James requested cash from the Privy Council and it arrived by the coachload. They sent £5,000 in gold and £1,000 in silver. Jewellery for his Danish Queen Anne arrived from London (although not the Crown Jewels which were not allowed out of the country) as well as a selection of Elizabethâs hundreds of garnet- and pearl-encrusted dresses. Six geldings and a coach with four horses were dispatched to bring the king into England. On 5 April 1603, leaving his wife and children to follow him, James left Edinburgh for a journey through his new kingdom. It lasted over a month, spreading on through the beautiful spring weather into May. Nobility, gentlemen and chancers from north and south of the border accompanied him. It was a cavalcade. Most rode on horses. The wife of the French Ambassador was carried to London in âa chair with slingsâ, eight porters hired for the task, four to carry, four to relieve them.
The English turned out in their thousands to see the spectacle. James may have been unaware that the Privy Council had instructed them to do so and âif any shall be found disobedient, negligent or remisse therein, these are to let them know, that they are to sustaine such condigne punishment as their offense in that behalfe deservethâ. The gaiety had a whip at its back and the glittering pageant was an instrument of authority.
In Berwick-on-Tweed, all the guns of the border fortress town were fired at once. It was to be for the last time. The newly unified country needed no internal border fortresses and money could be saved if the garrison was dispersed. James was invited to fire one cannon himself. In Newcastle all prisoners were released except those in prison for âtreason, murther and papistrieâ. All those gaoled for debt had those debts paid off. James was hosing the money around him. In York a conduit ran all day with white wine and claret. At Worksop, the king was entertained to âexcellent, soule-ravishing musiqueâ by the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had hurried from Whitehall to meet him there.
James was nothing but bonhomie. The previously violent and lawless Scottish borders were to become, he announced, the âvery heart of the Countryâ in the new united empire of Great Britain, a phrase in use since the 1540s when Henry VIII and Edward VI had been anxious to unite England and Scotland, but now given a whole new Jacobean impetus. James had ordered new signets in which the rose and the thistle were to be intertwined. Unity and togetherness was his dream. An ensign for shipping was to be designed in which the Scottish saltire of St Andrew and the English cross of St George were to float side by side so that neither should have precedence over the other. There was to be a single currency in which the 20-shilling gold piece was to be called âThe Uniteâ, with âOur pictureâ on one side and âOur Armes Crownedâ on the other, emblazoned with the Latin motto Faciam eos in gentem unam, I shall make them into one nation. Here, in a practical and symbolic programme, the dream of authority and wholeness was, in Jamesâs vision at least, to become reality.
The new king would soon discover, however, that seventeenth-century Englishmen had about as much love for union, whether fiscal or political, as their modern descendants. The dream of unity â an abstract, intellectualised, Scottish and hence European ideal of political togetherness â would within a year fall foul of an English conservatism which valued its own hard-won freedoms far above any high-falutinâ ideas of political unity. England was England, the rosbifs dominated parliament, civilisation stopped at the Cheviots and the English Channel and ever, alas, would it remain so.
For the time being, life was a holiday. Largesse had been pouring in an unending fountain from Jamesâs hand. He had, in places, literally showered the streets with gold coins. Teams of the gentry were queueing up to be knighted, 237 of them in the first six weeks of the reign, 906 in the first four months, a sudden gush from the Fount of Honour, which under Elizabethâs last years had run virtually dry.
Then, on 21 April, as the pageant arrived at Newark in Lincolnshire, James made his first mistake. It was a bad one.
In this Towne, and in the Court, was taken a cut-purse doing the deed; and being a base pilfering theefe, yet was a Gentleman-like in the outside. This fellow had good store of coyne found about him; and upon examination confessed that he had from Barwick to that place plaied the cut-purse in the Court ⦠His Majestie hearing of this nimming gallant directed a warrant presently to the Recorder of New-warke, to have him hanged, which was accordingly executed.
What can have possessed James? Perhaps he was rattled by the presence of a thief in the midst of all this springtime hope and optimism? Maybe he assumed that the English king, so much more powerful than the Scottish, could from time to time behave with autocratic authority? Maybe, in a complex and troubled personality, it was simply a blip, an aberration? He could certainly behave very oddly at times. (Later in his reign, travelling back to Scotland, he dismounted at the border between the two countries and lay down across it to demonstrate to his courtiers how two kingdoms could exist in one person.) Whatever the cause, here in Newark he made the wrong decision.
Summary execution was not done in England, nor had it been for centuries. The government habitually tortured and executed people and displayed their heads (hard-boiled, so that the skin went black and had some resistance to the weather) on spikes at the south end of London Bridge, but none of this was done without going through the proper procedures. The Privy Council alone could authorise torture and execution. Jamesâs summary justice made all the talk of peacemaking and constitutional kingship look hollow. The courtiers were appalled. âI heare our new Kinge hath hanged one man before he was tryed,â Sir John Harington wrote. âTis strangely done; now if the wynde bloweth thus, why not a man be tryed before he hath offended?â A doubt was sown that James did not really comprehend the promised land in which he had arrived. Was the Scottish king suddenly out of his depth in the more evolved world of English politics? Was he likely to override or ignore the long established rule of the common law, of which the English were deeply proud? Harington would play it carefully. âI wyll keepe companie with my oves and boves, and go to Bathe and drinke sacke.â Or so he told his friends; in fact, he had sent James an elaborate and expensive astrological lantern by which the king could tell his fortune, and composed elegant, supplicatory letters to his new sovereign. Nothing was entirely as it seemed.
The thief dead, the show went on. James appeared one day as Robin Hood, âhis clothes as green as the grass he trod onâ. At Exton in Rutland he hunted âlive hares in basketsâ. Outside Stamford, visible from miles away, âan hundred high men, that seemed like the Patagones, huge long fellows of twelve and fourteene feet high, that are reported to live on the Mayne of Brasil, neere to the Streights of Megallaneâ turned out to be âa company of poore honest suitors, all going upon high stiltsâ. Outside Huntingdon, a crowd on their knees begged James to reopen some common land which had been enclosed and denied to them. The king ignored the request. Another crowd from Godmanchester greeted him with seventy ploughs, drawn by seventy plough-teams, but that too was just a show, another means, however oblique, of asking for money.
This was not the serious business, not the power-playing which would become more intense and more real once the cavalcade reached London. For now it was play-acting. For a few days, the king and the itinerant court stayed at Hinchinbrooke Abbey outside Huntingdon. It was the house of Sir Oliver Cromwell, MP, himself a loyal monarchist, drainer of the Fens, and subscriber to the planting and cultivating of Virginia. Cromwell put on a spectacular show for the new king and for the crowds, providing âbread and beefe for the poorestâ, meat and wine âand those not riffe-ruffe, but ever the best of the kindeâ for the gentry. Cromwell gave the king a gold cup, âsome goodly horsesâ, a pack of âflete and deep-mouthed houndesâ as well as âdivers hawkes of excellent wingeâ. Everything was calculated to make England look like an Arcadia of riches, and James appeared to believe the propaganda.
England was salivating over James, submissive and obsequious in turns, in a way that is so unabashed that it strikes us as odd. But this too requires an act of the imagination.
