In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes explains why King James I grew frustrated in his dealings with Parliament and decided to avoid calling that body into session and ruling the kingdom directly:

King James I (of England) and VI (of Scotland)
Portrait by Daniel Myrtens, 1621 from the National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons.

By the end of 1610, James’s disillusionment with the House of Commons was complete — it was, he said, after six years of fruitlessly wrangling for parliamentary taxes, like a “House of Hell”.

So, despite failing to reach a permanent financial settlement, James decided to try to rule without it. His debts were huge, and his deficit substantial. But after the failure of 1610 he would do everything he could to never have to summon a Parliament again. Although he couldn’t actually afford it, he decided to try ruling as an absolutist monarch anyway — to embark on “personal rule”.

This extraordinary decision, to be an absolutist ruler without adequate financial support, would have dramatic consequences for England’s foreign policy, and perhaps on the whole balance of Europe too. James had already tried to reduce the costs of war when he came to the throne in 1603, by immediately concluding a peace with the vast Spanish Empire. Yet peace now became a necessity — if he couldn’t even plug the deficit during peacetime, he could not possibly pay for a war. Recognising this, Spain intervened freely in the affairs of the Protestant German states, confident that England would not be able to come to their aid.

To make matters worse, James’s financial woes made him especially susceptible to foreign influence. A poor king could be bought. Some of the smaller but wealthier European dynasties began to offer James large sums for his children’s hands in marriage. In 1611, the duke of Savoy offered a vast dowry of £210,000 for his daughter to marry James’s eldest son and heir, Prince Henry. The notoriously wealthy grand duke of Tuscany even put in a bid for £300,000. France then offered £240,000 — not as high, but it had the greater status as a kingdom. Any of these amounts would have plugged the deficit for a few years, even if they were nowhere near to eliminating James’s debt. Yet Henry died in 1612 at the age of eighteen, before any match was agreed, and James’s new heir Charles was much younger and sickly. There was now no rush, so the bidding war ceased. Indeed, by 1616 Charles had given England’s rivals yet another way to influence its king. The Spanish Hapsburgs dangled the prospect of a gigantic dowry of £600,000, but dragged their feet in negotiations, keeping James focused for as long as they could on trying to keep them sweet.

In the meantime, with Henry’s death denying him an immediate windfall, James in 1613 turned [to] Ireland. The Irish Parliament had not been summoned for over a quarter of a century, but it could be a way to reduce the costs of the occupation of Ireland and even raise some funds. The Parliament was initially a disaster. James had flagrantly gerrymandered a Protestant majority by chartering dozens of new towns, particularly in the English plantations in Ulster. Each new town was a borough constituency able to choose its own MPs, and James could even select their initial members — especially in cases where the towns were actually only tiny villages. In protest, the Catholic MPs refused to even recognise the new borough MPs, so each side elected their own Speaker. The Catholic Speaker was only forced out of the chair when the Protestant Speaker was hoisted onto his lap. Nonetheless, although James was legally entitled to create as many new boroughs as he liked, he soon compromised and in 1615 the Irish Parliament ended up voting him some cash.

But the delays forced James’s hand, and in 1614 he briefly suspended his foray into personal rule by summoning the English Parliament again. He needn’t have bothered. Having embarked on personal rule, James had doubled down on legally dubious ways of raising cash, like imposing new customs duties without parliamentary approval — measures that had already been deeply unpopular with MPs in 1610. This time, the Parliament lasted just two months and two days before James dissolved it in a rage — the House of Hell had proved even more impudent than before. One of the veteran opposition leaders, Sir Edwin Sandys, went so far as to explicitly compare James’s impositions on trade to tyranny, before reminding the Commons that tyrants often met a bloody end. When the Parliament was dissolved, the king had MPs’ notes on impositions burned, and a few of the ringleaders were even briefly imprisoned. But with the dissolution of Parliament, which had not voted him any cash, he was still none the richer.