The Accession of James I

The Accession of james I Historical and Cultural Consequences

Edited by

Glenn Burgess

Rowland Wymer

and

Jason Lawrence

Selection, editorial matter, and Introduction ©Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer and jason lawrence 2006 All other chapters © contributors 2006 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-4899-1

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First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, lLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.

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library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The accession of james I: historical and cultural consequences /edited by

Glenn Burgess, Rowland Wymer, and jason Lawrence. p. em.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. james I, King of England, 1566-1625. 2. Great Britain-History­james I, 1603-1625. 3. Monarchy-Great Britain-History-17th century. 4. Great Britain-Civilization-17th century. 5. Great Britain-Politics and government-1603-1625. 6. Great Britain­Kings and rulers. I. Burgess, Glenn, 1961- II. Wymer, Rowland. Ill. lawrence, jason, 1969-DA391.A 185 2006 941.06'1-dc22 2006041732

10 9 15 14

8 7 13 12

6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06

In memory of Professor Conrad Russell

Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Notes on Contributors X

Introduction xiii Glenn Burgess, Jason Lawrence, and Rowland Wymer

1 1603: The End of English National Sovereignty 1 Conrad Russell

2 'Representing the awefull authoritie of soveraigne Majestie': Monarchs and Mayors in Anthony Munday's The Triumphes of Re-united Britania 15 Tracey Hill

3 The Jacobean Union Controversy and King Lear 34 Philip Schwyzer

4 Radical Britain: David Hume of Godscroft and the Challenge to the jacobean British Vision 48 Arthur Williamson

5 The Happier Marriage Partner: The Impact of the Union of the Crowns on Scotland 69 fenny Wormald

6 London or the World? The Paradox of Culture in (post-) jacobean Scotland 88 Roderick f. Lyall

7 'Twice done and then done double' : Equivocation and the Catholic Recusant Hostess in Shakespeare's Macbeth 101 Matthew Baynham

8 The Romans in Britain, 1603-1614 113 fohn Kerrigan

9 Rex Pacificus, Robert Cecil, and the 1604 Peace with Spain 140 Pauline Croft

vii

viii Contents

10 1603 and the Discourse of Favouritism 155 Curtis Perry

11 The Essex Myth in Jacobean England 177 Maureen King

12 The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Empire: Sir Edward Coke's British Jurisprudence 187 Daniel f. Hulsebosch

Index 208

Acknowledgements

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

ix

Notes on Contributors

Matthew Baynham read Law at Brasenose College, Oxford, and Theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford, before entering the Anglican ministry. After 15 years of parish ministry, he studied for his M.Phil. at the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham before moving to chaplaincy in higher education. He is at present Associate Chaplain at the University of Liverpool and Senior Resident Tutor at Liverpool Hope University College.

Glenn Burgess taught from 1988 to 1994 at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch. He is currently Professor of History and Head of Department at the University of Hull. His publications include The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603-1642 (1992) and Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (1996).

Pauline Croft is Professor of Early Modern History at Royal Holloway, Uni­versity of London. She has published widely on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Britain: her most recent book is King James (Palgrave Macmillan 2003).

Tracey Hill is Principal Lecturer and Subject Leader in English Literature at Bath Spa University. Her research interests are in the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century cultural history, specialising in the works of Anthony Munday and in the literary culture of early modern London. She is the author of Anthony Munday and Civic Culture (2004) and a number of articles on Munday, The Booke of Sir Thomas More, and Renaissance history plays; she has also edited two collections of essays.

Daniel J. Hulsebosch is a Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He received his A.B. from Colgate University, a J.D. from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is the author of Con­stituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (2005), as well as several articles on the legal and constitutional history of the British Empire and the early United States.

John Kerrigan is Professor of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John's College. Among his publications are Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996), which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, On Shakespeare and Early Modem Literature: Essays (2001), and a study of seventeenth-century British-Irish anglophone literature in relation to nation-building and state formation, Archipelagic English (2006).

X

Notes on Contributors xi

Maureen King teaches early modern literature at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. She has published articles on various sixteenth- and seventeenth-century topics, as well as on fantasy and science fiction.

Jason Lawrence is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull. He has written on Samuel Daniel, Shakespeare, and John Marston, and his book 'Who the Devil taught thee so much Italian?': Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modem England was published in 2005.

Roderick J. Lyall is Emeritus Professor of Literatures in English at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He previously taught at Massey University (NZ) and the University of Glasgow, where he was Head of the Department of Scottish Literature from 1982 to 1994. He has published widely on medieval and early modern Scottish texts; his study of Alexander Montgomerie (d. 1598) is scheduled to be published in 2006.

Curtis Perry is Associate Professor of English at Arizona State University. In addition to articles on a variety of topics, he is the author of The Making of Jacobean Culture (1997) and editor of Material Culture and Cultural Mater­ia/isms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (2001). His book Literature and Favoritism in Early Modem England is scheduled to be published in early 2006.

Conrad Russell (the 5th Earl Russell) was Professor of British History at King's College London until his retirement in 2002. He had previously taught at Bedford College, University of London, and at Yale University, and was Astor Professor of British History, University College London, from 1984 to 1990. His major works include Parliaments and English Politics 1621-1629 (1979), his Ford Lectures published as The Causes of the English Civil War (1990) and The Fall of the British Monarchies 1637-1642 (1991), and his collected essays Unrevolutionary England, 1603-1642 (1990). He was honoured with a festschrift edited by Thomas Cogswell, Richard Cust, and Peter Lake, Politics, Religion and Popularity, published in 2002. Professor Russell died in October 2004, while this book was being prepared for publication.

Philip Schwyzer is Lecturer in English at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Literature, Nationalism, and Memory in Early Modem England and Wales (2004), and his current research focuses on archaeology and early modern literature.

Arthur Williamson is Professor of History at California State University, Sacramento. He has written extensively about early modern Scottish and British political thought. Most recently he has published George Buchanan The Political Poetry (2000), The British Union: A Critical Edition and Translation of David Hume of Godscroft's De Unione Insulae Britannicae (2003), both

xii Notes on Contributors

with Paul McGinnis, and Shaping the Stuart World, 1603-1714: The Atlantic Connection (2005), with Allan Macinnes. His study of Western eschatology Apocalypse Now, Apocalypse Then: Prophecy and the Shaping of the Modern World is slated to appear in 2006.

Jenny Wormald is an honorary fellow of Edinburgh University. She was previously Fellow and Tutor in History, St Hilda's College, Oxford; before that she was a Lecturer in Scottish History at the University of Glasgow. She has been a British Academy Reader in the Humanities, and a Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. She has published widely on late-medieval and early-modern Scottish and British history. At the time of writing, she is working on a book on James VI and I.

Rowland Wymer is Head of the Department of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, having previously taught for many years at the University of Hull. His publications include Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (1986), Webster and Ford (1995), and Derek Jarman (2005).

Introduction Glenn Burgess, Jason Lawrence, and Rowland Wymer

At about 3a.m. on 24 March 1603 Queen Elizabeth I died, and an hour later at Richmond, her successor, James VI of Scotland, was proclaimed king of England, France, and Ireland. Robert Cecil read the proclamation at Whitehall at 10 a.m., and over the next few days it was repeated across the whole land. 1 In Hull, after the proclamation was read, 'the King's health was drank, liquor given to the populace, and the whole day spent in ringing of bells, bonfires, and such other demonstrations of joy as are usual on similar occasions'.2 The news of Elizabeth's death was carried from Richmond to the new king by Sir Robert Carey, who reached James at Holyrood on the night of 26 March.3 The king had waited a long time for this moment, and was determined to savour the good fortune that he had so assiduously cultivated in secret correspondence with Robert Cecil and others.4 James was careful not to arrive in London before the late queen's funeral on 28 April. He left Edinburgh on 4 April, and arrived in London over a month later on 7 May. Along the way he received petitions, revelled in the hospitality of his new subjects and, in his delight, knighted a fair number of them.5

In one early tally, of the 2323 knights created by James, about 900 were created in the first year of his reign.6 Lawrence Stone suggests that 906 men were knighted in the first four months alone.? For all that they had prepared for his accession, James's new English subjects had only a limited understanding of their king, and rumours abounded about what they might expect from him. Individuals manoeuvred for favour; Catholics and puritans alike lived in the hope, perhaps even in the expectation, that James would act to further their interests. As David Calderwood put it, 'the formalists, the Papists, and the sincere professors, had all their own hopes' invested in James.8 The miseries of the 1590s, during which an aging queen ruled over a country suffering from famine, disease, and growing problems of crime and vagrancy, while living under the imminent threat of Spanish invasion, only increased the anticipation of the new Jacobean age.9

There can be little doubt that, for some of those who lived through it, the accession of James in 1603 was to be welcomed as both a culmination of prophetic and historical developments, and an opportunity to lay the foundations for a better British future. The propaganda campaign that had accompanied Protector Somerset's pursuit of a military conquest of Scotland in the late 1540s had generated a strongly Protestant and providential read­ing of the opportunity that existed to bring into being a united Britain, and themes from this campaign persisted into the early seventeenth century. The later sixteenth-century Scottish reformers, though, developed this unionist

xiii

xiv Introduction

vision in ways that removed it from the close association that it had in the 1540s with English imperialism (a vision that had found its few initial Scottish supporters mainly amongst strongly Protestant Scottish exiles in England).10 This contrast between an English 'imperialistic' understanding of the possibilities of union and a Scottish 'confederalist' one was to have a long history.U The union of crowns in 1603 was certainly welcomed in Protestant and providential terms, but it also posed a new question. Union of some sort had happened: How was it to be understood? What opportunities did it create?

Many people provided the answers to these questions. Chief among them was, of course, the king himself, who saw that 1603 presented him and his subjects with the opportunity for bringing about changes of the greatest significance. He was keen to grasp that opportunity. The union of crowns was to be but a prelude for something altogether more far-reaching. Precisely what it was that James hoped to achieve by the union of the Scottish and English crowns is rather harder to say. 12 More important to him, perhaps, than any precise set of proposals was a general sense that without some further steps to cement the union, it would remain unstable and liable to dissolution. His approach, and that of his propagandists, was both to talk up the areas of convergence that already existed between England and Scotland and to find ways of nudging both countries along a path of further convergence. This is, perhaps, reflected in the vagueness of his language. His first public statement declared that his well-disposed subjects shared with him a wish 'that the sayd happy Union should bee perfected'.U He went on,

And in the meane time till the sayd Union be established with the due solemnitie aforesayd, his Majestie doth hereby repute, hold, and esteeme, and commands all his Highnes Subjects to repute, hold, and esteeme both the two Realmes as presently united, and as one Realme and King­dome, and the Subjects of both the Realmes as one people, brethren and members of one body. 14

It was making his subjects believe this that was important for James, and much more important than any particular policy. It was unfortunate for ]ames, though, that some of the things he thought essential to achieving his goal - the adoption of the name of Great Britain and the naturalization of Scots in England- aroused intense opposition, as Conrad Russell demon­strates in his essay. James told his first English parliament on 19 March 1604 that 'I am the Husband, and all the whole Isle is my lawfull Wife.' Pointedly, he asked them: 'I hope therefore no man will be so unreasonable as to thinke that I that am a Christian King under the Gospel, should be a Polygamist and husband to two wives.' 15 His MPs seemed, though, to prefer the thought of a polygamous king to the thought of themselves forming a single body with the Scots. By 1607, ]ames had developed a clear sense of what he wanted,

Introduction xv

though even this was articulated only in support of the relatively moderate proposals put together by the Commissioners for Union in 1604:

I desire a perfect Union of Lawes and persons, and such a Naturalizing as may make one body of both Kingdomes under mee your King. That I and my posterities (if it so please God) may rule over you to the worlds ende.16

Even here, security and the perpetuation of the union were the prevalent concerns.

]ames's plans were supported by a chorus of politicians, clergymen, and civil lawyers; but the chorus did not seem to produce sympathetic echoes elsewhere in the political nation. Nonetheless, within Scotland there were those who, like their king, possessed a genuinely 'British' vision. At least one man greeted 1603 as a moment of opportunity, a Machiavellian occa­sione. David Hume of Godscroft, rejecting the prevailing fear of innovation, commented:

It might be deemed doubtful whether all innovation is dangerous and ought to be avoided. Aren't some kinds of innovation necessary? Not of course when we have achieved perfection, but sometimes it's necessary for old practices to be recalled and things to be restored to what they were originally (which is, after all, a kind of innovation), especially if the deviations are of long standing and sanctioned by traditionY

Portrayed by Arthur Williamson as an acolyte of George Buchanan, and a man who wanted to erect a form of quasi-republicanism in Britain, Burne's key concern appears to have been to spread a strict jure divino Presbyterian religious uniformity in England, and to ensure that no tolerance for other faiths was allowed. He emphasized, like so many others by this time, that a prince could not count on the loyalty of subjects unless he shared their religion.18

Whatever we might decide about his supposed 'quasi-republicanism', Hume was no anti-monarchist; but he was aware that monarchy alone was not an adequate foundation for stabilizing the new British polity:

And there is indeed, I say, one king- and let it be perpetual. Furthermore as he [?] says, Let the sun pay heed and the moon bear witness: may this king's posterity hold the sceptre as long as the sun and the moon illuminate day and night. Let me not think there is a single good citizen, a single good man (either Scottish or English) who doesn't hold that determination as dear as he does his own life.

xvi Introduction

All the same, however great this may be, it's still just one bond of union. Ought we to entrust so great a thing to just one bond? Doesn't the king himself wish for something better?19

His recipe for what was needed centred on 'love', the bonds of affection that bound a people together and prevented civil discord, of which religious uniformity strictly enforced seems to have been the chief component. He was not, for example, interested in legal uniformity, and did not propose tampering with laws of inheritance or any laws 'relating to the possession and acquisition of property'. 20 Hume was aware that consideration was being given to steps that would bring English and Scottish law closer, but in the end this was 'irrelevant' and 'it doesn't matter whether all the laws are ever brought into complete conformity'.21

Hume was an inverted image of James himself. Both attached great signi­ficance to the opportunity of stabilizing a new state in 1603, but one from a civic humanist perspective and the other from that of divine-right kingship. Whereas the most obvious feature of Hume's proposals was his wish to see an intolerant and exclusive Presbyterian church established throughout Bri­tain, James in 1604 enunciated the principle 'no bishop, no king'. He might have said this in England at Hampton Court in 1604, but its implementation was felt rather more heavily on the other side of the border.22

However, for most, certainly in England, 1603 was less an opportunity to be taken and more a threat against which the body politic needed protection. King James and David Hume saw opportunities: many saw threats. Change was to be resisted and not embraced. At least in the short term, there is some evidence that it was successfully resisted, as this collection of essays helps to show. Jenny Wormald's contribution to this collection stresses the degree of continuity across 1603 in Scottish history. James's proposals for further union were emasculated by the English parliament, and produced little. For England, Pauline Croft uses the image of the supertanker, a vessel 'ploughing on in the same direction even after the engines have been switched off', in explaining the continuities in English history. In her account, the 'Jacobean' peace with Spain of 1604 was rather less Jacobean than we have supposed. James merely completed a process of peacemaking initiated under Elizabeth.

While contemporaries had so many different views about what should have happened, the historian is tempted to wonder which of them might have been right. Was the accession an event of great or of little consequence in the development of English or British history? One way of answering the question available to the historian might be to say that 1603 was a key event in at least two of the narratives that have served to give meaningful shape to early modern English history. One story has it that the 1603 accession of the supposedly 'absolutist' Stuart kings gave the English nation an opportunity to defend their freedoms and rights from oppression, and thus served to make England the birthplace of liberalism in theory and in practice. A second

Introduction xvii

story, prominent in the historical scholarship since the mid-1980s, stresses instead a story that links 1603 into a sequence of dates (1536/1540, 1603, 1707, 1800/1801) that sketch the construction of a highly peculiar modern state, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, at its height in the nineteenth century, modified by the creation of Eire in 1921, and now the dubious beneficiary of Prime Minister Tony Blair's strangely half-baked experiments in devolution. These are important narratives, each playing a formative role in shaping the self-understanding of both the English and the British peoples. They make it clear that asking questions about 1603 is not a matter of idle or antiquarian curiosity, but of pressing concern for anyone interested in the identity of England and of Britain. The 400th anniversary of the Stuart accession, which these essays were written to mark, is an appropriate point at which to take stock of what modern England or Great Britain might owe to the historical and dynastic accidents that brought James VI, king of Scots, to London as the successor of Elizabeth I.

It is also an appropriate point to reflect on the way 1603 continues to act as a crucial marker in English literary history, dividing the continuously evolving forms of poetry and drama into two apparently discrete periods -'Elizabethan' and 'Jacobean'- and whether the date has a similar importance in relation to Scottish culture. In the case of some literary forms, the notion that 24 March 1603 brought about an immediate discursive shift is entirely plausible. The rhetoric appropriate to the praise of an aging virgin queen clearly would not serve for James and a particular problem of address arose for panegyric poets from the fact that the new king was himself a writer with claims to literary authority.23

In the case of the professional drama, the argument that 1603 marked a decisive change is much more problematic, despite the entrenched con­notations of the label 'Jacobean' in theatrical history. The significant shift towards satire and tragedy had already taken place in the previous four years and the notion that Jacobean plays staged during the first decade of James's reign are responding to specifically Jacobean forms of court corruption is extremely debatable. There is a demonstrable continuity with Elizabethan forms of anti-court rhetoric, such as the attacks on favouritism which Curtis Perry discusses, and also a clear desire to imitate commercially successful Elizabethan plays such as Hamlet, with its vivid allusions to a hidden ulcer at the heart of the state, 'something rotten' which necessitates the 'wild justice' of revenge.

Both Shakespeare and Jonson were, in fact, more favourably disposed to the new king and his court than they had been towards Elizabeth during her declining years. Jonson, benefiting from the greater toleration of Cath­olics in the brief Jacobean honeymoon which preceded the Gunpowder Plot, wrote in Epigram 35, 'We have now no cause I Left us of fear' and Shakespeare alluded in Sonnet 107 to the 'most balmy time' of peace which had followed the eclipse of 'the mortal moon', Elizabeth. 24 Shakespeare

xviii Introduction

had at least two concrete reasons for feeling grateful to James. Even before he reached London, James had signed a warrant ordering the release of Shakespeare's former patron, the earl of Southampton, from the Tower, where he had been imprisoned since the failed Essex rebellion of 1601. Shortly after reaching London, on 19 May 1603, James acknowledged the importance of Shakespeare's company by taking them under his own direct patronage and renaming them 'The King's Men'.

Although the King's Men sometimes seemed to bite the hand which fed them by staging such savagely satirical works as Middleton's Revenger's Tragedy, Shakespeare's primary response to the new reign did not take the form of an increased, 'Jacobean', disillusionment with court life but rather a decision to address his plays to James's own background and interests in a more direct way than he had ever done with Elizabeth. One obvious feature of this reorientation is the move away from the medieval English history which he had dramatized in the 1590s towards an exploration of the remoter British and Scottish past, in such plays as King Lear, Macbeth, and Cymbeline. Shakespeare, like other Englishmen in 1603, was now forced to answer the question which, a few years previously in Henry V, he had put into the mouth of the Irishman Macmorris- what is my nation? These plays con­stitute a prolonged reflection upon the problem rather than an answer and they arguably allude to the religious as well as the ethnic divisions within 'Great Britain'.

The essays that follow contribute in various ways to our assessment of the immediate cultural and historical changes which took place in 1603 as well as to our understanding of the relationship between 1603 and the long-term narratives of English and British history. Between the extremes of stubborn continuity and dramatic change lies the complex middle ground. It is a truism, no doubt, to say that all history represents a mixture of change and continuity; but truisms at least have the merit of being true. Thus many of the contributions to this volume explore the balance of this mixture of change and continuity in a number of areas, both historical and cultural, and from them several key themes and questions emerge as central to an assessment of the impact of 1603:

• Were the political ideals associated with the new king and his dynasty which were explored in a variety of cultural forms and contexts - ideals of 'absolutism', divine-right kingship, and peace -enough to mark the Stuart age as something distinctive from what had gone before?

• Did the patterns of court behaviour and cultural patronage change in 1603? Were the style and cultural identity of the Jacobean court in Eng­land distinctively different from that of Elizabeth's or of James VI's in Scotland?

• How did poets and playwrights, both English and Scottish, respond artist­ically to the new king's interests, both political and literary, and to any perceived changes in court culture?

Introduction xix

• What did the possibilities and threats of regnal union contribute to con­ceptions of English, Scottish and, indeed, Welsh identity? How far did it lead to the creation of a British identity?

• How did james's gender identity, that is to say the form of masculinity that he projected, and his sexual orientation, affect the culture of Stuart England? He was very much a man of peace and a man of the word, rather than a man of the sword (his 1604 speech promoted powerfully the peace that flowed from his accession), but was that what a king should be?

• In the longer term, what contribution did Sir Edward Coke's 'British jur­isprudence', centred on the case of the postnati (1608), with its distinctive account of English liberties and of 'citizenship' that would be widely diffused across the British Empire of the eighteenth century, make to colo­nial American thinking about political liberty and about constitutional relationships within the first British Empire?

This book does not answer any of these questions fully, but it throws light on them all, and thus contributes to the discussion we all must have, if we are to understand the possibilities open to us in the present, of Britain's political and cultural past.

The opening essay by the late Conrad Russell focuses immediately on the contentious political and legal debates surrounding the cherished plan of the self-styled 'King of Great Britain' for the Union of the Crowns. Russell stresses what is to become a recurrent theme of this collection, a degree of mutual misunderstanding and mistrust between the king's Scottish and English subjects in the early years of his reign, particularly with regard to the matter of whether they formed part of one state or two. By contrasting the insular approach of the representatives of the English legal system, such as Sir Edward Coke and Edwin Sandys, with a more expansive 'comparative dimension normal in Scottish thinking', exemplified by Sir Thomas Craig, Russell demonstrates how responses to the 1604-1606 report by the Union Commission led to stalemate in the Parliament of 1607. The London-based politicians were anxious about the proposed change of name to 'Britain', and especially about the naturalization of those whom they saw as 'foreign' subjects in England. The landmark decision in the following year in Calvin's Case (1608), however, declared that all Scots born after the accession in 1603 (postnati) did have legal rights in England under English Common Law, as they were natural subjects of the King of both Scotland and England.

English anxieties about the implications of the Union plan manifes­ted themselves in literary texts and dramatic performances as well as in legal and political debate. Anthony Munday's The Triumphes of Re-united Britania (1605) has often been regarded as an unproblematic celebration of King James's accession and his Union project, as it is in Philip Schwyzer's essay in this volume. Tracey Hill's revisionist account of this Lord Mayor's Show, however, persuasively argues that Munday focused on the myth of

xx Introduction

Brutus, derived from the already discredited account of Geoffrey of Mon­mouth, more out of opportunism than conviction. She accuses the author of instances of 'strikingly tactless ideological slippage': for example, in his frequent references to 'England' rather than 'Britain' in the printed text, seemingly deliberately excluding Scotland in the use of the ancient name 'Loegria'. Also Brutus himself is seen in the pageant primarily as the legendary founder of the city of London (Troynovant), which he founded prior to Britain itself. Hill argues that this is because Munday wanted to emphasize the civic dimension over matters of national identity in a show, sponsored by the Merchant Taylors' company, which had to meet the twin demands of celebrating the King and also the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Leonard Holliday. Her essay applies what james Knowles terms 'a double reading of civic ritual' to uncover a far more ambivalent attitude towards the Union of Crowns than might initially be inferred from Munday's text.

The following essay on King Lear describes another playwright who is found to be similarly 'cagey and ambiguous on the union question'. In his opening section, Philip Schwyzer illustrates how much pro-Union literature, exemplified in the work of john Thornborough and William Harbert, estab­lished a link between the legendary Britain of Brutus and the modern 'British' state, either by means of prophecy or by emphasizing the survival or revival of ancient bloodlines. He then proceeds to demonstrate how Shakespeare in King Lear, performed before the King at court in late 1606, carefully dis­mantles and discards these 'cherished tropes of British nationalism'. The play makes a nonsense of foreseeing the future in the Fool's Merlin prophecy in act 3, scene 2 of the Folio text, and also cuts the strands between the present and the past in its relentless breaking of inter-generational bonds. This is shown most devastatingly in the unprecedented deaths of the Brit­ish king and his youngest daughter in the final scene. Schwyzer suggests that King Lear's 'negative programme' is not an expression of Shakespeare's opposition to the Union project per se, but that it is indicative of his scorn for the 'nostalgic spirit of nationalism' associated with much contemporary pro-Union literature.

This opening group of essays concentrates on the anxieties discernible in a number of specifically English responses to the Union question, but it is a principal aim of this collection to range beyond a purely Anglocentric per­spective on the impact of the accession in 1603. The following three essays, therefore, all explore the effects of, and responses to, james's acquisition of a new kingdom from a Scottish perspective. Arthur Williamson's account of David Hume's De unione insulae Britannicae (1605-1606) situates this altern­ate, radical programme for 'a civic and reformed British commonwealth' in a natural continuum from the socially inclusive political philosophies of George Buchanan, with his emphasis on public participation and education, and the writings of Andrew Melville. Hume's work is read as a republican challenge to the conservative social vision in King James's own True Lawe

Introduction xxi

of Free Monarchies and Basi/ikon Doran of the late 1590s, outlining a vision of a genuine British Parliament and Church, with equal Scottish and Eng­lish representation and participation. This vision extended to Hume's desire to create a truly British people by advocating Anglo-Scottish intermarriage, with English settlers also encouraged to move into remote areas of Scot­land. Williamson describes this as part of a 'profoundly anti-racist' project for civic colonial administration, although the long-term effects of a similar experiment in social transplantation, following the foundation of the Ulster colony in 1607, might reveal some of the tensions apparently overlooked in Hume's utopian British vision.

Jenny Wormald's essay investigates the impact of the king's move to Lon­don on the governing of Scotland itself. She raises a fundamental political question, 'how does a kingdom keep going without a king?' The answer in the case of Scotland seems to have been extremely efficiently. Wormald argues that Scotland in 1603 was particularly well suited to confronting the problem of absentee kingship, owing to the repeated accession of child mon­archs over the past two centuries. There was also a significant continuity of personnel at the Scottish court from the 1590s to the 1620s. This meant that, although the king may have been physically absent, he was still running his government through men whom he knew, and who knew him, well. King James VI had already reached an accommodation with the Scottish Parlia­ment and the Presbyterian Kirk before his move to London in 1603, thereby dealing with the two most pressing concerns of turn-of-the-century Scottish politics. Wormald suggests, however, that it was the king's desire for greater 'congruity' between the churches of England and Scotland that began to unsettle his Scottish subjects, and that the relentless pursuit of this policy by his more Anglocentric son Charles after 1625 had ultimately devastating consequences for both kingdoms.

Rod Lyall's essay considers the dilemma caused by the king's move to Lon­don for a number of Scottish courtier-poets, namely whether to follow James to England in 1603 or to remain in Scotland. He contrasts the examples of Sir William Fowler, Sir William Alexander, and particularly Sir Robert Ayton, all of whom formed part of James's court in London, with William Drum­mond, Fowler's nephew, who chose to spend most of his writing life on his Hawthornden estate near Edinburgh. Where Ayton's manuscript poetry is shown to reflect a 'deft, light-hearted libertinism so typical of a certain kind of [English] Cavalier verse', it was, perhaps ironically, the domiciled Drum­mond who displayed a more outward-looking European focus in his verse. The latter's profound engagement with the Petrarchan tradition and mod­ern French and Italian poets, particularly Desportes, Tasso, and Marino, is attested to in both his manuscript reading lists and his own imitative poetry. In this aspect of his work, Drummond was certainly following and devel­oping the poetic interests of James's own Castalian Band, and especially his uncle Fowler. He was, however, influenced equally by a contemporary Eng­lish poet, Samuel Daniel, who shared a similarly broad European perspective.

xxii Introduction

Daniel's rise to prominence as a courtier-poet in the early years of James's English reign, when he became a Groom of Queen Anne's Privy Chamber, suggests the need for caution in making too rigid a distinction between Scot­tish expansiveness and English insularity in terms of their cultural horizons at the start of the seventeenth century.

Matthew Baynham's essay concentrates on Macbeth, the clearest example of an English playwright responding to James's accession, by choosing and adapting for the stage a story from Holinshed's Historie of Scotland. Baynham's principal interest, however, is in the allusions in Shakespeare's play to the recusant Catholic practice of equivocation. Reacting against recent criticism that has tended to associate these allusions specifically with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and a satirical attack on the jesuit Henry Gar­net, the essay argues that the play might be drawing attention to an earlier point in the history of equivocation, namely the arrest, trial, and execution of the jesuit priest and poet Robert Southwell in 1595. Baynham suggests that, in addition to the well-known Burning Babe, a second poem by South­well, New heauen: new warre, is a previously unacknowledged source for Macbeth's Naked Babe soliloquy, and goes on to question what this con­scious use of the jesuit's poetry might reveal about Shakespeare's complex attitudes towards Catholic recusancy in the early years of the seventeenth century. Acknowledging the probability of a personal and literary connec­tion between the two poets and cousins expounded in Richard Wilson's recent work on Shakespeare's Catholic background, Baynham's essay sug­gests that the allusions to Southwell in Macbeth, along with Shakespeare's representation of the equivocal character of Rosse, reveal 'a murmur of real sympathy for the recusant position' in the play.

After the focus on Scottish responses to the 1603 accession and an Eng­lish dramatic take on Scottish history in these four essays, John Kerrigan offers a further perspective on the formation of seventeenth-century British identity. His essay explores the representation of Wales in four jacobean plays dealing with the Roman occupation of ancient Britain. These plays treat Wales as a discrete religious and cultural entity, locating in it the site of authentic Britishness, partly due to its history of resistance against the powers of imperial Rome. Kerrigan detects two distinctive patterns emerging in plays by Rowley, Fletcher, Armin, and Shakespeare: the first he describes as a 'historical telescoping' and syncretic combination of mythical stories by the playwrights, as they attempt to negotiate the 'archipelagic politics' of the early Jacobean period. In his reading, William Rowley's A Shoo-maker a Gentleman, performed at the Red Bull theatre in around 1608, shows 'popular theatre reaching an accommodation with the politics of 1603', which had to look beyond 'a purely English perspective'. This is also demonstrated in Shakespeare's Cymbeline (c. 1610), which is described as 'a work about Anglo­Welsh Britain turning Scottish at a decisive moment', when Shakespeare uses Holinshed's Scottish Historie in his account of the unlikely British victory

Introduction xxiii

against Roman forces. After this victory, however, in a truce with no his­torical foundation, King Cymbeline agrees to continue paying tribute to the Roman emperor. This is an example of the second recurring pattern in these plays, by which the dramatists permit their British characters to achieve some kind of final political accommodation with the imperial powers. Ker­rigan concludes by suggesting that this dramatic trope reflects the pressing need for the new British state in the early seventeenth century to view itself in relation to the wider powers of continental Europe, rather than simply in terms of negotiating the complex question of its own national identity.

Pauline Croft's essay on early 'Jacobean' foreign policy focuses on a spe­cific example of exactly this type of accommodation with a hostile European power, Spain. Croft argues, however, that the prolonged negotiations with Spain, leading to the signing of a peace treaty in August 1604, in fact consti­tuted 'the last chapter of Elizabethan foreign policy', and a personal triumph for the pragmatic secretary of state Robert Cecil, rather than the newly crowned Rex Pacificus. Indeed King James chose to spend most of his time during the Somerset House conference hunting in the Midlands, and failed to impress the chief Spanish negotiator Frias even when he was present. The king himself acknowledged Cecil's pivotal role in securing the treaty by immediately awarding him the title Viscount Cranborne. By demon­strating the importance of the Anglo-Spanish negotiations that took place between 1598 and 1601 to the treaty signed in 1604, Croft highlights another principal theme of this collection of essays: the strong sense of continuity between the Elizabethan and Jacobean reigns, in terms of both politics and literary tropes. In her analysis, the peace with Spain is seen as an inevit­able consequence of the Anglo-Irish treaty of Mellifont, finally signed by the rebellious earl of Tyrone on 30 March 1603, having been nervelessly negotiated by Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, even as unconfirmed reports of Elizabeth's death intensified. The queen had actually died almost a week earlier, ironically turning this last significant act of Elizabethan foreign dip­lomacy, again largely engineered by Cecil, into the first Jacobean one.

The signing of a peace treaty with England's traditional Catholic enemy, Spain, did not endear King James to all of his new subjects. Croft suggests that there was still a bellicose faction in England in 1604 intent on return­ing to the aggressive anti-Spanish policies advocated by the earl of Essex in the late 1590s, prior to his ill-judged rebellion and subsequent execu­tion in 1601. Despite the central role of Cecil in negotiating the treaty with Spain, historical accounts of James's reign have frequently associated these pacifist policies with the king's perceived effeminacy. This is the starting point for Curtis Perry's consideration of the discourse of political favourit­ism in Jacobean England. Perry suggests that in seventeenth-century libels James's homosexual desire for his intimate favourites was viewed in terms of a lack of sexual self-control, which illustrated the potential dangers of an unchecked royal will by associating erotic intemperance with political

xxiv Introduction

misrule. This 'unofficial language of complaint' also permeated the Jacobean stage, where court corruption was directly linked to the malign influence of royal favourites in Fletcher's The Loyal Subject and Massinger's The Duke of Milan, tellingly both performed after the Overbury trial of 1616. Des­pite the damaging effects on the king's own prestige of Somerset's involve­ment in Overbury's murder and the subsequent rise of Buckingham, Perry argues that such anxiety about royal favourites was neither exclusively Jac­obean nor specifically homophobic. He describes the libellous Leicester's Commonwealth, printed in 1584, as 'the ur-text of the early modern dis­course of favouritism', and demonstrates how the same examples of corrupt favouritism were cited in both the Elizabethan and Stuart reigns. Thus, Sir Francis Hubert's verse history of Edward II, begun in the 1590s, was only completed and printed in the late 1620s, at the height of Buckingham's influence. The recurrent examples of corrupt royal favourites are seen to challenge a more positive image of intimate (male) friendship as a means of providing trustworthy royal counsel. Perry concludes with an analysis of George Chapman's Tragedie of Chabot, which is tentatively assigned to 1614 (significantly before the Overbury trial), as a 'semi-allegorical commentary on the problem of favouritism' at James's court, filtered through a French setting.

Maureen King's essay explores posthumous literary representations throughout the Jacobean reign of Queen Elizabeth's last great royal favourite, Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, executed after his disastrous insurrec­tion of February 1601. King suggests that James's accession was 'a pivotal moment' in the partial rehabilitation of Essex's wounded name, as the king received the earl's twelve-year-old son at court and also released the last imprisoned co-conspirator, the earl of Southampton, in the early months of his reign. The simultaneous appearance in print of works sympathetic to Devereux, like Richard Williams's poem 'The Life and Death of Essex', would certainly have been impossible with Elizabeth still on the throne. It was, however, possible to push this historical revisionism too far: Robert Pricket's claim in his poem Honors Fame in Triumph Riding, printed in 1604, that Essex was 'no Traytor' led to the poet's immediate imprisonment. Shortly after Southampton's release, Essex's bitter enemy Sir Walter Ralegh was arrested on charges of treason, and his antipathy to the late earl was cited against him at his trial in November 1603, and again at his execution in 1618. Many pro­Essex works, like the anonymous 'Sir Walter Rauleigh's stabb', focus on this antagonism between Devereux and Ralegh. Despite the king's role in Essex's posthumous rehabilitation, accounts of his life gradually came to emphas­ize the earl's anti-Spanish militancy, with particular reference to the Cadiz expedition of 1596, as a site of potential opposition to James's pacifist foreign policy. King traces a 'specific tone of political disquiet' that developed from William Harbert's Englands Sorrowe, or a Farewell to Essex (1606), through Henry Peacham's Minerva Britannia, dedicated to Prince Henry in 1612,

Introduction xxv

to Gervase Markham's Honour in his Perfection, printed in 1624, as the king's highly unpopular plan to negotiate a marriage alliance with Spain stalled.

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

Notes

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

2. Nichols, Progresses, vol. 1, p. 30n.

xxvi Introduction

3. Ibid., pp. 33-5; A. J. Loomie, 'Carey, Robert, First Earl of Monmouth (1560-1639)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) (http:/ /www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4656, accessed 5 April 2005).

4. John Bruce, ed., Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in England (London: Royal Historical Society, 1861). The correspondence has recently been analysed by Michele Vignaux in 'The Succession and Related Issues through the Correspondence of Elizabeth, James, and Robert Cecil', inJean­Christophe Mayer, ed., The Struggle for the Succession in Late Elizabethan England: Politics, Polemics and Cultural Representations (Montpellier: Universite Paul-Valery Montpellier Ill, 2004), ch. 3.

5. The story of James's progress south, and a preliminary list of those he knighted on the way, is in The True Narration of the Entertainment of His Royall Majestie, from the Time of His Departure from Edenbrough. Till His Receiving at London (London, 1603); also reprinted in Nichols, Progresses, vol. 1, pp. 55-120.

6. John Philpott, A Perfect Collection or Catalogue of all Knights Batchelaurs Made by King James (London, 1660), sig. A3v and passim.

7. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Oxford Univer­sity Press, abridged ed. 1967), p. 41.

8. David Calderwood, quoted in Alan Stewart, The Cradle King: A Life of James VI & I (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003), p. 186. The best known of the petitions to reach James on his journey south was the puritan Millenary Petition.

9. John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cam­bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For an important new account of James's assumption of power in England, see Diana Newton, The Making of the Jacobean Regime: James VI and I and the Government of England, 1603-1605 (Wood­bridge: Boydell, 2005).

10. Arthur H. Williamson, Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edin­burgh: John Donald, 1979); Roger A. Mason, 'The Scottish Reformation and the Origins of Anglo-British Imperialism', in Mason, ed., Scots and Britons: Scottish Political Thought and the Union of 1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch. 7; also reprinted in Mason, Kingship and Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland (East Linton: Tuckwell, 1998), ch. 9; Mar­cus Merriman and Jenny Wormald, 'The High Road from Scotland', in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds, Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995), ch. 7.

11. On 'confederalism', see the remarks of Alan Macinnes, 'Regal Union for Britain 1603-1638', in Glenn Burgess, ed., The New British History: Founding a Modem State 1603-1715 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1999), esp. pp. 53-4; also Macinnes, The British Revolution 1629-1660 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005). An examination of key terms is in John Robertson, 'Empire and Union: Two Concepts of the Early Modern European Political Order', in Robertson, ed., A Union for Empire? Political Thought and the Union of 1707 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 1. For a useful overview, see Keith M. Brown, Kingdom or Province? Scotland and the Regal Union, 1603-1715 (London: Macmillan, 1992).

12. On the difficulties, see Bruce Galloway, The Union of England and Scotland 1603-1608 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1986), pp. 163-6.

13. Larkin and Hughes, eds, Stuart Royal Proclamations, vol. 1, p. 19. 14. Ibid. 15. J. P. Somerville, ed., King James VI and I: Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1994), p. 136.

Introduction xxvii

16. Ibid., p. 161. 17. Paul J. McGinnis and Arthur H. Williamson, eds, The British Union: A Critical

Edition and Translation of David Hume o(Godscro(t's De Unione Insulae Britannicae (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), p. 99.

18. Ibid., p. 231. 19. Ibid., pp. 145-7. 20. Ibid., p. 201. 21. Ibid. , p. 205. 22. See for example Maurice Lee Jr, Great Britain's Solomon: fames VI and I in His Three

Kingdoms (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), ch. 6. 23. See Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­

versity Press, 1997), ch. 1. On the difference 1603 did, or did not, make to James's own poetry, see Jane Rickard, 'From Scotland to England: The Poetic Strategies of James VI and I', Renaissance Forum 7 (Winter 2004) (http:/ /www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v7 /rickard.htm). This is one of six essays which make up a special double issue focusing on some of the consequences of the accession of James I. Jane Rickard's book fames VI and I: Authorship and Authority is forthcoming from Manchester University Press.

24. For Jonson's attitudes to Elizabeth and James, see Blair Worden, 'Ben Jonson and the Monarchy', in Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer, eds, Neo-Historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (Cam­bridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 71-90. For Shakespeare's relationship with James, see Alvin Kernan, Shakespeare, The King's Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603-1613 (New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 1995).