Ringing the changes, from Tudor to Stuart

From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I by Susan Doran
Oxford University Press, £30, 646 pages

Over the last two years Britons have slowly adjusted to being Carolingians rather than Elizabethans. Challenging as that may have been in some ways – in 2022 few people remembered a time when Elizabeth II was not monarch – the accession of Charles III was orderly, dignified and (most importantly) expected. The same can’t be said of the succession of Elizabeth I by James I – or of the process by which the first Elizabethans metamorphosed into Jacobeans.

Elizabeth had conspicuously failed to designate James VI of Scotland as her successor; there were several other plausible claimants to the throne and the ad hoc body of privy councillors and nobles who decided to recognise him as sovereign in 1603 had tenuous legal standing.

It also took time for James’s new subjects to work out what they really made of him. His strong articulation of Divine Right theory to legitimate kingship – perhaps a defensive  to the irregular circumstances of his accession – sat uneasily with the English common-law traditions that stressed the importance of custom and consent as checks on the Crown. 

James alarmed many loyal monarchists. Yet, as From Tudor to Stuart explains crisply, unlike his son Charles I he had a sense of realpolitik which prevented him from pressing his arguments to their practical conclusion and thereby provoking revolt. 

Susan Doran, Oxford’s professor of early modern British history, is one of the UK’s most distinguished Catholic scholars. It’s unsurprising, therefore to find that a chapter called “Catholics and Recusants” is one of this book’s high points.

From Tudor to Stuart challenges common perceptions that James was inherently more moderate in his approach to Catholicism – or indeed other forms of deviation from the established church. He was devoted to his (secretly converted) Catholic wife, Anne of Denmark, and executed many fewer Catholics than did Elizabeth: there were only 25 martyrs between 1604 and 1618, compared to 189 between 1570 and 1603. Nevertheless, Doran cautions against reading this as a sign of distinctive irenicism.

Instead, she identifies a radically different international context as key. James was not subject to a bull of excommunication, as Elizabeth had been, and with it the release of Catholic subjects from their oaths of allegiance. Apprehension about Catholics as a threat to national security was thus diminished. Improved relations with Spain, and other Catholic powers, also reduced prejudice against Catholics as potential fifth columnists and gave James reasons not to provoke diplomatic partners into military intervention on behalf of their co-religionists. 

However, James could sometimes – as in his reaction to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – tighten the screws on England’s Catholics in a way that looks uncomfortably like communal punishment for individual transgression. James certainly protected individual Catholics who had earned his trust, but Doran thinks that “the overall Catholic experience under James during the first half of his reign was as difficult as it had been under Elizabeth”.

The author’s handling of the other streams of Stuart religious sentiment, establishment “Conformist Calvinism” and the various shades of Puritanism, in a chapter called “Protestants and Puritans” is both assured and sensitive. Occasionally, though, a question is begged.

Recent decades have seen a revival in the idea of Elizabethan Lutheranism as a minority strand in the late Tudor church – one important in incubating the later movement known as “Laudianism”, which flowered under Charles I. This trend goes unreferenced here, and readers are left wondering what role the royal dynastic alliance with Lutheran Denmark may have played in strengthening the nascent “high church” tendency. Despite her conversion Queen Anne maintained a Lutheran chaplain, Johann Seringius, who had ample opportunities to influence leading English churchmen – but this is not explored. 

OUP has marketed this book as a “cross-over’” title suitable for both a general audience and specialists. Some parts will, however, only be of interest to the latter. Most readers can safely skip the intimate descriptions of the entertainments for James and Anne as they journeyed towards London in 1603. The same goes for the outlines of the family backgrounds of early appointees to positions in the royal bedchambers who make no further appearance. 

The book’s great strength lies in making abundant use of contemporary woodcuts, poetry and plays to inform analysis of how James was received at home, and perceived abroad. Thereby Doran not only adds colour to the historical narrative but exposes hidden meanings in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Measure for Measure and many other works of literature besides. From Tudor to Stuart offers much to stimulate – and even to entertain.

This article appears in the September 2024 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click HERE.

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