Plenty begot ease BOOKS

JOEL HURSTFIELD

The kings and queens of England were passing out of fashion in history lessons at about the time that I was leaving school. This was based, I think, on two errors: that children were not interested in them and that in any case they were not important. In fact, the subject of kingship, in its social setting, is perennially fascinating for, in English history, the monarchy has always attempted to combine truth with illusion, the harsh facts of politics with the divine attributes of an anointed crown; the daily routine of Exchequer finance with the mystic healing of the royal touch. Because of these inherent complexities in its traditional role, historians have somehow managed at one and the same time to over- rate and underrate its powers and influence.

How much nearer do the two books under review carry us towards an understanding of English kingship? It must be said at once that the title of Professor W. K. Jordan's book, Edward VI: the Young King, the Protector- ship of the Duke of Somerset (Allen and Unwin 70s), is a misnomer. In 523 pages, which cover only the first two years of his reign, Edward VI makes only brief and shadowy appearances: the central figure is his uncle, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, Lord Protector. We catch a rare glimpse of Edward as a boy of nine receiving surreptitious gifts of £20 from the Lord Admiral at a time when ministers of the crown were filling their pockets and enlarging their estates at the king's expense. We meet him again two years later being bundled at night from Hamp- ton Court to Windsor by the Protector in a hopeless bid to retain power. The wretched monarch retired to bed with a heavy cold and the Protector to a spell of imprisonment in the Tower.

Little is known about these early years of the young monarch who, by the time of his death at the age of fifteen, was already dis- playing all the qualities of a humourless prig, made worse by his hereditary obsession with theology. (Of Henry VIII's three children only Elizabeth was free of the disorder.) But we see in this book a great deal of the rapid decay of the Tudor monarchy. Within two years of Henry's death his will had, in one important respect, been set aside; his high Anglicanism was being forced to yield place to a radical Protestantism; his privy council, which had been his instrument, had become the master of the crown; and authority in the state_as a whole had almost collapsed in the face of social revolution. It had needed only this brief minority to thrust into jeopardy the unparalleled monolithic power of Henry Tudor.

How had this extraordinary collapse come about? In part the explanation lies in the economic conditions of mid-Tudor England. 'God,' wrote an unfriendly ambassador at the court of Henry VIII, 'has entirely abandoned this king.' It certainly looked, under his son, as though God had abandoned the whole heretical nation. During this period the English overseas market began to collapse, unemploy- ment was widespread, agriculture backward, food scarce and dear, inflation rampant. Each week brought fresh and alarming news from abroad as the pound sagged lower and lower on the exchanges. And war was in prospect.

Like the heirs of Stalin after the dictator's death, the Protector Somerset suddenly found himself in power with all the forms of authority but no policy to set forth. For lack of that he had certain theories about society which carried him forward with extraordinary zeal. He would liberalise social and religious life, dis- mantle all the apparatus of Tudor despotism, and yet, without this machinery, would direct from the centre an ambitious programme for social reform and the redistribution of wealth. He assembled around him a brains trust of radical economists, social reformers and pro- gressive churchmen; and between them they hammered out a scheme for a wealth tax (on sheep) and for opening up some of the en- closed land to the peasantry.

This wealthy nobleman, with his immense newly acquired estates, with his passion to establish his fame in stone—his name but not his building still survives in the Strand— found himself the leader of a disorderly agrarian movement with nothing to unite them but a profound discontent. He and the little group of intellectuals around him were swept along by the hopes they had released. `Maugre the Devil, private profit, self-love, money and such like the Devil's instruments,' he cried, 'it shall go forward. . . .' The Protector found himself trapped in a contradiction. He was the head of the government in London and the patron of dissent in the provinces.

The peasants resolved the contradiction for him. Unwilling to wait for reform they rushed headlong to rebellion. The socially powerful in London and the provinces watched aghast at these predictable consequences of the Pro- tector's adventures. Large parts of East Anglia were up in arms and Kett was in control of lacobus VI Rex Scotorum, from a painting by an unknown artist at Falkland Palace, Norwich. There had been sporadic risings else- where and a dangerous religious revolt in the West Country. To put down Kett's rebellion Somerset called on the Earl of Warwick, his great rival and his severest critic. Within a few weeks Warwick had crushed both Kett and the Protector.

Professor Jordan is least good in his lengthy, elaborate accounts of the implementation of policy, for example in foreign affairs, and he is at his best in his analysis of the progressive erosion of Somerset's authority as the forces of reaction closed in on him. If this book had been some 200 pages shorter, its structure might have been better and it would have enabled him to express to the full his unrivalled know- ledge and subtle, compassionate understanding as one of the leading American historians of Tudor England. We look forward to his second volume.

The monarchy never recovered from its ex- periences under Edward VI, and Mary; and Elizabeth, the last of the Tudors, realised this but restored most of its prestige and a good deal of its power. I think, too, that James I realised that things would never be the same again; but he tried on occasion to persuade the English political nation that nothing had hap- pened, that this Scottish Solomon was indeed an earthly god. Did contemporaries share his view? 'I pray unfeignedly,' wrote Sir Roger Wilbraham at the beginning of his reign in England, `that his most gracious disposition and heroic mind be not depraved_ with ill coun- sell, and that neither the wealth and peace of England make him forget ,God, nor the painted flattery of the Court cause him forget himself.'

This passage is taken from James I by his Contemporaries (Hutchinson 42s), Professor Robert Ashton's excellent edition of numerous contemporary and near-contemporary accounts of the king in all aspects of his life, with valuable introductory and link passages by the editor. It makes fascinating reading whether in the study or at the bedside.

If the volume as a whole does not modify the accepted view of James I, it does much to illuminate it. We see him in his troubled childhood in Scotland, the son of a murdered father and exiled mother, trying to hold his own amidst the barbarous feuds of a decadent society. We see him in England, after the first rapture of a joyful, peaceful succession, declining rapidly in popular esteem. We meet him with his slobbering speech, his ungainly walk, his extravagant taste for pretty young men. 'The setting up of these golden calves,' said Osborne, 'cost England more than Queen Elizabeth spent in all her wars.' We see his utter devotion to Buckingham which leads him, when young Charles squirts water at the favourite, to give the prince 'two boxes in the ear.' For his daughter Elizabeth, James had a deep affection. However, on the morning after her wedding 'the King went to visit these young turtles that were coupled on St Valen- tines day, and did strictly examine him [the groom] whether he ,were his true son-in-law, and was sufficiently assured. . . .' What a mind!

But we see much also in this book of the public face of James I: his diplomacy, his religious policy, his interest in scholarship— which wins him the extravagant praise of Francis Bacon—his patronage of John Donne. We meet again his condemnation of the 'new weed, tobacco': he thinks that 'no learned man ought to taste it, and wished it forbidden.' And finally we have Arthur Wilson's opinion of him as he looked back on his reign:

'Some paralleled him to Tiberius for dis- simulation, yet peace was maintained by him as in the time of Augustus: and peace begot plenty, and plenty begot ease and wanton- ness, and ease and wantonness begot poetry •

It might have been good for the memory of James I if the passage had ended there. But, Wilson went on, after poetry came satire. And the things that men wrote, he says, are too repulsive to repeat.

The facts were in conflict with the illusions and were parting company. All this was implicit in the reign of Henry VIII's son when the Pro- tector Somerset attempted his impossible task. In the reign of James l's son it became explicit; and it fell to the executioner to try with one stroke to sever fact from illusion.