Civil War: The History of England Volume III Read Online Free Page B

said, ‘though sorely against my will.’ It did not come to that.
    The members of the Commons had continued their ordinary business on the day they were meant to be destroyed; a committee on Spanish trade was established, and a petition was discussed from a member asking to be excused on account of gout. Yet by the end of May 1606, they had passed an Act ‘for the better discovering and repressing of popish recusants’; one of its provisions was an oath of allegiance, drawn up by Archbishop Bancroft, which acknowledged James to be the lawful king beyond any power of the pope to depose him. Catholics were obliged to attend the services of the established Church and to receive holy communion at least once a year; the penalties included fines or the impropriation of property. No recusant was to come within 10 miles of London, and a statute of the previous reign was revived prohibiting any recusant from travelling further than 5 miles from his or her home. No recusant could practise as an attorney or as a doctor.
    These measures did not bring about the demise of the old faith. The Catholics merely withdrew from political activity during the reign of James and largely remained quiet or quiescent. Most of them were willing to accept the oath of allegiance in order to secure both peace and property; only the Jesuitically inclined were still eager to support the pretensions of the pope. James himself said of the oath that he wished to make a distinction between the doctrinaire Catholics and those ‘who although they were otherwise popishly affected, yet retained in their hearts the print of theirnatural duty to their sovereign’. The previous sanctions against the puritans had been only hesitantly or partially imposed; the same policy of caution was now pursued against the Catholics. James had no wish to make martyrs out of his subjects. It was in any case far easier, in the early seventeenth century, to make laws than to enforce them.
    The court of James I, its excesses having already become public knowledge, was now notorious for its laxity; drunkenness and dissimulation, venality and promiscuity, were its most significant characteristics. Freedom of manners was the only rule. The earl of Pembroke was believed to have a horror of frogs, so the king put one down his neck. The king himself had an aversion to pigs, and so Pembroke led one into the royal bedchamber. One courtier took into the palace at Whitehall ‘four brawny pigs, piping hot, bitted and harnessed with ropes of sausages, all tied to a monstrous pudding’. The sausages were hurled about the room while the fools and dwarves of the court began leaping on one another’s shoulders.
    In Sejanus, His Fall , a play performed in the first year of the king’s reign, Ben Jonson alluded to courtiers when he wrote that:
    We have no shift of faces, no cleft tongues,
    No soft and glutinous bodies that can stick
    Like snails on painted walls . . .
    ‘If I were to imitate the conduct of your republic,’ the king told the Venetian ambassador, ‘and begin to punish those who take bribes, I should soon not have a single subject left.’
    When the king of Denmark arrived in the summer of 1606 the courtiers of Whitehall were said by Sir John Harington ‘to wallow in beastly delights’ while the ladies ‘abandon their sobriety and are seen to roll about in intoxication’. A great feast was held for the two sovereigns, in the course of which was shown a representation of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The lady who played the queen carried various gifts to the two kings ‘but forgetting the steps arising to the canopy overset her caskets into his Danish majesty’s lap and fell at his feet . . . His Majesty then got up and would dance with the Queen of Sheba, but he fell down and humbled himself before her, and was carried to an inner chamber and laid on a bed of state.’Other actors in the pageant, such as Hope and Faith, ‘were both sick and spewing in the lower hall’.