Power in Smoke: The Language of Tobacco and Authority in Caroline England

Writing in his A Chronicle of the Kings of England (1643), Sir Richard Baker recalls the year 1596, which saw the death of "Richard Fletcher, Bishop of London; who for marrying the Lady Baker (as goodly a Lady as he was a Prelate) incurred the Queens displeasure; and to cure his cares, fell immoderately to drinking of Tobacco, and so expired."¹ The anecdote in some ways typifies Baker's work, which occasionally detours into vivid gossip before returning to the higher matter of kings and parliaments. Yet Baker's rendering of this incident may be more than a simple illustration of the difficulties of Elizabethan courtiership, for in it Baker seems to take particular care to emphasize the connection of tobacco to political disobedience. Matters of personal desire—love and excess—are confronted in a moment of royal displeasure, resulting in the rapid degeneration of both the individual man and the bishop.

Baker's anecdote might remain solely a matter of entertainment or historical curiosity if not for its appearance in 1643, one year after King Charles I had raised his standard against Parliament at Nottingham. Like others in his family, Baker appears to have been a Royalist, writing a manuscript rebuttal against William Prynne's Histriomastix (later published posthumously) and subsequently dedicating his chronicle to Charles (II), then Prince of Wales.² Given both its author's political leanings and the moment of the text's publication, the full title of Baker's chronicle—A chronicle of the Kings of England, from the time of the Romans goverment unto the raigne of our soveraigne lord, King Charles—must be seen less as a description and more as a deeply contentious political argument. In 1643 the inviolability of Charles I's sovereignty and prerogative demanded battlefield proof rather than literary assertion.

What then can we make of this Elizabethan anecdote in a Caroline text, particularly when recounted by an author personally invested in the period's struggle over kingly rule? Such an enticing combination of tobacco, immoderation, and lust played out over the drama of royal and subject desires recalls for us—as I expect it would have recalled for Baker—the hostility to tobacco expressed by James I, father to Charles and the monarch who, in his very first year on the throne, had both published A Counterblaste to Tobacco (1603) and knighted our author. The Counterblaste figures prominently in most current research on early modern England and tobacco, garnering particular attention recently with the growing critical interest in the European project of New World colonization and its resulting impact on material culture.³ Such inquiries have generally remained focused on earlier English encounters with tobacco, in particular its introduction in the later years of Elizabeth I and the troubled accommodation to the plant pursued during the reign of James. Little work, however, has been done on specifically Caroline discourses surrounding tobacco, particularly in relation to matters of political authority. During the reign of Charles I, this essay will argue, debates regarding tobacco became occasions in which were pursued some of the most contentious and deeply divisive issues of the period—the status of royal authority, the role of political dissent, and the mechanisms of royal finance. Such matters came to a head during the English Civil War, when the taxation and monopolization of tobacco became a locus for both rhetorical and actual hostility toward the Crown. Often read as part of England's encounter with the "New World," tobacco thus also becomes a means to trace the perhaps more traditional story of the personalization and subsequent deterioration in Charles I's authority, ultimately demonstrating that political authority in the period was as much rhetorical as institutional or material.

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Despite the obvious vehemence with which James attacks tobacco in his Counterblaste—describing smoking as a "vile custome" and an "uncivill tricke"—the official policy regarding tobacco that he bequeathed to his son Charles was more nuanced and practical.⁴ Often deep in debt, James found himself trapped between a personal distaste for tobacco and the desire for...