FOLK TOO OFTEN LOSE SIGHT OF THE COROLLARY...:

England was certainly an oddity to her friends and enemies on the Continent. 'There was no school in the world where one could learn how to negotiate with the English,' the Spanish envoy Íñigo Vélez de Guevara, count of Oñate, told his Venetian counterpart in 1637. The following year, a Jesuit in England groused that he had 'never been in a country where things go so slowly or stupidly ... I seem to be in the middle of Spain.' At other times, however, affairs moved fast, so fast, in fact, that Pomponne de Bellièvre, the French ambassador in 1646, complained that 'one no longer reckons time by months and weeks, but by hours and even by minutes.' The Huguenot Maximilien de Béthune, marquis of Rosny, suspected that the water had something to do with it, the English having 'contracted all the instability of the element by which they are surrounded'. Others blamed a lack of executive heft. With no standing army and no prerogative tax like the taille in France, English monarchs had to seek funds from a parsimonious Parliament. The Stuarts resented that assembly's assertiveness. 'I am a stranger,' James VI and I confided in the Spanish ambassador in 1614, 'and found it here when I arrived, so that I am obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of.'

That James, a Scot, was complaining to a Spaniard about his alien Parliament was a large part of the problem with the Stuarts, at least from the perspective of their southern subjects (and conversely explains some of the appeal of 'God's Englishman', Oliver Cromwell). James was accused of wanting to sacrifice his new kingdom's distinctiveness for the sake of a 'Great Britain' in which the Anglo-Scottish borders would be reconfigured as 'Middle Shires', Charles I of being swayed by Spain to an 'execrable and rotten' degree, and Charles II of turning England into a 'tributary' of France. It is indicative of Parliament's concern for English liberties that in 1604 a bill was placed before the Commons seeking confirmation of the provisions of Magna Carta. When Guy Fawkes was caught with 36 barrels of gunpowder under the House of Lords the following year, he told his interrogators that he had wanted to blow the lot of them back to Scotland.

Another problem for the Stuarts was that, in spite of their persecution of Catholics, they were associated with 'popery'. England was a leading Protestant kingdom - God's chosen nation, according to puritans - and therefore vulnerable throughout this century of Counter-Reformation to the Catholic armies and missionaries who were reclaiming territory at an alarming rate. Between 1590 and 1690, the geographical extent of Protestantism was reduced from one half to one fifth of Europe's landmass. Englishmen feared the return of human bonfires and, as one tract threatened, of 'troops of papists ravishing your wives and your daughters, dashing your little children's brains out against the walls, plundering your houses and cutting your own throats'. For many Protestants in England, the need to keep popery out, by fighting Catholics in Europe and stamping on creeping popery at home, trumped all other considerations.

James II, the last male monarch of the dynasty, was openly Catholic, and his older brother, Charles II, had converted to Rome on his deathbed. James I and Charles I were both devoted to the Church of England, but favoured a ceremonial form of worship which to the hotter sort of Protestant smacked of popery-by-stealth. All four Stuart kings had Catholic queens (Anne of Denmark covertly) and absolutist tendencies, or at least a preference for consulting Parliament as infrequently as possible. Fewer parliaments meant less money, however, which tended to result in arbitrary taxation at home and a degree of suppliance abroad that invited further charges of popery.

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