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cahnUnfortunately, there was then at Berlin a King who pursued one policy only, who deceived his enemies, but not his servants, and who lied without scruple, but never without necessity.
(from The King's Secret - by Duke de Broglie, grand-nephew of the subject of the book, Comte de Broglie, and grandfather of the physicist) )
(from The King's Secret - by Duke de Broglie, grand-nephew of the subject of the book, Comte de Broglie, and grandfather of the physicist) )
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-03 03:01 pm (UTC)Though now that I've said it, undoubtedly Mildred will find gay Rizzio depictions preceeding good old Maxwell.
Lol! Well, Mildred doesn't care enough about this one to go looking, but I see salon is training us both!
his current main enemy, the Earl of Bothwell (not his mother’s third husband, that guy’s cousin or son, I honestly don’t know right now and can’t looik it up)
Looks like it's his nephew, according to Wikipedia.
Scots: ARE YE MAD, JAMIE? WE HATE THOSE BASTARDS!!!!!
Lol!
=> result: both the English and the Scottish parliaments refuse a union of both countries and insist James will rule them only in personal union (i.e. as King of both), but as two separate countries. This will stay the case until the last Stuart monarch, Anne, in whose reign the act of union finally formally happens.
And from everything I've read and been told, the Scots still largely hated those bastards, but the Scottish Parliament was basically bribed into dissolving itself and letting Scotland be ruled from London. OTOH, that could be Jacobite propaganda, idk.
Ah, yes, Wikipedia says "The role played by bribery has long been debated" and doesn't come to a firm conclusion. It does agree, though, that "the Union was carried by members of the Scottish elite against the wishes of the great majority. The Scottish population was overwhelmingly against the union with England."
And that was in 1707, after a hundred years of personal union! I can only imagine how they felt in James' time.
The idea for Ireland, for example, was that once there were enough god-fearing rightly thinking Protestants there, surely the unenlightened Catholic masses would see how much better Protestantism was and would convert. 800 years later….
*facepalm*
Although technically it would be 400 years since James' introduction of Protestant planters, 800 since Strongbow initiated English occupation. Either way, though.
Of course, I still can't help being reminded that my history teacher in high school insisted James (of the King James' Bible) was Catholic! Because all the Stuarts were Catholic! And none of young Mildred's counterarguments held any weight.
full equal rights for Catholics was impossible to sell to the English (and Scottish, for that matter) majority, not least because by then the Thirty Years War had started.
This will become relevant, at least tangentially, when I do my 1768-1772 foreign policy write-up. On which work continues apace!
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-03 05:43 pm (UTC)Ah, yes, Wikipedia says "The role played by bribery has long been debated" and doesn't come to a firm conclusion. It does agree, though, that "the Union was carried by members of the Scottish elite against the wishes of the great majority. The Scottish population was overwhelmingly against the union with England."
Bruce Lenman goes into this in some detail in his book The Jacobite Risings in Britain 1689-1746. According to him, the English Parliament introduced an act (the Alien Act) which said that unless a union was put in place, all Scots not living on English territory would become aliens (apparently James I/VI had introduced a joint citizenship for all English and Scots born after his succession to the English throne). This was bad for Scots nobles because they often owned land in both England and Scotland (often through marriage), and then their English land holdings would be threatened. They would also ban the three main Scottish exports to England (cattle, linen, and coal).
Further, the Scottish Parliament was manipulated into letting Queen Anne appoint the Scots commissioners who would negotiate the terms of union. This was accomplished by the Duke of Hamilton, one of the leaders of the Scottish opposition to union, encouraging people to go home, and then putting it to the vote when few people were there. There are indications in correspondence between pro-union politicians that some sort of pressure had been brought to bear on Hamilton, either financial or legal (he had lots of debts).
So the people negotiating for Scotland were in reality not properly representing Scotland. Nevertheless there had to be enough concessions for the Scots parliament to pass the Treaty of Union. These concessions were 1) securing the position of the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk, 2) that the rights and privileges of the Scottish burghs would remain the same (they were later abolished in the 20th century), 3) Scots law and the heritable jurisdictions of Scotland would remain the same (the latter were obviously abolished about 50 years later), 4) everybody who had lost money in the Darien scheme would have it repaid. You could call the latter a bribe, of course. And of course there's lots of other stuff in the treaty.
But it was still massively unpopular. To avoid this unpopularity affecting the next election, the old, discredited Scottish Parliament appointed the first Scottish representatives to the new union parliament, instead of them being elected.
Lenman has the following to say (this is a great example of his scathing irony): The jobbery and pressures used to expedite the progress of the treaty through the Scots parliament would appear to have been little different from the behavior which was standard government practice in the 18th century. It was perhaps neither less nor more reputable than the practices of government in late 20th century Britain, another patronage-ridden society.
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-07 04:58 am (UTC)Lenman has the following to say (this is a great example of his scathing irony)
Hee. The more things change...
Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-07 12:24 pm (UTC)Re: James I and VI: Scotsman on the English Throne
Date: 2023-10-04 07:26 am (UTC)LOL, though also, what a testimony to the miserable state of education. Bad history teacher. I mean, last month I stumbled across a vid where a guy took of all the inaccuracies in any given Three Musketeers film adaption (and also the original novel) the one thing to complain about that was actually completely correct, to wit, the statement that Anne of Austria had been a Spanish Princess. I mean, I get the confusion if you're not familiar with the Habsburgs referring to themselves as "The House of Austria" and Charles V. having divided his realms up between his son and his brother, thus founding the two lines. But then don't make absolute statements like "Anne of course as Austrian, not Spanish!" without at least taking the two seconds to google her wikipedia entry!
Catholics won't end up getting emancipated until 1829.
We also heard a bit of the situations for Catholics in the "Mitred Earl" biography where Fred Hervey did try to make things better for the Irish Catholics which was still very much a minority position in the late 17000s.
BTW, to return to James, he lifted the fees for Catholics in the last years of his reign in order to finally make progress with the Spanish marriage project, and Charles reinstalled them at the start of his reign to much acclaim. His wife Henrietta Maria kept asking him to lift them again and it was quite a while until he did. The image of Charles I. as being pro Catholic and just a a step short of proclaiming himself Catholic as well really derives not from his actual deeds or convictions (whatever else he was, he was solidly Protestant all his life and one of the things he made the two children still with him in England, Henry and Elizabeth, swear on their last meeting before his execution was that they should remain true Protestants) but from the mixture of Puritan anti Royalist pamphlets and son James (II)' behaviour decades later, who of course wanted to believe Dad would have if he could have.