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

encouragement of sound work habits and piety. There were two new almshouses and a municipally funded brewhouse to employ the ‘deserving’ (that is non-begging) indigent. A house of correction was built with a homily carved over the door summing up the prevailing ethos in Dorset’s little Jerusalem: ‘Look in yourselves, this is the scope/Sin brings prison, prison the rope.’
    In 1620 there was a new and urgent cause for which the godly in Dorchester were asked to empty their purses: Protestant refugees fleeing from an invasion of the Rhineland Palatinate by Catholic troops of the king of Spain. Some of the fugitives even came to settle in Dorchester, such was the international reputation of White, whose German assistantmade sure the town was in close touch with events in continental Europe. Those events in the Rhineland, apparently remote from English and British concerns, became immediately a topic of supreme importance in the country’s political and religious life, the subject of innumerable tracts, sermons and pamphlets, to the point where they changed Britain. By marrying his daughter Elizabeth to the apparently dull but safe Protestant Elector Frederick, James had unwittingly put his entire reputation as the king of peace in terrible jeopardy. The consequences of that marriage and the predicament in which it put the Crown would dog James until his death in March 1625 and would cast a long shadow over the beginning of his son’s reign.
    The problem could hardly have been anticipated, happening in the same place that even three centuries later Neville Chamberlain would notoriously describe as a ‘far away country of which we know little’: Bohemia. In 1618 the Protestant Estates rejected the Catholic nominee for their crown (the archduke who would become the Emperor Ferdinand) and made their point by throwing the envoys sent from the Emperor Matthias out of the windows of Hrad č any Castle in Prague on to the substantial dung-heap below. Invitations went out to eligible Protestant candidates, and Frederick, certainly to his father-in-law’s consternation, accepted the throne in August 1619. In November 1620 his army suffered a disastrous defeat at the hands of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor at the battle of the White Mountain, and at the same time Spanish troops invaded his Rhineland home territory of the Palatinate. Frederick and Elizabeth – the Winter King and Queen, from their short stay in Prague – became the most famous and fashionable refugees of their age, travelling between England and France and finally settling in The Hague, where they established their own court in exile.
    In the more Protestant centres of Britain, from London to Edinburgh (and certainly in Dorchester), a hue and cry went up for war against Spain and the Catholic powers. To the godly this was the battle of the Last Days, heralding the coming of the kingdom of the saints. Sides had to be taken. And the king, it was clear, would have to be pushed. But James’s deep reluctance to turn warrior was not just a matter of ending his long and successful career as a pacifist; it was also a matter of bankrupting the realm. His trusted adviser, and later, from 1622, his Treasurer, Lionel Cranfield, who knew what he was talking about, coming as he did from a commercial and financial background, and who by dint of painstaking economies had managed to contain, if not reverse, the damage to the Exchequer from years of profligate spending, now warned of the fiscally catastrophic consequences of a war. But James was equally awarethat to do nothing about the humiliating predicament of his daughter and son-in-law, to say nothing of the standing of the Protestant states of Europe, was to compromise beyond any possibility of recovery the authority of his government.
    James felt personally betrayed by the Catholic offensive because for some time before 1620 he had been making overtures to Madrid for a marriage