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The Changing Role of the Monarchical Institution in Britain Until the Glorious Revolution (1688)

It is during the first two decades of Elizabeth's reign (1558-1603) that the full impact of earlier changes became evident, a process that led directly to the literary achievements of the 1580s and 1590s.To some extent this can be credited to the surprizing and unexpected stability of the government and her cautious, moderate religious settlement. However, the religious turmoil of the previous reigns had left a negative effect. The Dissolution of the Monasteries meant the closure of religious houses in the universities; the abolition of the study of cannon law in 1535 closed one traditional career; and theology seemed closer to a minefield than a route to preferment. Scotland had a subsistence economy to which trade and exploration were marginal. Economic planning and the new technology were therefore rather alien to James I, who came from a very literate, theologically obsessed court and capital, and was himself fluent in the ancient languages. In the visual arts he had little education. In Scotland the old abbeys were falling into ruin; James V's palace at Holyrood Abbey was in a sorry state; other castles were no match for what he saw in Denmark when he went to meet and marry his queen in 1589. The King had no clear intention of transforming London into a new-style city: he had neither the energy nor the interest in the visual arts which such an enterprise would have required. He took Lord Burghley's second son, Robert Cecil to London as his mentor. After the eclipse of cecil, the Howard family maintained some power, and orientated the King away from his Protestant alliances. James's only daughter Elizabeth (extremely popular in Britain,partly because she was identified with the Great Queen, her grandmother) had married Frederick the Elector Palatine in 1613 who shortly afterwards (1619) was to be elected King of Bohemia, but was driven from Prague by Emperor Ferdinand and from his Rhenish Palatinate by the Flanders Spaniards. Indeed Edward Herbert lost his Paris posting for failing to interest the French in the rescue of the Palatinate; the affairs of the unfortunate Queen of Bohemia were to engage British politics for half a century. Meanwhile, James's personality slowly transformed the system of government which he had inherited from the Tudors, who had centralised power in a courtly civil service by making favourites of their managers. James, with his great belief in a miraculous, or perhaps merely sacramental, wisdom granted to kings when they were anointed in the course of the coronation ceremony, had no interest in government as administration, and attempted (and failed) to turn favourites, chosen for their good looks and charm as well as for their ability to flatter their monarch and provider, into managers. Policy in the latter part of James's reign was controlled by Buckingham, who had an understanding with the learned and sharp Spanish ambassador, Count Gondomar; he led the first negotiations for a marriage between the Prince of Wales and the Infanta, daughter of Philip III. When these negotiations broke down, he benefited from Richelieu's anti-Spanish, anti-imperial policy which involved him in a number of Protestant alliances, and married his son to Henrietta Maria of France, the sister of Louis XIII. During these negotiations various arrangements with Rome were discussed, which were on the whole very unpopular in the country.

The King and parliament

The voice of the squirearchy was the Commons. The merchants also had their say in it, but they formed a minority, and not a vociferous one; and their intrests were also represented in the Lords, in which many of the more powerful investors took their seat. The high and mighty doings of the courtiers, which were indulged by the Elizabethan Commons, were viewed with increasing disfavour by the Stuart House, especially when it came to their being paid for out of taxation. And yet that is what the unwritten constitution of the British monarchy, as it had been more or less set up by Simon de Monfort, demanded: the sovereign and the executive spent the taxes but they had to summon parliament in order to be able to impose and collect them. In turn, the Lords and Commons could not sit until summoned to do so by the monarch. In order to raise tax for any enterprise, whether road-building or war, the Commons were needed and once they had gathered they inevitably discussed the merits of what the King proposed. James had found these discussions and the criticism of his court, or of the distribution of offices and monopolies, irksome, the protests and remonstrances provoking. Charles would find it even more difficult to raise money through parliamnet, which reduced his budgets and criticised his religious opinions. He tried several ruses (such as pawning the crown jewels in Holland), but could not succeed in the end. Charles, even more clearly than James, saw himself as answerable to noone but God, and as the father of his country he sometimes used the prerogative courts to defend tenant against yeoman and squire, or to control the provisions of the poor law by central government. These actions antagonised the Commons quite as much as some aspects of his foreign policy-such as his siding with Spain against the Dutch in 1631. In the final clashes Charles behaved, as he often did, aggressively and indecisevely by turns-with results disastrous to himself. The first Stuarts had failed to appreciate another development of importance in their realm, the growth of the City of London. Even in England four-fifths of the population still lived on the land, and land was the prime investment and the ultimate guarantee of much capital. James I had already established monopolies on private taxation and on some home manufactured goods which he sold or gave to courtiers, but he also encroached on the monopolies essential to the trading companies.

The King and the Church

Royal policy had inevitably to be concerned almost as much with religious passions as with directly political issues, though less with divinity proper as with ecclesiology and church government. Henry VIII's quarrel with Rome had been about discipline, not about theology. Before the breach, Pope Leo X had named Henry "Defender of the Faith" for publishing a book which attacked Luther's sacramental doctrines. After the breach with Rome the King went on burning heretics,but he also flirted intermittently with Lutheran alliances, as well as with a return to the Roman obedience-though neither suited his purpose. Queen Elizabeth maintained old liturgical properties, would not put up with married bishops and did not even approve of married clergy, though she did not hesitate to appropriate cathedral revenues when money seemed short. As a result of all this her clergy were decidedly underpaid, confused by the quick switches in theology and worship, and somewhat under-educated. James I had early on conceived a solid loyalty to moderate sacramental theology. He was firmly committed to episcopal government-and to ritual. Francisco Suarez, the most influential of the Jesuit theologians, seems to have considered monarchy as a kind of by-product of a commonwealth based on a form of social contract, and considered the monarch responsible to the society he ruled, and not to God alone. He was not very interested in the sacramantal nature of the monarchy, and was convinced of the subjects' duty to rebel against an impious or apostate monarch. In spite of the bitterness and violence of religious conflicts, the cultural centre of Europe, whatever the political pressures from France and Spain, was still Italy.But a powerful change, which coincides approximately with the Commonwealth in Britain, was a gradual shift from Italy to France, a move which was engineered, even forced, through centralising. The great developments in astronomy, physics and arts had a great cultural influence upon the 17th century Britain.