Civil War: The History of England Volume III (17 page)

The style is hard and elliptical, almost tortuous in its slow unwinding of the sense. It relies upon repetition and alliteration, parallel and antithesis. It is knotty and difficult, almost impossible for the hearers fully to understand. Yet it is the devotional style of the Jacobean period, fully mastered by a king who prided himself on his scholarship and erudition. Andrewes hovers over a word, even a syllable, eliciting its meaning by minute degrees; he is constantly questioning, refining and rephrasing. He does not express a thought but, rather, the process of thought itself; he dramatizes the act, or art, of creative reasoning. This is the luxuriant etymology
of Jacobean scholarship, similar in its strenuous tone to the prose of Francis Bacon.

‘Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and especially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in
solsitio brumali
, O the very dead of winter.’ The prose is disciplined and pure, evincing clarity of thought and expression as well as a great power of ordered analysis. It may not possess the inspired eloquence or impassioned fervour of the great Elizabethan preachers, but it is marked by what T. S. Eliot described as ‘ordonnance, precision, and relevant intensity’. Andrewes moves forward in pulses of light; he stops and repeats a phrase for more lucidity; he is always reaching out for the full revelation of the interior sense. An association of words can lead him further forward, caressing or coaxing their intention; he professed that such meanings can ‘strike any man into an ecstacy’.

The soaring cadence and expressive emotionalism evident in the sermons of John Donne may seem a world away from the concerted pressure of Andrewes’s words; the articulations of any one culture, however, will not be very far apart. On 13 November 1622, the month before the bishop of Winchester gave his sermon to the king on the journey of the Magi, John Donne, the dean of St Paul’s, entered the pulpit of the cathedral.

The first word of the text is the cardinal word, the word, the hinge, upon which the whole text turns. The first word,
But
, is the
But
, that all the rest shoots at. First it is an exclusive word: something the Apostles had required, which might not be had; not that; and it is an inclusive word; something Christ was pleased to afford to the apostles, which they thought not of; not that, not that which you beat upon,
But
, but yet, something else, something better than that, you shall have.

The rapid associations are like a sudden peal of bells.

For Donne the sermon was a species of erudite oratory, a performance that like the plays of the Jacobean tragic stage would surprise and delight the audience. He must remind his auditors of the damnation of being ‘secluded eternally, eternally, eternally,
from the sight of God’. He must move and direct their emotions or else he had failed. That is why he exerts all the power of the macabre that John Webster had employed. So in one sermon Donne reminds his hearers that ‘between that excremental jelly that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last; there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature’.

The settled truths of the old medieval faith had utterly gone. It was now necessary to argue and to convince. In this endeavour Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne were united. Yet this meant that they were sometimes engaged in tortuous and self-involved trials of the spirit; this was in many respects a sceptical, ambiguous and ambivalent age, at least in direct comparison with its predecessors, and against that unstable background both preachers protested and declaimed.

The syntactic parallels and paradoxes of both churchmen are attempts to riddle out individual truths and certainties from ambiguous matter. They needed to convince as much as to inspire their hearers. Yet the sermons are characterized by the caustic rhetoric that is so much part of the period. Donne preached that ‘sects are not bodies, they are but rotten boughs, gangrened limbs, fragmentary chips, blown off by their own spirit of turbulency, fallen off by the weight of their own pride . . .’ The immediacy and urgency of the language, with its rough cadence, are also part of Donne’s secular poetry. We may note the pessimism and melancholy, anatomized in an earlier part of this chapter, that also underlie his being in the world. In one of his meditations he enquires about the source of his disease. ‘They tell me that it is my melancholy. Did I infuse, did I drink in melancholy into my self? It is my thoughtfulness; was I not made to think? It is my study; doth not my calling call for that?’ This is the true music of the Jacobean period, now come to a close.

11

Vivat rex

Charles Stuart had become king of England at the age of twenty-four. He was proclaimed on the same day as his father’s death, 27 March 1625, and a contemporary at Cambridge wrote that ‘we had thunder the same day, presently on the proclamation, and ’twas a cold season, but all fears and sorrows are swallowed up in joy of so hopeful a successor’. Had the new king not put himself at the head of the anti-Spanish alliance in England?

He was more severe and reserved than his father, with a strong sense of formality and order, and the change of tone at court was soon evident. Charles announced that during the reign of his ‘most dear and royal father’ idle and unnecessary people had thronged the court, bringing ‘much dishonour to our house’. There were to be no more bawds or catamites. The new king had been impressed by the decorum of the Spanish court, where he had spent many months; he appreciated the privacy by which the royal family was protected, and the gravitas with which courtly affairs were conducted. The moral tone appealed to a young man who had become dismayed by the laxness and libertinism of his father’s court. He began to dress in black. In the preface to his orders for the royal household he remarked that his purpose was ‘to establish government and order in our court which from thence may spread with more order through
all parts of our kingdom’. This art of control, however, might be more congenial in theory than in practice.

The Venetian ambassador noted that within days of his accession ‘the king observes a rule of great decorum. The nobles do not enter his apartments in confusion as heretofore, but each rank has its appointed place.’ The ambassador also reported that the king had drawn up rules and regulations that divided his day, from first rising, into separate compartments; there was a time for praying and a time for exercising, a time for business and a time for audiences, a time for eating and a time for sleeping. He did not wish his subjects to be introduced to him without warning; they were only to be sent for. Servants proffered meals to him on their bended knees, and such was the protocol around royal dining that he seldom if ever ate a hot meal; food took too long to serve. Whenever he washed his hands, those parts of the towel he touched were raised above the head of the gentleman usher who removed it from the royal presence.

Charles set to work in earnest at the beginning of April when he asked Buckingham and other grandees to review all aspects of foreign policy; the fraught relationship with Spain, and a possible alliance with France, were to be considered in the light of Charles’s desire to recover the Palatinate for his brother-in-law. A committee was established, a few days later, in order to supervise the nation’s defences in case of war. The new king then set up two further commissions to investigate financial fraud by the collectors of the customs and to examine the trade of the East India Company with Russia. It was a business-like start but, as is generally the case with the work of committees and commissions, it achieved very little.

Buckingham was still the principal councillor, as he had been in the reign of James; he stayed in the company of the king all day, and slept in a room next to the royal bedchamber. He possessed the golden key that allowed him entrance to all the apartments of the palace. It seemed that nothing could be done without him. He had an almost vice-regal status and was in part able to compensate for the king’s unskilfulness in persuasion and management.

Charles had a stutter which, together with his want of natural fluency in conversation, led him to confess once that ‘I know I am
not good to speak much’. When he was a child his doctors had tried to cure the problem by putting small stones in his mouth, but this had provided no benefit. He tried to form complete sentences in his mind before uttering them, but the impediment remained. He was always shy and hesitant in speech. So he communicated with his household servants by means of gestures as much as words.

One of his principal advisers at a later date, the earl of Clarendon, noted that his insecurity led him to adopt the suggestions, or yield to the influence, of men who were in fact less capable than himself. He never really discerned the true merits or vices of those around him; he tended to confide in those who were merely boasters and adventurers while ignoring those of real, if silent, merit. The council about him consisted of professional courtiers, many of whom had been close to his father, while the others were friends or trusted servants. The principal decisions, however, were diverted from the full council to selective small groups or committees; suspicion and jealousy were therefore rife.

His first public appearance, in April, was at the port of Blackwall, on the north bank of the Thames, where he visited the royal fleet. He was small, just a little over 5 feet in height, and might be described as rather delicate than otherwise. Yet he had disciplined and trained himself in healthy exercise, so that his slight exterior was deceptive. He was of a pale complexion, set off in his youth by curly chestnut hair; he had a long face with grey eyes and full lips. He was of temperate habits, preferring plain beer to spiced wines, and of an apparently cool and dispassionate nature. He always blushed if he overheard indecent talk. If he could command his own passions, however, he might be able to control those of his kingdom. He collected aphorisms from the Stoics and neo-Stoics on the importance of cultivating detachment from the pressing issues of the moment. ‘We have learnt to own ourself by retiring into ourself,’ he once said. Yet acute observers, among them portrait painters, were able to sense that he concealed secret or hidden tension. His pace was rapid and hurried.

The potentially dangerous matter of his marriage to the French Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria, soon became the principal topic of London gossip. Many in the court, and in the country, deplored
the alliance with a devotee of Rome and conjured up old fears of papal domination. Yet Charles was not inclined to heed any warnings. He had a Scottish father, a Danish mother, and a half-French grandmother in the person of Mary Queen of Scots; he was the perfect representative of the fact that the royal families of Europe were not necessarily nationalist or religious partisans.

The marriage was celebrated by proxy, on 1 May 1625, in front of the west door of Notre Dame; on the same day the king issued a declaration that ‘all manner of prosecution’ against Roman Catholics should ‘be stayed and forborne, provided always that they behave themselves modestly therein’. This had been one of the stumbling blocks in the Spanish negotiations of previous years and a contemporary, John Chamberlain, now complained that ‘we are out of the frying-pan into the fire’. In the middle of the month Buckingham himself travelled to Paris in order to accompany Henrietta Maria across the Channel and to expedite the proposed alliance between England and France; he hoped to persuade the French king to treat his Protestant subjects, the Huguenots, with the same tact as Charles was now displaying to the Catholics. He also wished to draw the French into open warfare against the Spanish. In both respects he was unsuccessful, and in any case his flair or arrogance was not to the taste of Louis XIII. He is reported to have worn a white satin suit sewn all over with diamonds, and to have flirted with the wife of the French king; he also danced a saraband in front of her dressed as a Pantaloon.

Henrietta Maria eventually arrived at Dover on 12 June and was taken to the castle where Charles rode to meet her. She seemed to be taller than he anticipated, and she noticed him glancing at her feet in case she were wearing shoes like stepladders. ‘Sir,’ she said, ‘I stand upon mine own feet; I have no helps by art. Thus high I am, and am neither higher nor lower.’ She had spirit, therefore, and was described by an English observer, Joseph Mead, as ‘nimble and quick . . . in a word, a brave lady’. She was fifteen years old. Soon after her arrival she was discomfited by too much company in an overheated room. Mead reported that ‘with one frown . . . she drove us all out of the chamber. I suppose none but a queen could have cast such a scowl.’

A new parliament for the new reign was of paramount importance. Charles would have been happy to recall the old one, since it had favoured his anti-Spanish cause, but he was informed that the death of James had brought it to an end. He should have known this element of constitutional practice. A parliament had been called for May, but the onset of the plague in thirteen parishes of the city led to its postponement for a month. Charles opened the assembly with a speech in which he pressed for money to finance the recovery of the Palatinate. It is not at all clear, however, that the members wished to be drawn into a continental war and instead they seemed intent on domestic matters. After they had observed a day of fasting, they delivered to the king a ‘pious petition’ in which was demanded the immediate execution of ‘all the existing laws against Catholic recusants and missionaries’. The king had married a Catholic princess and, against the opinion of the country, had granted toleration to her co-religionists. The wrath of the Commons was then turned against one of the king’s chaplains, Richard Montagu, who in a theological tract effectively denied the Calvinist notion of predestination; the book was declared to be in contempt of the house, and the unfortunate divine was taken into custody.