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

given the thankless job of Lord Treasurer in addition to being Secretary of State, that something had to be done to find amore dependable source of income for the Crown. In that year he did his best to sell a ‘Great Contract’ to parliament, in which the Crown would relinquish its feudal rackets, like purveyances and ‘wardships’ (the right to manage the property of a feudal minor), in return for a guaranteed annual revenue of £200,000. The deal came to grief when, simultaneously, James decided to demand compensation for the abolition of wardship officers and parliament came to the conclusion that it had overpaid. In the general bitterness, the row over money turned constitutional. Dissolving the uncooperative parliament, James denounced the Commons who had ‘perilled and annoyed our health, wounded our reputation, embouldened an ill-natur’d people, encroached on many of our privileges and plagued our purse’. Lord Ellesmere believed that the Commons’ presumption in denying the king adequate funds had encroached on the ‘regality supreme’ of the Crown by parading a concern for ‘liberty’ that, if not checked hard and fast, ‘will not cease until it break out into democracy’.
    Without its life-line, the government staggered on, although Robert Cecil did not, dying of stomach cancer in 1612. He was hardly gone before the predictable attacks on ‘Deformity’, including one very pointed polemic by Francis Bacon, appeared. With Cecil collapsed both the moral and actual credit of the Crown. London brewers (hitting the king where it hurt) refused to supply any more ale without advance payment. A Dutch goldsmith, from whom James asked for a £20,000 loan on security of jewels he had bought from him, turned James down on the grounds that others had contributed to the purchase price! It did not help that the king now entrusted the Treasury to one of the Howard clan, the Earl of Suffolk, whose reckless prodigality at Audley End ought to have been an immediate disqualification. But the bigger the debt the more impressive the player, the king seems to have felt.
    Little went right in the years ahead. In 1612 Henry, the Prince of Wales, the paragon of Protestant patriots, lauded as virtuous, intelligent, handsome on a horse and (compared to his father, old
Rex Pacificus
) refreshingly interested in bloodshed, died. The outpouring of sorrow at his huge funeral was genuine. In contrast to the defunct Protestant hero, his replacement as Prince of Wales, Charles, had been such a puny child that no one expected him to survive infancy, and even at the age of five he needed to be carried around in people’s arms. He was tongue-tied (in glaring contrast to his father), solemn and very short. After Prince Henry died the golden suit of parade armour that had been made for him was passed down to the new Prince of Wales. It was too big for him. Much of his subsequent life would be spent trying to grow into its imperial measurements.
    To compensate for a death, two great weddings were celebrated the following year, 1613. At the time there seemed reason only for rejoicing, but both unions turned out to be extremely bad news for the peace and good order of James’s realm. The more auspicious of the two matches was the marriage of Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the prince-elector of the Rhineland Palatinate. If the court had had to suffer the loss of its own native Protestant son in Henry, the son-in-law, Frederick, seemed a reasonable replacement. The festivities, held in mid-February, were, as usual, rowdy and excessive, culminating in an elaborately staged mock naval battle on the Thames between ‘Turks’ and ‘Venetians’, during which the paper and paste-board port of Algiers went up prematurely in flames.
    The second marriage crashed and burned even more spectacularly. The match was between Frances Howard, the daughter of the spendthrift Lord