A History of Britain, Volume 2 by Simon Schama Page A

expected to be entertained in palatial style. James made himself so much at home in his courtiers’ houses that one desperate host wrote a letter to his bulldog, Mr Jowler, asking him, since he had the royal attention, if he would not mind urging departure on the king. Inevitably, the ‘prodigy houses’ that had been going up in the last decades of Elizabeth’s reign became even more prodigious in James’s time. With Britain at peace, its aristocrats travelled more freely and widely in Europe and brought back with them exuberantly Mannerist designs for stone-clad façades and intricately carved interior panelling. The show places of the Jacobean grandees, like Robert Cecil’s Hatfield (the Hertfordshire estate given by the king in exchange for Cecil’s sumptuous Theobalds), the Earl of Pembroke’s Wilton in Wiltshire or the most prodigious monster of them all, the Earl of Suffolk’s Audley End in Essex (on which James passed his famous backhand compliment, ‘too big for a king but might do well enough for a Lord Treasurer’), boasted galleries as long as football pitches, and, now that the English glass industry had beenproperly established, great ranges of windows to light them. Even the furniture of the houses – beds, desks and cabinets – sprouted putti and sphinxes, obelisks and miniature temples. Draperies were required to be especially stunning and often renewed. Some £14,000 were spent just to furnish the Countess of Salisbury’s (by definition temporary) lying-in chamber with white satin, embroidered with gold and ornamented with pearls. Nothing was too fantastic not to be diverting, especially the stunning gardens, which, since they now featured complicated riddles and allusions to the classics, embedded in statuary, fountains and grottoes, now required specialized hydraulic engineers, like the de Caus family, to design and maintain them.
    All this was, of course, ruinously expensive, and many of the most ambitious builders were duly ruined. The most prodigal of all, the king (whose spending was at twice the rate of Elizabeth), drove successive treasurers to distraction attempting to find ways to support his extravagances. There were old ways and there were new ways, but none of them ever came up with enough money and all of them created resentment. The old ways featured the exploitation of ‘Crown rights’ like the ‘purveyances’, the right granted to the Crown to set prices for goods and services, ostensibly for the household, at well below market rates. Over time it seemed easier, especially to the Crown, to settle for money sums that represented the difference between purveyance prices and market prices, instead of the goods themselves. What had begun as something necessary to the dignity of the Crown had degenerated into a racket. That the honour of the Crown – still an important element in its authority – was shabbily compromised by James’s creation of more than 800 new knights at £30 a head was obvious from all the jokes showing up in libels and ballads featuring figures like ‘Sir Fabian Scarecrow’, whose landlady coughed up the necessary for his knighthood.
    None of these expedients was likely to endear the Crown to its subjects, especially out in the country, where knighthood and aristocratic hierarchy were still treated with reverence. Likewise, when the government sold tax ‘farms’ (the right, in return for an up-front sum, to run a tax-collection or customs operation as a private business), it seemed to be delivering the helpless consumer to a private individual who had an interest in maximizing his take in a period of continuing low wages and high prices. In many respects it was no worse than their experience in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign. But then there had been hope, by now gone, that James’s government would be an improvement. By 1610 it was clear to Robert Cecil, now