Jacobean era

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jacobean era produced its most famous near-disaster on the 5th of November 1605. A group of English Catholics, including Guy Fawkes, meant to hide gunpowder barrels beneath the Palace of Westminster and blow up Parliament in session. They also hoped to kill the king. The plot was exposed and prevented, and the convicted plotters were hanged, drawn, and quartered.

  The king in question was James VI of Scotland, who inherited the English crown in 1603 and became James I. The Jacobean era is the period of his reign, and its name comes from Jacobus, the Latin form of James. It followed the Elizabethan era and gave way to the Caroline era.

  What kind of ruler was this man, and what did his reign do to the royal finances? Why does his refusal to join a great continental war now look like one of his wisest choices? And how did these same years produce some of the most celebrated writing in the English language?

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• 2. Crowns and Colonies

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  Jamestown, Virginia, was founded in 1607, and Newfoundland followed in 1610. These were the first British colonies on the North American continent. Closer to home, the Parliament of Scotland began the Plantation of Ulster in 1609.

  At the same time, a single man now wore the crowns of both England and Scotland. The two kingdoms were not formally merged. Sharing one ruler nevertheless worked as a practical unification. Historians treat that change as an important shift of order for both nations, one that still shapes them today.

  A third North American colony arrived in 1621, when Plymouth Colony was planted in Massachusetts. Together, these settlements laid the foundation for later British settlement and for the eventual formation of both Canada and the United States of America.

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• 3. A King's Ledger

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  Croft cites Fontenay's portrait of James as a "curious combination of ability and complacency, idleness and shrewd judgement, warm emotions and lack of discretion." Historians have long debated this king's ruling style. Croft adds that the pragmatism of "little by little" came to mark how James governed. In his view, Fontenay's description held true for the whole of James's life.

  The royal accounts show that temperament at work. James was already deeply in debt in Scotland. After 1603 he inherited a further English debt of £350,000 from Elizabeth. By 1608 that figure had grown to £1,400,000, and it was rising by £140,000 every year.

  Lord Treasurer Robert Cecil answered with a crash program of selling off royal demesnes. By 1610 the debt stood at £300,000 and the yearly deficit at £46,000. Cecil could not repeat the trick much further, especially against the king's large spending habits.

  Each shortfall sent the crown back to Parliament for financial support. The negotiations were tense and often failed. The strain worsened under James and his son and heir Charles I, until it ended in the crisis of the English Civil War.

  The era itself closed in a severe economic depression that ran from 1620 to 1626. An outbreak of bubonic plague in London in 1625 made it worse.

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• 4. A Peacemaker Abroad

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  James called himself "Rex Pacificus," meaning "King of Peace," and the source describes his devotion to peace as sincere. He wanted calm across all of Europe, not only across his three kingdoms. That was a hard wish on a deeply polarized continent. The smaller established Protestant states faced the aggression of larger Catholic empires, and the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648 loomed.

  In 1604 James made peace with Catholic Spain. He also made it his policy to marry his daughter to the Spanish prince.

  On the 14th of February 1613, at Whitehall, his daughter Princess Elizabeth married Frederick V, Elector Palatine. The wedding was more than the social event of the era, because the union carried political and military weight. German princes were then banding together in the Union of German Protestant Princes, headquartered in Heidelberg, the capital of the Palatine.

  James calculated that the marriage would win him influence among the Protestants. With a connection to each side, he expected to broker peaceful settlements. In his naivete, he failed to see that both sides were treating him as a tool for destroying the other.

  Spain and Emperor Ferdinand II, the Vienna-based leader of the Habsburgs who controlled the Holy Roman Empire, were both shaped by the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Their goal was to expel Protestantism from their domains.

  At court, meanwhile, Lord Buckingham's influence was growing, and he wanted an alliance with Spain.

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• 5. Bohemia and Backlash

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  Buckingham took Charles with him to Spain to woo the Infanta Maria Anna. Spain's terms were that James must drop Britain's anti-Catholic intolerance. Buckingham and Charles were humiliated. Buckingham then became the leader of the widespread British demand for a war against Spain.

  In 1619, Frederick and Elizabeth were elected King and Queen of Bohemia, and the choice outraged Vienna. The Habsburg Emperor ousted the new king and queen and massacred their followers. That was the start of the Thirty Years' War. Catholic Bavaria then invaded the Palatine, and Frederick begged his father-in-law for military help.

  The Protestant princes also looked to Britain, the strongest of all the Protestant countries, for support. James finally saw that his policies had backfired, and he refused the pleas. He kept Britain out of a war that proved devastating for three decades.

  His backup plan was to marry Charles to a French Catholic princess, who would bring a handsome dowry. Parliament and the British people strongly opposed any Catholic marriage. They demanded immediate war with Spain and favored the Protestant cause in Europe. James had alienated both elite and popular opinion, and Parliament was cutting its financing.

  Historians nevertheless credit him for pulling back from a major war at the last minute. His determination to stay out, even during the "war fever" of 1623, appears in retrospect as one of the most significant and most positive aspects of his reign.

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• 6. Page, Stage and Masque

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  King Lear appeared in 1605, Macbeth in 1606, and The Tempest in 1610, all written during James's reign. Patronage came from the king and also from his wife, Anne of Denmark. John Webster, Thomas Middleton, John Ford and Ben Jonson wrote powerful works in the same years.

  Jonson also contributed some of the era's best poetry, alongside the Cavalier poets and John Donne. In prose, the most representative works are those of Francis Bacon and the King James Bible.

  In 1617 George Chapman completed a monumental translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse. These were the first complete English translations of either poem. Until then, the wildly popular tale of the Trojan War had reached English readers only through medieval epic retellings such as Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye.

  Jonson was also an innovator in the masque, a hybrid art that developed intensely in this era. His name is linked with Inigo Jones, who worked with him on the literary and the visual and technical sides. Jonson's The Masque of Blackness and The Masque of Queens are among the best known.

  The high cost of these spectacles set the Stuarts far apart from the relative frugality of Elizabeth's reign. It alienated the middle classes and the Puritans, who saw a prospect of waste and self-indulgent excess.

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• 7. Natural Philosophy

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  In Germany, Johannes Kepler was carrying the Copernican revolution to a new level, and in Italy so was Galileo Galilei. Science was entering a key phase.

  Francis Bacon laid a foundation for modern inquiry and argued for it persuasively. His approach used empiricism as the lens for studying the natural world. It stood in stark contrast to the dominant philosophy of the time, medieval scholastic authoritarianism.

  On a more practical level, much work was going into navigation, cartography and surveying. John Widdowes' A Description of the World, published in 1621, is one significant volume in this area. Researchers also continued William Gilbert's work on magnetism from the previous reign.

  Scholarship and the sciences, then called natural philosophy, found important royal patrons. They were not so much the king as his son, Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales, and even his wife, Anne of Denmark.

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• 8. Painters and Builders

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  Paul van Somer and Daniel Mytens were the most prominent portrait painters of James's reign. Both were foreign talents, and foreign talent dominated the fine arts across the Tudor and Stuart periods. Anthony van Dyck would take that role under James's son.

  A native school of painting nevertheless kept developing, as it had in the previous reign. It produced Robert Peake the Elder, who died in 1619, William Larkin, active from 1609 to 1619, and Sir Nathaniel Bacon, who lived from 1585 to 1627. Some also count Cornelius Johnson, or Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen, born and trained in London and active through the first two Stuart reigns.

  Furniture and other decorative arts grew richer in color, detail and design. Worldwide trade brought materials such as mother-of-pearl, which craftsmen used as decoration. Even familiar wood and silver were worked deeply into intricate, intensely three-dimensional forms. The goldsmith George Heriot made jewellery for Anne of Denmark.

  Buildings of the Jacobean era continued the Elizabethan style while leaning harder on classical elements such as columns and obelisks. Strapwork patterns came from continental engravings, especially the prints of Hans Vredeman de Vries, and appeared on buildings and furniture alike. Influences arrived from France, Flanders and Italy.

  Inigo Jones may be the most famous English architect of the period. His works include the Banqueting House in the Palace of Whitehall and the portico of Old St Paul's Cathedral, which the Great Fire of London destroyed. Significant Jacobean buildings include Hatfield House, Bolsover Castle, Aston Hall and Charlton House.

  Many churches hold fine monuments in the Jacobean style, with strapwork and polychromy among the characteristic motifs. The mason and sculptor Nicholas Stone produced many tomb effigies as well as architectural stonework.

  Customs, manners and everyday life in the Jacobean era had a distinctly religious tone. Tobacco from Virginia nevertheless grew popular.

  In 1604, James I published A Counterblaste to Tobacco. The book had no discernible effect. By 1612, London had 7,000 tobacconists and smoking houses.

  The colony planted at Jamestown survived because English smokers had acquired a taste for what Virginia could grow.

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