Sabbatical Two: That Sassy Jacobean Attitude
Historial background
By the end of the sixteenth century, the English court was waiting for Elizabeth Tudor to die. Age did not become the Virgin Queen well – her conduct had deteriorated into a crabby, narcisstic caricature of the dashing imperiousness that had held center stage in European politics for so long. Most of the courtiers had never known a world without Elizabeth as its sun, but were hankering to try it out.
Her heir was the son of her old rival Mary, Queen of Scots and the rapscallion Lord Darnley – James VI of Scotland. From his infancy James had been surrounded by people hoping to get something from him. By the time Elizabeth shuffled off this mortal coil in 1603, James, in his mid-thirties, was distinguished mainly by his parsimony and distrust. He hid a huge inferiority complex behind a mask of genial buffoonery, reasoning that if he laughed at himself first, others would be less critical of his shortcomings. Though his fundamental interests lay (ahem) elsewhere, he had sired a sufficiency of heirs with his Queen (the starchy and status-mongering Anne of Denmark) to be sure that the Stuart dynasty would continue, then proceeded to let his hair down with a series of willowy young boy “favorites.” The chief of them, a peachy-faced lovely named George Villiers, became Duke of Buckingham and a valued advisor to the besotted King.
The combination of the Queen’s staunch Lutheranism and the bedrock Scots Protestantism of James’s boyhood made England not a particularly great place to be a Catholic for awhile. People who chose not to attend Church of England services were fined heavily as recusants – Catholics were also not allowed to hold any position of government authority nor practice any professions. There were still many powerful provincial families that had clung to their faith through Elizabeth’s milder discouragements and resented this new interloper and his arrogant ways. A small coterie of powerful Catholic aristocrats plotted to blow up James, his heirs and a good portion of England’s powerful by cramming the basement of Parliament with gunpowder the night before the session’s opening, when everyone would be present. A mercenary named Guy Faux was discovered, however, and the conspirators were rounded up and executed one, two, three.
The Gunpowder Plot did not improve James’s issues with trust. He grew more narrow, arrogant and intolerant, while Anne’s extravagances added to the unpopularity of the royal family with all levels of English society. The most cultured and disciplined of the Stuart family, Henry Prince of Wales, died of a fever in 1612, while his charming and devoted sister Elizabeth was married off to Germany and her own troubles. Charles, the remaining child and the new heir to the throne, had absorbed his father’s notions of the absolute powers of kings – notions in direct opposition to the growing feeling among the English people as a whole that they had something to say about who would rule them and how. Charles’s attempts to revive an almost medieval model of absolute kingship got him nothing but a date with the executioner’s axe. If it had not been that the English found Cromwell’s brand of moral absolutism as obnoxious as Charles the First’s, James’s son might have been the last King of England.