The Accession of James Stuart and the Kingdom of Great Britain, 1603–1610

The accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England and Great Britain triggered a series of negotiations as to what the new British polity would be like and how far the Elizabethan settlement of religion might be subject to alteration. James manipulated the agendas of a range of interest groups in order to remodel both the court and, in some sense, to remake the (British) State. One crucial aspect of that process was the making of peace with Spain and an attempt to shadow the major European royal houses without getting drawn into the political conflicts which replaced the wars which had concluded in 1598. But the attempt to maintain a quasi-nonconfessional mode of politics inevitably encountered a Protestant critique of the king and court which James sought to defuse by tacking his public pronouncements on papal authority to his, arguably, absolutist readings of royal power.

Dynastic Marriage Diplomacy, Parliamentary Conflict, Peace and War, 1621–1629

Some of the more successful historical writing on the early Stuart period deals with an apparent rise of parliamentary influence over and against the court. But it can equally well be argued that the 1620s saw a failure of parliaments as the crown’s dynastic strategy eventually took precedence over the concerns of, especially, Protestant-minded representatives of the people. The conflict between the two modes of doing politics can be picked up from the reactions caused by, for example, the brief period when it seemed that the prince of Wales might marry a Spanish infanta. That conflict was not resolved by the Anglo-French dynastic marriage treaty of 1625. After the death of James I, Charles found himself at war with Spain and, then, briefly with France as well. Domestic politics was convulsed by the perceived corruption of the Caroline court, dominated by the ubiquitous favourite, the duke of Buckingham.

The Jacobean Polity and the Failure of Via Media Politics, 1611–1620

After the assassination of Henry IV of France, the resulting weakness of the French regency government and the proposal for a Franco-Spanish dynastic treaty meant that King James was compelled to look to an overtly Protestant foreign (dynastic) alliance; the result was the Anglo-Palatine marriage treaty of 1612. That there was a British dimension to the resulting fractures in the Jacobean polity could be picked up from troubles in Ireland where there was more than one prescription for guaranteeing civil peace and national security. These fractures became even more apparent when war threatened and then actually commenced in central Europe over the Bohemian succession. James was at risk of being dragged into the conflict because his son-in-law Frederick V had accepted the Bohemian crown after the Archduke Ferdinand was deposed. This left James faced with calls to prosecute a war on behalf of his European Protestant friends while he himself tended to think that dynastic diplomacy was a better bet.

Puritans, Catholics, and Dynastic Crises, 1571–1582

This chapter deals with the period after the dynastic ‘turning point that did not turn’ at the end of the 1560s, that is, when Mary Stuart failed to recover the ground that she had lost after being deposed in Scotland. It covers the relative peace in Church and State in England up to the mid-1570s, a peace which was destabilized inter alia by Elizabeth’s unwillingness to subscribe to the agenda of some of her councillors who wished her to agree to a more actively Protestant raft of policies than she would concede. A more aggressive form of popular politics, both puritan and Catholic, was the result by the end of the 1570s when Elizabeth temporarily opted for an Anglo-French dynastic union as a way of dealing on her own terms with the difficulties that now confronted her.

The Elizabethan Settlement, the Issue of the Royal Succession, and the Emergence of Religious Dissent, c.1558–1571

This chapter rehearses the dis/continuities between the reigns of Mary Tudor and Elizabeth Tudor. It looks at the attempts to embed the new regime in England and Ireland in and after 1558/1559 and at the foreign policy issues which Elizabeth’s accession generated. First and foremost, this meant the relationship with Scotland, particularly after the return from the Continent of Mary Stuart. In the early and mid-1560s contemporaries witnessed the Scottish queen doing all the things that the English queen was conspicuously failing to do, that is, until the implosion of Mary’s government, her deposition, and the civil war in Scotland. Mary’s arrival in England produced a breakdown of consensus about how her relationship to Elizabeth should be negotiated; in the end there was a rebellion in the North of England which was phrased in part by reference to Catholic hostility to the Elizabethan settlement of religion.

European Politics and the Stuart Succession in England, 1593–1603

Here the politics of the British Isles is viewed in the context of the resolution of the French royal succession crisis—after Henry IV’s conversion to Rome. The gradual collapse of the Holy League had a knock-on effect in England and Scotland; arguments for excluding James VI as Elizabeth’s successor were now harder to make. But, as the regime in England turned legitimist, this provoked a range of critiques of indefeasible hereditary right. Prominent among them were the works of Catholic ideologues. The chapter concludes by looking at the peace treaty agreed between France and Spain in 1598, a peace which made necessary a toleration of the Huguenot minority (which some thought might be a precedent for tolerance of Catholic separatists in England); and also at the way that British succession issues were played out in a military setting in Ireland as the reign of Elizabeth drew to a close.

Protestant Foreign Policy and the Coming of War, 1582–1593

The Anjou marriage diplomacy triggered a series of reactions. The chapter deals with James VI’s attempts to free himself from the control of Anglophile elements within his court. The response of those around Elizabeth was to become increasingly hostile to Mary Stuart and, against Elizabeth’s wishes, to evolve republican schemes in response to the unsettled English succession and also to intervene militarily in the Netherlands. The narratives of the English and French succession crises began to move in step at this point, that is as, after Anjou’s death, it became an issue as to whether the Huguenot Henry of Navarre ought to be allowed to take the French crown after Henry III. The latter half of the chapter deals with the exclusion of the Scottish queen from the English line of succession, the war with Spain and the Armada of 1588, and the turn of a certain sort of Catholic to the Scotland of James VI as their best hope for the political future.

Introduction

The introduction provides a short discussion of the methodology and historical assumptions of the volume. It explains that the aim of the book is to run different narratives of the period against each other—narratives which have tended in the past to be kept separate. First and foremost, here, we have comparatively well-known accounts of the period based on European high politics and international relations rooted in, inter alia, dynastic unions between royal houses. The period is framed in part by attempts to secure political consensus and stability through alliances of this kind. Secondly we have a series of narratives which record contemporary critiques of royal authority, critiques which were frequently phrased by reference to the language of religion, and not least to constructions of orthodoxy which were not merely Protestant ones.

Conclusion

Historians have often seen the advent of the personal rule of Charles I as the product of failure, and a harbinger of bad things to come. But it was equally possible for contemporaries to argue that things were the other way around and that the move towards an assured succession in the direct line, on the basis of alliance with a major European power, was the best way to guarantee civil peace, a peace which could not in the end be secured by the cause of pan-European Protestantism or by anything that looked like puritan zeal. Of course, such a view was brought into radical question during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. At the very least, however, this adds a new dimension to the discussion of the causes of that conflict and for an analysis of the politics of the Interregnum and the Restoration.