of Scotland at 13 months old in 1567 and succeeding Elizabeth I to the throne of England in 1603, James had sought to enact into reality his dream of a united kingdom. His death was an event steeped in controversy. It saw the self fashioned King of Great Britain leave behind three disparate kingdoms whose only other unifying factor was religious division. On James death in 1625, his son Charles I inherited a crown beset by political dissent and social unrest. And as you all know, these were conflicts the autocratic monarch would only make worse. To think about that liminal moment, the moment of transition from one king to another, I'm delighted to welcome back to the podcast Professor Clare Jackson, Honorary professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cambridge and Walter Grant Scott Fellow in History at Trinity Hall. An expert in Tudor, Stuart and George and Britain, Professor Jackson's remarkable book Devil England Under Siege, 1588-1688 won the prestigious Wolfson History Prize. In 2022, she returns with a dazzling new work, the Mirror of Great Britain, A Life of King James VI and First, which will be published later this year. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and you are listening to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Professor Jackson, welcome back to the podcast.
- [04:38]
Professor Clare Jackson
Thank you very much for having me.
- [04:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So I wondered if we could start by thinking about this idea of James's reign, pursuing this concept of a unified Britain. How was his reign defined by that idea? Was it indeed?
- [04:56]
Professor Clare Jackson
I think James thought it might be. At the beginning to James it made complete sense. It was God's divine will that he had become the strongest genealogical hereditary heir to succeed Elizabeth. It seemed to make obvious providential as well as natural sense that these to mutually warring for a long time, very hostile powers to one another, England and Scotland that were nevertheless within the same territorial island. Both were Protestant, both had similar sorts of parliamentary government, both spoke a language that was comprehensible to the other. Even if Scots and English were different, it just made sense to James that he was now succeeding to the English throne as well as the crown of Ireland. He also had at the time of his accession, two sons and a daughter. And it would just be in everybody's interests and logical for the new state to be founded out of his dynastic achievement. And that's very similar to the ways in which other early modern dynasties expanded their territorial kingdoms through dynastic consolidation. So yes, James thought that this would be both his achievement in Political terms, but also the sort of natural outcome of his dynastic accession to Elizabeth's crown.
- [06:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And how did other people feel about that idea?
- [06:13]
Professor Clare Jackson
Not as keenly engaged as James, I think, expected. James was very good at imaginatively investing the idea of British union with practical sort of content, through proclamations, through imagery. The union. Jack Flagg is Jack after James, through coinage, through iconography. And yet it did gain the sort of traction, in a way. The English had their crisis on Elizabeth's death for at least a decade, if not longer. A lot of people had expected that England would get involved in some awful sort of long running war of dynastic succession. Elizabeth I had made it very clear that discussion of her successor was not to be tolerated. Indeed, it was a capital crime. So there was real apprehension that on the moment of Elizabeth's death, without the succession confirmed, that England would descend into some sort of awful internal fighting with continental involvement. That doesn't happen for various reasons. Other claimants just don't manage to make their claims able to trump James's. James engages in covert correspondence with some of Elizabeth's close successors. And actually Elizabeth's death is met with remarkable stability in that James is immediately proclaimed King of England and Ireland and journeys south, arriving in London after Elizabeth's funeral. And the most noteworthy aspect of all of that transition period was quietness and the sort of near universal sort of approbation as James as the next monarch. So in a way, the English sort of had no crisis. Now they said, well, that was our potential crisis, but it's been solved and now we can just take up where we left off. Unusually for a multiple monarchy as well, the seat of government moved from Edinburgh to London. Whereas James now saw this as the opportunity to achieve something the English were not particularly interested. And the more that James peddled this rhetoric, the more they saw danger and threat.
- [08:04]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So even the idea of a new name, Great Britain, is implicitly involved. The eradication of England, did that invalidate English laws?
- [08:14]
Professor Clare Jackson
The more James talked about his right to be king, he used often a language of conquest that landed kind of badly with English common lawyers who preferred to think much more abstractly about their law deriving from time immemorial. So I mean, sometimes I think about the nearest parallel might be James's Bible project, because this was an idea to create a new translation of the Bible was something that actually had been discussed in the General assembly in Scotland in the early years of the 17th century. James had said, that's a great idea. But not much more had happened. Same idea was mooted at the Hampton Court Conference that James convened in 1604 in England. And then it happened. You know, there were sort of companies that were set up, different cleric were assigned different parts of supervision of this project. It wasn't overnight. It was a phenomenal philological, scriptural, sort of literary effort. But the King James Bible was published in 1611 as a result of a major sort of collaborative operation. And I think James thought something very similar would happen with Union, that there would be commissions set up to look at how to bring the two laws of the country into closer alignment. There would be commissions to look at the national churches, there'd be commissions. And yet everywhere that he looked on the Union project, there was sort of resistance as well as a marked lack of enthusiasm.
- [09:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So was it important for James to develop a kind of English identity alongside his Scottish one?
- [09:35]
Professor Clare Jackson
It probably was, although I think that happened sort of less deliberately. I mean, I think by the end of it, the king that we think of is James I did have a clear sort of English identity, but I don't think it was anything that James would have embraced at the beginning. What he wanted to do was make his subjects begin to think of themselves as British. The more that they thought of themselves less as Scottish and English, the more likely they would be to forget this sort of past history of conflict and wars, and the more that this would be part of his rhetoric of British union. And, as I say, it was a remarkably positive view that he put forward. It wasn't just all about division being bad, it was the positive gain aims for national security by a much bigger United Kingdom. And there were remarkably fertile ideas about having different seats of government, having an itinerant court, maybe having different parts of the government in York or, you know, the sorts of things actually we're quite familiar with now to try and make London less dominant. But again, the English really didn't see the need to upset the way that they had governed for centuries. And if one also thinks about sort of just sometimes events, it's not that long after James accession that the Gunpowder Plot is discovered in November 1605, and his attention thereafter becomes necessarily focused on the Catholic threat and the need to devise ways of securing the loyalty of English Catholics as well.
- [10:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what's the relationship between the English insistence on their liberties and James rhetoric around the divine right of kings?
- [11:10]
Professor Clare Jackson
It's a good question. And for historians who are looking for some sort of high road to civil war to understand, you know, why Charles I ended up being executed on a scaffold outside the banqueting house, they would begin to look and say, well, this is guaranteed to end in disaster. You've got a monarch here who's seen as one of Europe's preeminent theorists of the divine right of kings. So you've got a Parliament very concerned to assert subjects liberties. And surely there's a sort of fundamental clash between these two principles. And actually James is long reign. I mean, it's a very long series of two reigns, if you include a Scottish reign. But even his long reign in England is actually remarkable success in navigating those two languages. It's not always harmonious. There are certain liberties that MPs particularly claim through Parliament that James denies are their liberties. But if one looks at his main works of political theory, there's Basilicon Doron, that he wrote for his eldest son as a sort of manual of advice for Prince Henry, who died later in 1612. Or there's the True Law of Free Monarchies. Both of these works were written in the 1590s in Scotland. But the subtitle of the True Law of Free Monarchies is very much about the mutual and reciprocal duty between a king and his free subjects. So James never denies these liberties at all. And he is also remarkably good at knowing when to compromise, when to row back, perhaps in contrast to his son, who often wishes to sort of push a particular point if monarchical prerogative comes into conflict with subjects liberty.
- [12:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And before we move on to think about this transition moment of 1625, one last question on James alone, which is how would you characterise his success as a leader?
- [12:50]
Professor Clare Jackson
In a way, picking up where we were just talking about a moment ago, bringing together a remarkably different set of expectations. I mean, I think particularly in religion, the Reformation is not completed in many eyes. James not only taking on a multiple monarchy of Scotland, England and Ireland, but even within England there is a vast spectrum of religious belief and preferences among his subject. There are the hotter sorts of Protestants, the more Puritan inclined, who want to sort of progress the Reformation, who look to the Presbyterian Church, Presbyterian support in Scotland and think this is more of the kind of preaching ministry. We want to sort of begin to dismantle the residual hierarchy into the episcopal structure. There are clearly also sort of Episcopalians within the Church of England as well, who see themselves very much as an arm of the monarchy. And actually, James likes the sort of much more entrenched Episcopalian structure he finds in England. He's fought very hard to try and restore bishops to some of their pre Reformation dignity and Standing, but often against a lot of opposition. And then there are also still adherents of the old faiths, Catholics who are more or less overt in their religious preferences. Some of them will outwardly conform and become what we now refer to as church papists. But others see that really this is the last chance for England to rejoin the Catholic fold. And they anticipate much more instability and much more opportunity. At the time of Elizabeth's death, they look at James as the son of Mary Queen of Scots, who at this stage is sort of regarded as an unofficial Catholic martyr. And some of the desperation that's associated with the Gunpowder Plot reflects that sense that this is really England's last chance.
- [14:28]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So where does James succeed in this?
- [14:31]
Professor Clare Jackson
Well, you know, England is at peace under his reign. Domestically, later, James is often sort of tagged as being the sort of Rex Pacificus. It's a motto that comes later in his reign. And in some ways it just reflects the poverty of the English state that it's unable to sort of wage large scale warfare. But you know, under James, England does not suffer any major sort of domestic rebellion. There's a lot of pressure for James to take a decisive and launch some large scale military intervention in the latter stages of his reign, which he resists. As Europe descends into large scale confessional warfare, James stays on the sidelines of that. There are sort of fantastic achievements like the King James Bible in terms of being a godly learned king. I don't think Britain has had any a more scholarly king in its history.
- [15:23]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's fascinating. So he died on 27 March 1625. Of what did he die? And why was there a suggestion of foul play surrounding his death?
- [15:35]
Professor Clare Jackson
Okay, so James is 58 at the time of his death. He had suffered periods of illness previously, most notably in 1619, so this wasn't entirely unexpected. But at the time of his death, he was suffering a sort of malaria like fever, which was clearly meant rendering him indisposed for periods. But he had always sort of recovered, so there was shock when this one proved fatal. He also at the same time seemed to suffer a stroke. It's also worth pointing out that he wasn't necessarily a very well man throughout his life. I mean, we don't have the sophisticated medical diagnostic techniques now. These weren't available in the 17th century and there's been a lot of attempts retrospectively to look at some of James's disabilities. But he was also remarkably sort of physically robust when this did prove fatal, this fever. And that was a shock.
- [16:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So when did the cause of James death become a source of speculation or foul play even.
- [16:32]
Professor Clare Jackson
It became controversial probably about 12 months afterwards, at least in the public mind. The version that was given to the outside world was that His Majesty had been unwell, but he had been surrounded by physicians, but eventually he'd been sort of called to God. This wasn't a moment of crisis. His son, Prince Charles is now 24. His succession is not remotely contested. There is no panic. And Charles himself oversees a hugely elaborate funeral for his father at a time when English Crown finances is in a pretty paltry way. He spends huge amounts honouring his father, demanding large amounts of funeral cloth, decking out Denmark House and Westminster Abbey and taking a role as the chief mourner. So usually a successor monarch would, would stay out of sight at royal funerals, but Charles is very prominent. About a year later there is a work published on the continent by a Scots born medic who begins to allege foul play, that James's death might not have been all it seemed. And what rendered it particularly suspicious was the death of another prominent Scots noble three weeks earlier, Marquis of Hamilton. And Hamilton had recently fallen out with George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who is James last and most powerful male favourite. There are allegations of foul play around Hamilton's death and then rumours begin to surface that actually Buckingham, who had become very close to James heir Charles, had actually hastened the old King's death because it was standing in the way of a much more bellicose, aggressive foreign policy. So actually, through this book called the Forerunner of Revenge, one gets this tale not of a serene, peaceful death at all at Tybalt, but actually various doctors disagreeing with one another about appropriate treatments. But then Buckingham and his very ambitious mother recently sort of depicted in Mary and George administering their own medical regime to James whenever the doctors were at dinner. James himself apparently resisting this, saying, you're trying to poison me. And all sorts of allegations of foul play begin to emerge and they gain ground.
- [18:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, and they don't go away. Even in the 1640s, these allegations that Charles, even if he wasn't directly involved in it, had somehow been complicit in his father's death by not restraining Buckingham, they still seem to linger in a very damaging way. And I suppose the root of that is really very much as you've indicated, this antipathy, this distrust towards Buckingham that seems to be at the heart of the matter.
- [19:02]
Professor Clare Jackson
Buckingham has by 1625, but before that, you know, sort of monopolized access around James. He has also been phenomenally wrecked Nicholas in agreeing with Charles to go on this sort of unprecedented, very foolhardy six month voyage to Spain in 1623, ostensibly to woo the Infanta and to try and progress James's foreign policy on that front. That is all a massive fiasco. Buckingham and Charles find themselves outmanoeuvred on every front by the Spanish court and eventually leave six months later without the Infanta, which is sort of very popular when Charles returns home without a Spanish wife. But they are both sort of seething with revenge at the, the humiliation that they feel that they endured. They come back sort of fired with a desire now to try and fight the Spanish. And this is all against a context of a Europe that is increasingly divided between Catholic and Protestant forces. And at the center of it is James's other child. His daughter, Princess Elizabeth, who's older than Charles, had married the Palatine Elector Frederick V. They had moved to Heidelberg and then in 1618, Frederick had unwisely accepted an invitation from the Bohemians to become King of Bohemia as a Protestant monarch. Immediately. Well, not immediately, but had one winter, so he's often described as the Winter King, very quickly been ejected from that office and they'd become itinerant exiles. They couldn't go back to the Palatinate, that had now been invaded by Catholic forces as well. There's huge pressure on James in the latter part of his reign to mount some large scale invasion of continental Europe and recover the platinate for his daughter and also triumph over the sort of Catholic Antichrist, as many people see the papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. James has stayed above all of that. But when Buckingham and Charles come back from Spain, I mean, James had in a way perhaps hoped that by marrying Charles to a Spanish princess, he would therefore be able to negotiate return and restitution of the Palatinate. So it was probably quite aspirational, but that was very much how James went about diplomacy. It fails. And Buckingham and Charles put a lot of pressure on him to mount some attack on Spain. James resists it, but in the very last months of his life, he's agreed to an expeditionary force. And actually the situation that Charles inherits is incredibly uncertain.
- [21:25]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, yes, I'd like to know more about that. What is the sort of political and the financial state of Britain that James left to Charles?
- [21:36]
Professor Clare Jackson
The financial state is really important because it's probably the main difficulty of governance that no Stuart monarch resolves until the 1690s, until William of Orange and the financial revolution. There are many attempts, one attempt to secure the great contract in 1610 that James had worked on with Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, to try and say it is no longer reasonable for the monarch to live off their own. We now have a monarch and a family and a court. We now have more than one kingdom. We need to think about Crown finance in a new way. MPs were always very resistant to that. They couldn't see why the monarch couldn't just raise their own revenue for their own private expenses. And that problem hasn't gone away. The only source of large money is Parliament, and Parliament naturally use their leverage over any Stuart monarch to say, well, redress our grievances and then we'll talk about money and actually the 1624 parliament. Ironically, James last Parliament was the first that secured a significant amount of money without much difficulty because MPs understood that this money would now be used in pursuit of a Protestant orientated sort of foreign policy Work Management Platforms ugh. Endless onboarding IT bottlenecks, admin requests but what if things were different? Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding, beautiful reports in minutes, custom workflows you can build on your own, easy to use prompt, free AI. Huh? Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use.
- [23:27]
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- [23:58]
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- [25:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Surely James himself would have recognised that, that it was nowhere near the amount that would be required and that actually Britain, if there was going to be a united force, was just not in that kind of position. It couldn't have had anything like the resources of the Holy Roman Empire in terms of armies or Spain or France.
- [25:26]
Professor Clare Jackson
But nevertheless, it had been agreed that this would fund an expeditionary force. And there were tussles between James and MPs over who would direct this expenditure. MPs were who are still determined if they were going to give money, that they would have some say over this. But all of that becomes sort of redundant when James unexpectedly dies. Foreign policy does, however, remain just as complex because having given up the idea of a Spanish wife, Buckingham and Charles have sort of instantly pivoted towards a French alliance. So by proxy, Charles has married Henrietta Maria. And whereas, at least in a way, everybody knew the stakes involved in the Spanish match, there's real unhappiness about the COVID way in which this Spanish marriage has suddenly just been presented to most English Protestants. A French Catholic isn't really that different from a Spanish Catholic. And there is real concern over what James might have negotiated away toleration for Catholic or improved conditions for Catholics. Much of that was done in secret and isn't clear. So at this point, suddenly Henrietta Maria arrives with a letter from the Pope saying, you know, part of your mission in marrying into the English monarchy is to improve the position of English Catholics.
- [26:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And that would have produced an awful lot of fear. I mean, this is the big question. And as you've alluded to already, those seeking a kind of route to civil war might draw this conclusion. But stepping back a little, to what extent do you think the problems that would emerge in Charles's reign were the result of what he inherited?
- [27:08]
Professor Clare Jackson
I don't think maybe the problems were different. I mean, we often talk about Charles I's personal rule, so he doesn't summon an English parliament between 1629 and 1640. We don't often talk about James's personal rule, but he had also not called an English Parliament for seven years. And I'm not sure to contemporaries that there's so much of a difference in terms of expectations. The difference is, I think, that James is much more realistic about positions into which he then finds himself how to navigate way out of them.
- [27:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And I wonder if there's a sort of attritional point here as well, that having dealt with James for all these years, Parliament's tolerance for being messed around is that much less when it comes to Charles. But is it also about Charles's preparation? How equipped is he for the role? How suited is he?
- [28:07]
Professor Clare Jackson
Some people thought he was very well equipped. I mean, that in a way, seen as a positive. James had made it really quite clear from an early stage in his English reign that he wasn't overly fond of London. He was actually much happier out of London, ideally at a sort of hunting lodge in Royston or Newmarket. But he would come back to London and he expected when he was needed, he would do what was required. But he wasn't going to sort of take up residence. And as he becomes older and more infirm, he spends more time away from London. So during the 1621 Parliament, as Prince of Wales, for example, Charles had been very visible in the House of Lords.
- [28:43]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And presumably at that point, Charles's reputation wasn't what it would become.
- [28:48]
Professor Clare Jackson
It gained a lot of respect. I mean, one of the difficulties for Charles is that he was born in Scotland. I mean, he was born in Dunfermline, but he was born and seemed to be not very robust. He suffered a lot of sicknesses as a child. He was seen as frail. He wasn't expected to succeed. Prince Henry was the heir for whom Basilica and Doran had been written much older. And then this is probably the biggest shock to the Stuart monarchy when Henry unexpectedly dies in 1612, aged 18. And attention shifts immediately to Charles, who has really been in the background as this. He is a stammer. He's just seen as very sort of quiet and introspective. There is actually legislation passed to allow his sister, Princess Elizabeth, and her family to succeed and for her husband to become a naturalised foreigner, should that arise. Because so many people just don't think Charles is going to make it. But actually, by his early 20s, Charles is clearly very robust, if we think about the images of the Van Dyck portraits. So there is optimism that this is a young man, now nearly in his mid-20s, who has has political experience, who also seems to get on, however, counterintuitively, very well with his father's favourite, Buckingham. Buckingham has probably also realised it's in his interests not to lose all his positions when James dies, but together they are a formidable force. They become an unpopular force. But I think the real difference is not really so much in ideas and conceptions of monarchy. On that I don't think there's much difference, really, between James and his son. I mean, James has written these manuals of political theory. He believes firmly in the divine right of kings, regards things like foreign policy as the arcana in peri, the preserve of the monarch. And one of James's most sort of animated rows with Parliament occurred in 1621, when he ripped a protestation out of the Commons journal and said that MPs had no right to discuss things like his son's marriage and foreign policy. That was. That was the reserve of the monarch. I don't think there's. I don't think there's much light between Charles and James in their conception of monarchy, but they are very different in terms of temperament. As I say, Charles has a stammer. The one thing he doesn't really like doing is talking at length. And the one thing that James does endlessly is talk. And with that talking comes sort of room to manoeuvre. People often regard him as somebody who's very skilled at saying whatever every different person wants to hear and that he will dissemble with no problem. Charles's problem is that he doesn't talk to very many people. But if he does make a commitment, he often breaks it by his actions and then becomes to be distrusted quite widely.
- [31:29]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So in 1625, Parliament refuses to grant Charles lifelong customs revenues. What did this mean and what was his response?
- [31:39]
Professor Clare Jackson
So how monarchs raise money had been a difficult point from the accession of the Stuarts onwards. On the whole, James had actually more or less gone without to try and raise money in other ways. Tonnage and poundage was a conventional customs due that was given to the monarch, but it had always been done with parliamentary consent. And in the first of all, the other backdrop to Charles's accession is that it coincides with a large outbreak of plague. Some people see that as a bad omen. But there's an attempt to sort of rush the first Parliament that meets in June 1625. And in the end, Charles isn't given tonnage and poundage for life as he expected. He's given it for a year, actually. It doesn't get renewed, but he assumes that he could carry on sort of collecting it forever. But it is just one part of the ways in which MPs begin to distrust Charles, because the more that they withhold money from Charles, the more that Charles begins to start looking for prerogative ways to raise money without Parliament's consent.
- [32:41]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you've mentioned, of course, his marriage to Henrietta Maria and the fears about Catholic revival in England. What do we know of Charles's own beliefs?
- [32:52]
Professor Clare Jackson
Again? Whereas his father had given lots of sort of insights into his religious credo throughout his life, probably the most we know about Charles and the biggest sort of PR success he had is a posthumous one. So immediately after his death, a volume entitled Icon Basiliki, which is his sort of prayers and Meditations, is published, and that has an image of Charles kneeling with a crown of Thorns, very much in imitation of Christ. And that becomes a huge sort of royalist propaganda success in the wake of the regicide, when people are very stunned by the radical direction that events have taken throughout his life, he is more. More taciturn and more closed about his religious beliefs. So again, people are often obliged to interpret them by his actions. But what he doesn't seem comfortable with is maintaining the same very broad spectrum of Protestant sort of opinion that James had kind of actively welcomed. So James, one of his first actions, had been to some of the Hampton Court Conference. To hear views from across the sort of Church of England spectrum and even a little bit beyond, we shouldn't draw too strong a contrast. This was still the era in which New England pilgrims had left England in 1620 because they really despaired about the direction of the Church of England and felt that it would never reform in the way that they wished. Charles is a firm Protestant, but it seems much more of the kind of ceremonial end of the spectrum. The tag that often gets associated in the 1630s with Charles and is for many years was one of the sort of popular causes of the Civil War subjects, was the extent to which he favoured Arminian theologians. So these were named after a prominent Dutch theologian, Arminius, but they were about theories of salvation. And Arminius had rejected Calvinist theories about predestination and had looked much more similar to older Catholic views about humans having some agency over their actions on earth. Certainly under Charles Arminian, it wasn't all about salvation, but that becomes the sort of tag to characterize the beauty of holiness and a much more ceremonial attempt to perhaps, you know, rehabilitate the Church of England. I mean, Elizabeth I have been notoriously parsimonious. Not huge amounts have been spent under. Under James's reign. So this idea of beginning to make the Church, you know, sort of appear a major force in society was. You could make a positive case for why you might want to do that, but it is inevitably controversial. And it becomes even more controversial because Charles has a close relationship with William Lord, who is very much of that ceremonialist Wing of the Church of England, who's Bishop of London, then becomes Archbishop of Canterbury.
- [35:31]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what did this more closed approach to faith, this lack of sort of discourse with the range of positions mean when it came to negotiating the religious divisions of the three kingdoms?
- [35:45]
Professor Clare Jackson
Well, on one side, one could also say this closed world was also a peaceful world. When you look at the devastation that's going on in the continent, what we now call the Thirty Years War from 1618 onwards, vast swathes of modern day Germany that were just suffered complete scorched earth policy. So, you know, when, you know, people were suffering hugely during the civil wars of the 1640s, a lot of people look back to the 1630s as this very sort of of halcyon days of peaceful prosperity. But it was sitting on a very unstable religious situation. So, you know, there was a spectrum of opinion of religious belief within England. In Ireland, Charles also had a very strong working relationship with Thomas Strafford, who was later Earl of Wentworth, who he sent there as his lord deputy. And Strafford was nothing if not thorough was the adjective often used in association with Strafford in Ireland about implementing Charles's beauty of holiness policy. That was deeply unpopular because the vast majority of Irish subjects remain Catholic. There is a very minority Church of Ireland, Protestant Church of Ireland, onto whom Wentworth tried to project this Caroline church reform. But there's also a growing and vociferous population of Protestants in the north of Ireland who are the product of Anglo Scottish plantation, who are much closer in some senses to the majority opinion in Scotland who bitterly resent this sort of ceremonialist approach. So it's often said that Strafford is the first person really to reunite all the sort of constituencies in Ireland against him. And then in Scotland there is real resistance. And that had started before Charles.
- [37:26]
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Unknown
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- [38:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How had James tried to bring the English and Scottish churches into greater conformity?
- [38:41]
Professor Clare Jackson
He admired the emphasis on preaching. James adored sermon and tried to sort of inject a lot of that into the English church. There are double the number of court sermons than they've been under Elizabeth. There's a sort of. He loves the idea of a sort of preaching ministry. At the same time, he also likes a lot of the ceremonialism of the English church and, and key sort of ceremonies such as signing the cross in baptism or kneeling to receive Communion. He tries to get these passed through the Scottish church on his one visit back to Scotland. After he leaves, he goes back to Scotland for a three month visit in 1617 and it becomes very clear that the Scots regard these as Popish, as the Scots would far rather sit round in imitation of Christ at the Last Supper for communion. They feel that bowing and kneeling is Popish. Eventually James gets those passed, but they are very unpopular through the latter part of his reign. And actually one of the things that's often said about his death is it happened just before Easter. So, you know, the fear that everyone had of whether people were going to get into trouble for not kneeling at Easter was avoided.
- [39:45]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
But Charles really seems not to realise that they should just be left well alone. And he only goes to Scotland for the first time as king in 1633, eight years after his accession. That seems too late really to show that this had been important to him.
- [40:01]
Professor Clare Jackson
But also the minute he does, he calls a parliament there. And Charles tends to treat parliaments more as tests of loyalty than as attempt. You know, opportunities for subjects to come together. He notes any forms of dissent against him, Laud goes with him. And they, they have religious ceremonies at Holyrood that fill the Scots with fear about the sort of levels of ceremonialism to the Scots. A lot of, of the way that Charles has turned out for someone who was born in Dunfermline is a sort of manifestation of all of their fears about the creep of Popery. And Laud, for his part, is shocked at the state of the Scottish church. There is no liturgy, so there's no standard way in which services are conducted. And Lord's solution really is simply just to import the English prayer book and sort of impose it on the Scots, he's not helped. There are sort of. There are bishops in Scotland, but they're pretty weak institutionally and they don't represent majority opinion. But nevertheless, when in the middle of all of this, the Scottish Prayer Book is devised, essentially a sort of copy of the English prayer book, in July 1637, there is a riot in Edinburgh. And if you want to begin to see the cause, the sort of chain of events that caused the civil wars, it is the introduction of the Scottish prayer book in July 1637.
- [41:18]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Why do you think Charles one, took so long to go to Scotland for his second coronation? So. And two, had such a sort of tinned approach to recognizing that if you oppose an English Prayer book, an English liturgy on the Scots, with their different culture, with their traditions so well established by this point with the Scottish Kirk, that that would produce a problem. I mean, we've got hindsight, but why is there no foresight here?
- [41:48]
Professor Clare Jackson
Well, I think a lot of people ask why is there no foresight on Charles at various stages of his career in terms of why he didn't go at first? It is not a priority. I mean, he never goes to Ireland. So maybe the Scots are fortunate in inverted commas that he visits at all. The early years of his reign are punctuated with disastrous foreign policy expeditions, a disastrous expedition to Cadiz, a disastrous attempt to relieve French Protestants in La Rochelle, Buckingham's assassination in 1628. I mean, there is an awful lot going on that, that Charles. And Charles had never sort of gone to Scotland, you know, in all the time that he'd been sort of Prince of Wales. So, I mean, if he actually therefore has a tin ear, then that is partly why. I mean, ironically, James had said in Basilicon Doran to his son and heir, Prince Henry, if, as I expect, you will become king of more kingdoms than just Scotland alone, make sure you visit each of those kingdoms at least every three years to hear from your subjects directly. And James has all the right theory. He then doesn't take his own advice and doesn't go back to Scotland. I mean, had he gone back to Scotland every three years, I mean, it's a counterfactual. We don't know. Had he gone to Ireland, I think things would have been very different. But he doesn't. But he also has, you know, he is also a very experienced king of Scotland, so he knows when to leave things be. He has, you know, lots of experience of working cooperatively as well as adversarially with Presbyterian ministers and clerics in Scotland. Charles has none of that. And I suppose. I mean, I don't know, all I can do is put myself into sort of maybe Charles's mind for a moment and think, what is the positive reason you might do this? And, you know, devising a liturgy might not, on the face of it, seem a bad thing to do. It is surely quite risky for your subjects. If you're a divinely ordained monarch whose prime responsibility, that you will be answerable for God at the end of your life is saving your subject's soul, then surely putting your national churches into good order is an honourable objective in itself. Not leaving your Scot subjects at the whim of. If they have a very learned, educated, dedicated, conscientious minister, then that's perfect. But what if they don't? Are they somehow risking their souls and eternal salvation? At least I'm playing devil's advocate here. But this might be how the argument goes. At least if you have a liturgy, all of your subjects will be at least performing certain offices on a weekly basis. That's one argument.
- [44:13]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I suppose at the heart of it is that James has spent all these years ruling in Scotland. He may be away for a long time after he becomes King of England, but they know with whom they're dealing. Whereas Charles practically spent no time at all in Scotland, doesn't understand the culture. And so that, of course, is going to fuel fears, and then his actions on arrival continue to compound that. Tell me about the subsequent events of the bishops wars.
- [44:45]
Professor Clare Jackson
So the imposition of the prayer Book produces a riot again. You know, James, I think, had good established contacts. They get weaker in the latter half of his reign. They're not as strong as in the first decade, but. But he is informed. I mean, there's a very telling moment during that Parliament in Scotland in 1633 where one of the nobles says to Charles, oh, you know, for all the times we didn't tell your father what was going on here, we saved him many a problem. And he expects Charles to sort of say, oh, well, you know, I'm very grateful you keep doing the same. I mean, Charles is outraged and says, well, what do you mean you didn't tell my father everything? You know, this is unacceptable. And in the reaction to the Prayer Book, a very similar. I mean, Charles sees this as a unacceptable attack on his authority. There is no attempt to summon, say that the main Scots church leaders or main Privy Councillors to London to discuss or to go. Instead of which, you know, there is an attempt to, well, what do I need to do to enforce this observance and what sort of example do I need to make of certain people? And the Scots in response form what becomes known as the National Covenant. It's a very interesting document. It's very loyalist in tone about proclaiming allegiance to their rightful monarch and defending the integrity of the Scottish Church. A negative confession in 1581 as the definition of that church. And it's very studiously silent on what happens if those two things come into conflict. And it's called the National Covenant because it becomes a sort of nationally subscribed document. It's pinned at market crosses across Scotland and people will sign it. There's very little in it that would make it difficult for you to sign if you're a Protestant. But Charles sees all of this as the direct attack on his authority. He sees it as opposition and he starts mobilising. And one of the areas in which he might mobilise, it is felt, is to raise sort of Irish Catholic troops and potentially deploy them.
- [46:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Do the Scots feel strongly enough to want to go to war over this?
- [46:45]
Professor Clare Jackson
There isn't any appetite, it has to be said, for actual war. I mean, although the First Bishop's War is basically a kind of immediate sort of standoff troops, the Scots and Covenanters later became known as the Covenanters after this document, actually have a much more ready made military structure at their disposal. A lot of Scots have fought on the continent in the Thirty Years War, their recourse called home. Things like Swedish kind of recruitment models are set up very quickly. And this Covenant has sort of devised this very sort of very well funded, very well organised sort of military structure that the English court is sort of looking at in initial bemusement. But there is a sort of standoff. So that forces Charles to call an English parliament, which there hadn't really been much sign that he ever intended to do after 1629. I think Charles is assuming that there will just be sort of natural sympathy for him. He will naturally be granted money to sort of pay off this Scots who are demanding very large sums of money, about 850 sterling from him a day to stay around Newcastle or they will come further south. And instead Charles finds actually quite a lot of sympathy among MPs. I mean, they're for the Scots position. They haven't had a parliament for 11 years, but their concerns haven't gone away. That Parliament should meet more often, at least every three years, that taxes shouldn't be raised without consent, that there are directions in which Charles and his senior clerics seem to be wanting to take the English Church that that cause concern. So the short parliament ends, no agreement. And in a way, you know, that's where I think James is very realistic. He either presumably could have conciliated his MPs and got some money, or he could have conciliated the Scots and got rid of the need for an English parliament. But, you know, he kind of doesn't either. He tries to carry on fighting the Scots. It's clear that he just doesn't have the resources to do it. And then that eventually leads to the long parliament and then, then that's when Charles begins to sort of see that actually he has opponents in England too.
- [48:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
He does indeed. And we shall leave the civil war to one side and not go there today. But I want to ask you, as we conclude, a couple of questions, sort of reflecting back on this, which is how warranted do you think accusations of tyranny are when it comes to Charles? And do you think that what we see in Charles behavior is more driven by his own personal inability to adapt to changing political realities or by the inheritance of unresolved conflicts from the reign of his father?
- [49:20]
Professor Clare Jackson
So tyranny is a sort of very vexed word. I think it's Hobbes who might say one person's tyranny is another's very well governed monarchy. There are certainly accusations of tyranny directed towards Charles. I think I would probably see him more as authoritarian. I mean, if one thinks about a tyranny, one thinks about subjects groaning under, you know, very high exactions or really having their lives, you know, made extremely miserable. And that's not really the reality for the 1630s. But when it comes to taking counsel, I mean, he doesn't, when it comes to decision making, he is very authoritarian. I mean, foreign diplomats who can be at least hoping to perhaps negotiate with him, if not necessarily on a complete par, they nevertheless represent their sovereign monarchs. I mean, they find him extremely difficult to deal with. Whereas James had very good relations with ambassadors because he was actually sort of instinctively interested in talking and foreign policy and dealing with people of a similar rank as his own. So I wouldn't see Caroline England as a tyranny. However, I would see why people look at tyrannies, say in the classical era and can draw parallels and why I would say that Charles is a much more authoritarian ruler in practice than his father. How much of this is sort of of Charles's own making? Suddenly, you know, contemporaries were just as excused as exercised by this as subsequent historians. And when Edward Hyde of Clarendon came to write his history of the rebellion, he said, you need look no earlier than 1625. That is where you need to look for the source of the problems. Other historians, famously Lawrence Stone in 1972 wrote a book called the Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642. So, you know, fixing that point will keep historians going for years. I do think that counterfactuals, and if it wasn't for this factor can be quite useful in this setup. And I think under Jeffrey, different monarch, those problems hadn't really changed. And I think a different monarch would have devised different solutions. I mean, Charles's tend to be very sort of, you know, sort of binary. It's either this or it's that often when actually compromise and maneuver would have been more advisable. I don't think there should be a complete rupture around 1625. I mean, the entanglement that Charles faces most instantly, you know, there's very, very awful kind of continental situation in which his sister, who he does care about deeply, has lost the Palatina, is living in exile. Europe looks like it's going to sort of implode. It's all confessional divisions are becoming entrenched and the Habsburgs, the Catholics, are doing very well. So for a Protestant monarch, you know, this is a moment of real concern. England still is a relatively young Protestant state. So, you know, the problems of what we now think of as the 30 years war are very real. So too is Buckingham. I mean, he certainly inherits Buckingham and he becomes as close to him, perhaps in a different way than his father, but certainly as politically close to him. So there are similarities. But then I think very quickly, I mean, if James did operate as a brake on his son and Buckingham in the latter years of his life, and suddenly once that break is removed, you see problems.
- [52:42]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
It's so interesting. When I first started studying history, became a historian and there was much talk of great forces and there was much rejection of great men theories of history. And yet as I go on, I still, I start to feel the importance of individual personalities more and more in the work I do.
- [53:04]
Professor Clare Jackson
Well, I remember John Morrill was quite. I remember he had a very good analogy which was, you know, when, when talking about these debates among historians that are often talked about sort of revisionists and post revisionists, I remember he used the analogy of an aircraft, think about England under Charles I and said there were bits of the infrastructure, the fuselage, if you like, that were rotten, that weren't brilliant, but ultimately they weren't rusting completely. Away, it was pilot error. So again, that sort of speaks to your point about the individual can't be absolved completely, and in this case, a large degree of responsibility must lie at Charles's door.
- [53:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Professor Jackson, this has been wonderful. I've thoroughly enjoyed myself. Thank you so much for your insight into this pivotal liminal moment, this moment of transition and change in 1625 that we're marking the 400th anniversary of this year. Thank you for your time.
- [54:01]
Professor Clare Jackson
Well, thank you.
- [54:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudor and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susanna Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors From History.
- [54:17]
Professor Clare Jackson
Hit.
- [54:28]
Paige
Hey, this is Paige from Giggly Squad and this episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Nordstrom is here to help you dress in a way that feels totally you, with the best spring styles, from boho dresses and matching sets to must have bags and sneakers. Discover thousands of items from lots of your favorite brands like Mango Reformation, Veronica Beard and Farm Rio. It's easy too, with free shipping and returns in store order pickup and more. Shop today in stores and@nordstrom.com everyone has.
- [54:58]
Unknown
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