JAMES I. (_concluded_).
Reign of Favourites--Robert Carr--His Marriage--Death of
Overbury--Venality at Court--The Addled Parliament--George
Villiers--Fall of Somerset--Disgrace of Coke--Bacon becomes
Lord Chancellor--Position of England Abroad--The Scottish
Church--Introduction of Episcopacy--Andrew Melville--Visit
of James to Scotland--The Book of Sports--Persecution of the
Irish Catholics--Examination into Titles--Rebellion of the
Chiefs--Plantation of Ulster--Fresh Confiscations--Quarrel
between Bacon and Coke--Prosperity of Buckingham--Raleigh's
Last Voyage--His Execution--Beginnings of the Thirty
Years' War--Indecision of James--Despatch of Troops to the
Palatinate--Parliament of 1621--Impeachment of Bacon--His
Fall--Floyd's Case--James's Proceedings during the
Recess--Dissolution of Parliament--Reasons for the Spanish
Match--Charles and Buckingham go to Spain--The Match is Broken
Off--Punishment of Bristol--Popularity of Buckingham--Change of
Foreign Policy--Marriage of Charles and Henrietta Maria--Death of
James.
From the death of Cecil we may date the reign of favourites, which
continued as long as the king lived. That cautious and able minister was
too fond of power himself to allow it to pass into the hands of much
weaker men. James, while Cecil lived, had indeed no lack of favourites
on whom he lavished affluence and honours; but his cunning minister had
the address to prevent him from giving them places of real power and
responsibility. James therefore, so long as Cecil remained, was content
to make his favourites his companions and left Cecil to conduct public
affairs; but no sooner was Salisbury in his grave, than James became the
slave of his favourites, who ruled both him and the kingdom.
The first of these was Robert Carr, or Ker, a young border Scot of
the Kers of Fernihurst. He had been some years in France, and being a
handsome youth--"straight-limbed, well-formed, strong-shouldered, and
smooth-faced"--he had been led to believe that if he cultivated his
personal appearance and a gaiety and courtliness of address, he was sure
of making his fortune at the Court of James. Accordingly he managed to
appear as page to Lord Dingwall at a grand tilting match at Westminster,
in 1606. According to chivalric usage, it became his duty to present
his lord's shield to his Majesty; but in manoeuvring his horse on the
occasion, it fell and broke his leg. That fall was his rise. James was
immediately struck with the beauty of the youth who lay disabled at his
feet, and had him straightway carried into a house near Charing Cross,
and sent his own surgeon to him. As soon as he could get away from the
tilt-yard, he hastened to him himself. He renewed his visits daily,
waiting upon him himself, and displaying to the whole Court the intensity
of his sudden regard for him. "Lord!" says Weldon, "how the great men
flocked then to see him, and to offer to his shrine in such abundance,
that the king was forced to lay a restraint, lest it might retard his
recovery."
The lad's fortune was made; and though James, in conversing with him,
found that he was very ignorant--the whole of his education having
been directed to his outside--this did not abate his regard, for he
condescended to be at once his nurse and schoolmaster. "The prince," says
Harrington, "leaneth on his arm, pinches his cheek, smooths his ruffled
garments. The young man doth study much art and device; he hath changed
his tailors and tiremen many times, and all to please the prince. The
king teaches him Latin every morning, and I think some one should teach
him English too, for he is a Scotch lad, and hath much need of better
language."
[Illustration: SIR FRANCIS BACON (VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS).
(_From the Portrait by Van Somer._)]
James found that Carr had been his page in Scotland, and that his
father had suffered much in the cause of the unhappy Mary Stuart;
these were additional causes of favour. On Christmas-day, 1607, James
knighted him and made him a gentleman of the bed-chamber, so as to have
him constantly about his person. Such was his favour that every one
pressed around him to obtain their suits with the king. He received rich
presents; the ladies courted his attention; the greatest lords did him
the most obsequious and disgusting homage. Carr, however, had an eye to
pleasing the public and therefore, Scotsman as he was, he turned the
cold shoulder to his countrymen, and associated with and favoured the
English; probably, too, finding this the most profitable. Those about him
were almost wholly English; and his affairs were in the hands of one Sir
Thomas Overbury, a man of an evil look, and with a countenance said to
be shaped like that of a horse. The dark ability of this man supplied
the lack of talent in his patron, and became a mine of wealth to Overbury
himself. Even Cecil and the Earl of Suffolk strove to avail themselves of
his services; and when Cecil quitted the scene, Carr, through Overbury's
management, carried all before him. In March, 1611, he had been created
Viscount Rochester; in April, 1612, he became a member of the Privy
Council, and was invested with the order of the Garter. The Earl of
Suffolk succeeding to Cecil's post of Lord Treasurer, Carr stepped into
Suffolk's office of Lord Chamberlain, at the same time discharging the
duties of the post of Secretary by the aid of Sir Thomas Overbury. The
favourite's favourite, however, was no favourite of the king, who was
jealous of having so much of the time and confidence of Carr occupied by
Overbury, and this feeling was probably much heightened by the queen,
who had an instinctive aversion to the man. On one occasion the queen
succeeded in obtaining his expulsion from Court, for alleged discourtesy
to her, but he soon returned; and though the king appointed Sir Ralph
Winwood and Sir Thomas Lake to occupy jointly the office of Secretary of
State, yet Carr, by the king's favour and Overbury's ability, remained
lord paramount in the Court; Overbury himself being the avenue to every
favour. On April 21, 1613, Overbury boasted to Sir Henry Wotton of his
good fortune, and his flattering prospects, yet that very day saw him
committed close prisoner to the Tower. Adept as he was in all Court
intrigues, he had yet committed an irremediable blunder, and aroused
a spirit of vengeance which nothing but his blood could quench. This
spirit lived in the bosom of a beautiful girl not yet twenty years of age.
Lady Frances Howard, the daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, had been
married at the age of thirteen to the Earl of Essex, the son of
Elizabeth's unfortunate favourite, who was only a year older. It was a
match promoted by the king out of regard, as he said, for the memory of
the young earl's father. The ceremony being performed, the bride returned
to the care of her mother, and the boy bridegroom proceeded, under care
of a tutor, on his travels. At the end of four years he returned, and
claimed his wife, whom he found the beauty and pride of the Court. But
whilst he was enraptured with her loveliness, he was mortified to find
that she treated him with every mark of aversion. It was only by the
stern command of her father that she consented to live with him at all,
and he soon discovered that in his absence her affections had been stolen
away by the profligate favourite Rochester, who had won her even from
another and a royal suitor, Prince Henry.
This discovery, and the constant bickerings which took place between the
earl and countess, made Essex willing that a divorce should be obtained.
There were others who were glad of this expedient: Lady Howard's father,
Lord Suffolk, and the Earl of Northampton, Lord Privy Seal, saw in her
marriage with Rochester a mode of putting an end to the rivalry which
existed between them, and the king was equally eager for this result.
But to Overbury the scheme boded the destruction of his power, which
would be at an end if his patron coalesced with his enemies. He therefore
commenced a determined opposition to the match. He it was who had written
the glowing and eloquent love-letters of Rochester, and had promoted
the _liaison_ to the utmost of his power; but he had never dreamt of
its leading to a marriage which must work his own ruin. He therefore
represented to Rochester the odium of such a marriage; the base and
abandoned character of the woman, who might do for his mistress, but was
not to be thought of as a wife. When he found that his arguments did
not produce the effect which he wished, he took the dangerous step of
menaces, and declared that he could and would throw an insuperable bar
in the way of the divorce from Essex, without which there could be no
marriage. This bar was undoubtedly Overbury's knowledge of the adulterous
connection which had existed between the parties, and which would
certainly ruin the countess's demand of a separation.
The master of deep policy could not see the rock upon which he was
running, and which would have been very clear to him in another person's
case. Rochester repeated to the countess all that he said, and the rage
of a sinful woman, proverbially fierce as hell, seized upon her. She
vowed that she would have his life. In her first fury she offered £1,000
to Sir John Wood to kill him in a duel, but her friends interposed, and
suggested a less hazardous and less criminal method of getting Overbury
out of the way, which was to send him on an embassy to France or Russia.
If he accepted the office, he would be detained abroad till the divorce
was effected; if he refused, it would be easy to construe his conduct
into a contempt of the king's service.
Overbury was sounded on the subject of a mission to Russia, and listened
to it with apparent pleasure; but the young beauty could not thus satisfy
her revenge, and at her instigation Rochester affected to feel his
projected absence intolerable. He declared his presence and counsel were
indispensable to him, and he promised to satisfy the king, if he agreed
to decline the offer. No sooner did Overbury consent than Rochester, so
far from excusing him to the king, represented his conduct as not only
disobedient to his Majesty, but as insolent and intolerable to himself.
James was only too glad to clear the Court of the hated man; a warrant
was immediately issued, and Overbury was committed to the Tower. By the
arrangement of Rochester and the Earl of Northampton, the lieutenant of
the Tower, Sir William Wade, was removed, and a creature of theirs, Sir
Jervis Elwes, was installed in his place. Under the care of Elwes, Sir
Thomas Overbury was at once cut off from all communication with the outer
world. Neither servant nor relative was permitted to see him; he was
already dead to the world, and the world was soon to be dead to him.
The dangerous man secured, the measures for the divorce commenced. The
countess petitioned for it, alleging serious grounds, and her father
signed the petition. But no one was more forward and determined in
carrying this disgraceful transaction through than the king. He appointed
without delay a commission to try the cause. The commissioners were
Abbot the Archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops of London, Winchester,
Rochester, Ely, Lichfield, and Coventry; Sir Julius Cæsar, Sir John
Barry, Sir Daniel Dunne, Sir John Bennet, Francis James and Thomas
Edwards, doctors of civil law.
The Earl of Essex was only too glad to be rid of his virago, and
consented to anything, even to the most humiliating imputations on
his manhood. The real causes of the vile business were sufficiently
notorious; and the Primate, though at the head of the commission,
revolting at being made a tool for the accommodation of aristocratic
licentiousness, strongly opposed the divorce. But James took him sharply
to task, telling him in so many words that it was his duty to resign
his own judgment and follow that of his sovereign. "If," he wrote, in a
most imperative letter, "a judge should have a prejudice in respect of
persons, it should become you rather to have a kind of implicit faith
in my judgment, as well in respect of some skill I have in divinity, as
also that I hope no honest man doubts the uprightness of my conscience;
and the best thankfulness that you, that are so far my creature, can use
towards me, is to reverence and follow my judgment and not to contradict
it, except where you may demonstrate unto me that I am mistaken or wrong
informed."
But James did not content himself with recommending implicit obedience;
he influenced and controlled the proceedings, and intimidated the judges
by all means in his power. His zeal was quickened by the receipt of
twenty-five thousand pounds from Rochester, at a moment when his officers
were at their wits' end for money. But do what he would, he could not
bend the integrity of the Primate, who to the last resisted the divorce,
and three of the doctors of law supported him. The Bishop of London also
voted with him, but the rest of the bishops and civil lawyers voted
for the divorce, which was carried by seven voices against five. The
Bishop of Winchester showed himself so servile on the occasion, that
the king knighted his son, who was ever afterwards dubbed by the people
Sir Nullity Bilson. The other judges and bishops who voted according to
his wish were also rewarded by James, and the sentence of divorce was
pronounced on the 25th of September.
The public at large, to whom the facts of the case were no secret,
condemned the whole proceeding in no measured terms, and this reprobation
rose into actual horror when the news oozed out that, the very day
before the verdict for the divorce, Sir Thomas Overbury was found dead
in his cell in the Tower. He was buried in all haste, and with profound
secrecy, the officials diligently propagating a report that he died of a
loathsome and contagious disease: but the public entertained no doubt of
his perishing of poison.
In the face of all this, James proceeded immediately to raise Rochester
to the dignity of Earl of Somerset, that he might equal in rank, if not
in iniquity, the murder-breathing countess. The marriage, moreover, was
celebrated on the 26th of December, at the royal chapel in Whitehall,
the king making it his own affair, being himself present, with Prince
Charles, and a great crowd of bishops and noblemen. The queen kept
herself commendably apart from the whole infamous business. The
blood-stained bride, with a shamelessness unparalleled, appeared with
her hair hanging loose on her shoulders, in the character of a virgin!
Montague, Bishop of Bath and Wells, married the guilty couple, and
Mountain, Dean of Westminster, pronounced a blessing upon them. Then
the king gave a series of banquets and masques at Whitehall in honour
of them, which continued till the 4th of January, 1614; and, as if all
classes of public men were eager to disgrace themselves by sanctioning
this Court wickedness, the Lord Mayor and aldermen invited the adulterous
couple to a splendid banquet, given at the Merchant Taylors' Hall, on the
same 4th of January, whither they were accompanied by the Duke of Lennox,
the Earl of Northampton, Lord Privy Seal, the Lord Chamberlain, and the
Earls of Worcester, Pembroke, and Montgomery.
From his gaieties James was called, by his eternal want of money, to face
his Parliament. Since 1611, when he dissolved his last House of Commons,
he had endeavoured to carry on by any illegal and unconstitutional
means that the people would submit to. But the Dutch did not keep their
engagement to pay off their debt of upwards of eight hundred thousand
pounds by annual instalments of sixty thousand pounds, and James was too
pusillanimous to adopt the means which a Cromwell would have done. He
threatened war, and threatened only; and therefore became despised by his
debtors, who thenceforth made no movement towards paying. Disappointed
here, the only alternative was to fleece his own subjects. He resorted
to the scandalous measure of selling all the places of honour and trust,
and all kinds of dignities, for money. He sold several peerages for
high prices. Every place under Government was to be had only for cash;
nor did the proceeds of this infamous traffic always reach the king's
hands, but fell into those of his minion Somerset, and the Howards, the
relatives of Somerset's wife. The wicked Countess of Somerset, and Lady
Suffolk, her mother, got four thousand pounds as a bribe from Sir Fulke
Greville, for the Chancellorship of the Exchequer. The example thus set
at Court ran through all departments, and the whole management of the
country was given up to corruption and venality. So little of these
proceeds of iniquity came to the king, and that little was so foolishly
and recklessly given away amongst his hangers-on, that the salaries of
all who were not in a situation to be bribed, and thus pay themselves,
remained unpaid. In this difficulty, James hit upon a notable scheme,
and originated a new order of aristocracy--namely baronets, or little
barons, a link between the barons, or lowest peers, and knights. These
new titles he sold at one thousand pounds apiece. Sir Nicholas Bacon was
the first created for England, and Sir Francis Blundell for Ireland, in
1620. Baronets for Nova Scotia, of whom Sir Robert Gordon was first, were
added by Charles I., to extend this source of income, in 1625.
[Illustration: THE BANQUETING HOUSE, WHITEHALL.]
James was now compelled to summon a Parliament, and Sir Francis Bacon
concocted a scheme for managing the House of Commons. Bacon's plan was
this, and he had regularly weighed it and drawn it up for the king's
consideration: that, according to a principle afterwards made a maxim
by Sir Robert Walpole, every one had his price; that the leaders of the
late opposition, Neville, Yelverton, Hyde, Crew, and Sir Dudley Digges,
were chiefly lawyers, and there were plenty of means, by prospects of
promotion skilfully applied, to bring them zealously to the king's side;
that they being once brought over, he had the talking, persuasive power
of the House; and that much might be done beforehand also with the city
men and country gentlemen, and where any obstinate man appeared, means
might be used to keep him out. At the same time Bacon assured James that
it was necessary to make a show of some concession. It was suggested that
as he had promised to abolish abuses, he should at least give up some of
the lesser ones; and on his accepting this plan, he and his friends were
ready to "undertake" to manage Parliament, and to guarantee his Majesty
plenty of money and little trouble, provided James would only avoid
irritating speeches.
James's Parliament met on the 5th of April 1614, and he endeavoured to
put in practice the Machiavellian instructions of Bacon by delivering a
very popular speech--popular because it promised plentiful persecution
for religion, which was the spirit of the day, and a liberal removal
of grievances; but, as usual, first of all he placed the supply of
his necessities. But the Undertakers had not succeeded in their first
out-of-door efforts; there was a sturdy assemblage of popular members,
and such faces appeared amongst them, according to a writer of the time,
as made the Court to droop. The House of Commons at once reversed the
topics of the king's speech, placing the grievances in the front and
making the supplies conditional on their abolition. The royal party which
the Undertakers had got together, found their pleas for slavish obedience
drowned in a storm of angry demand for justice; and the House demanded a
conference with the Lords on the subject. The Lords asked the opinion of
the judges on the question, and especially that of Coke the Lord Chief
Justice. Coke, who remembered the endeavours of Bacon to supplant him
in the good graces of the king, and who hoped for no higher preferment,
took the opportunity to throw cold water on the conference, asserting
that the judges, after consultation among themselves, felt that they were
bound by their office to decide between the king and his subjects, and
were therefore equally bound not to appear as disputants or partisans
on either side. The Lords on hearing this declined the conference, and
Neale, who had recently been transferred from the see of Lichfield to
the wealthier one of Lincoln, for his services in procuring the Countess
of Essex's divorce, rose and uttered a most unbecoming tirade against
the Commons, charging them with striking at the root of the royal
prerogative, and anticipating that if admitted to a conference, they
might use very disloyal and seditious language.
This roused the indignation of the Commons: they did not understand the
etiquette of our time, which supposes what passes in one House unknown in
the other; but they immediately demanded of the Lords the punishment of
the man who had thus dared to slander their loyalty. On this the bishop,
who was as cowardly as he was insolent, and who was hated by the Puritans
as a merciless persecutor, instantly recanted in his place; and with many
tears, and fervent declarations of his high respect for the Commons,
denied many of the offensive expressions attributed to him. But the House
was not thus to be appeased. The members were greatly exasperated at
the plan of managing them, which had become public, and fell on Bacon
as the author of the scheme. The versatile Sir Francis pretended to
ridicule the very idea of any such scheme being in existence, as the
king had done in his opening speech, but the House gave him no credit;
they proceeded to question even his right to sit in their House, on his
accepting the office of Attorney-General, and only permitted it as a
special indulgence, which was not to be drawn into a precedent.
The king, who saw no chance of supplies in the present temper of the
House, sent them a sharp message, desiring them to proceed to the
business of the supplies, attended with a threat of immediate dissolution
in case of non-compliance. This produced no effect, and the House was
dissolved on the 7th of June. Having thus broken the immediate power
of retaliation in the House, he, the next morning, arrested the most
refractory members and committed five of them to the Tower, amongst whom
was Wentworth, a lawyer, destined to act a very prominent part in the
next reign. These members were not discharged till they had, by their
admissions, occasioned the king to arrest others, who were committed in
their turn. This Parliament obtained the name of the Addled Parliament,
because it had not passed a single bill, but it had displayed a spirit
which was pregnant with the most momentous consequences. It had laid
the foundation of the rights of the Commons, and at the same time had
displayed its rigid temperament, by issuing an order which excluded all
Catholics, and by making it necessary for every member, before taking his
seat, to receive the Sacrament according to the form of the Church of
England.
James had indeed got from the determined tone of the House a fright which
lasted him nearly seven years. He returned to his usual unconstitutional
modes of extorting revenue. Besides the sale of monopolies and
privileges, he compelled the payment of benevolences, an odious tax, not
only because raised without sanction of Parliament, but because its name
implied a free gift. Those who resisted these modes of royal robbery were
dragged into the Star Chamber, and there sentenced to enormous fines.
Mr. Oliver St. John, a gentleman who had not only refused such payment,
but had vindicated his conduct in an able letter, in which he commented
freely on the king's violation of Magna Charta, was fined by the tyrannic
Star Chamber five thousand pounds, and ordered to be imprisoned during
the king's pleasure.
A new era now arrived in the history of the king's favourites. Though
the Countess of Somerset was hardened enough to stalk through adultery
and poison to the gratification of her desires, and show no remorse, it
appears that her new husband was not altogether of so callous a nature.
From the moment of the death of Overbury, he was a totally changed man.
All pleasure in life had deserted him; he had lost all his gaiety and
went about moody and morose. His person became neglected, his dress
disorderly, and even in the king's company he was absent of mind and
took no pains to please him. This was not lost on those courtiers who
envied the favour of the Howards, who now enjoyed complete ascendency
through their wicked kinswoman. The Earls of Bedford, Pembroke, and
Hertford maintained a sharp watch for a new favourite to bring before
James, confident that a suitable man once found, the day of Somerset was
over. This man soon appeared in a youth of the name of George Villiers,
the younger son of Sir George Villiers of Brooksby, in Leicestershire.
Sir George was dead, and young Villiers had been brought up under the
care of his mother, who was at once one of the most beautiful and
infamous women of her time. She saw in the beauty and grace of this boy
the means of advancing the fortunes of the whole family. She therefore
carefully educated him to win the favour of the favourite-loving king,
confident that if he once attracted his attention, the result was sure.
This far-seeing and ambitious woman therefore sent the lad to France, to
acquire the gay and easy manner of that Court.
His courtly education being considered perfect, at the age of
one-and-twenty, the post of cup-bearer to his Majesty was purchased
amongst the lavish sale of offices of the time, as one that must
unavoidably place him under the eye of the king. Accordingly, he appeared
in that employment with a fine suit of French clothes on his back, and
as many French graces as any silly modern Solomon could desire. He was
a fine, tall young fellow, and pre-eminently handsome, at the same time
that he was one of the emptiest, haughtiest, and most profligate men that
ever lived. Time, however, was yet to display these qualities; they were
at present concealed under a garb of finished courtesy and agreeable
manners. The Herberts, the Russells, and the Seymours were delighted;
and it was planned that young Villiers should discharge his office of
cup-bearer at a supper entertainment at Baynard's Castle, in such a
manner as must strike the imagination of the king. James was, according
to expectation, smitten with the looks of the youth, and pointed out his
imagined likeness to a beautiful head of St. Stephen at Whitehall, whence
he gave him the pet name of "Steenie," which he always after used.
Villiers once installed in James's good graces, the fall of Somerset
was easy, and no time was lost in effecting it. Somerset was not so
lost to observance of what passed around him as to be unaware of some
danger; probably his vigilant spouse brought the fact to his attention.
He therefore solicited a pardon of the king, in full and formal style,
of all and everything which he might have done, or should hereafter do,
which might subject him to a charge of treason, misprision of treason,
felony, or other accusation. James, who had not yet been incited to
his destruction, with his usual facility in such matters, especially
when under certain genial influences, freely granted it; but the Lord
Chancellor Ellesmere refused to put the Great Seal to such a document,
declaring that it would subject him to a Præmunire. After all, it might
be a _ruse_ of James to grant this pardon, thus still preserving an
appearance of favour to Somerset, as he did to the last moment, knowing
that a hint to Ellesmere, who was a very compliant creature of his, would
prevent the deed taking effect. James went further; he sent Villiers
to Somerset, to assure him that he desired not in any way to interfere
between him and the king's favour, but would seek preferment only through
his means and be "his servant and creature;" to which Somerset, with the
moroseness which had become his manner, replied, "I will have none of
your service, and you shall have none of my favour. I will, if I can,
break your neck."
Matters now being ripe, Mr. Secretary Winwood was induced by Archbishop
Abbot, under promise of protection from the queen, to communicate
to James the popular rumour that Overbury had been poisoned in the
Tower, and that this had been confirmed by some admissions of Elwes,
the lieutenant of that fortress, in conversation with the Earl of
Shrewsbury. That the old favourite had lost his place in James's heart
was immediately evident. He took up the matter with his usual avidity
where a mystery was to be probed. He put a number of questions to Elwes
in writing, and demanded, on pain of his life, a faithful answer. The
answer satisfied James that Somerset and his wife were guilty of this
foul murder. He immediately sent for the Lord Chief Justice Coke, and
ordered him to arrest them. Coke demurred till the king had named several
others in commission with him. This being settled, this extraordinary
royal dissembler set out to Royston to hunt, and took Somerset with him,
showing him all his old marks of fondness. In the days of his real favour
he had refused him not the most iniquitous request. Even when the wife
of Sir Walter Raleigh, on his first condemnation for treason, had gone
down on her knees to him, to implore him to spare his castle and estate
at Sherborne, in Dorsetshire, for his children, James had ruthlessly
replied, "Na, na; I maun hae the land; I maun hae it for Carr." And at
this moment, when he was dooming the same Carr to destruction, he was
pretending the same infatuated regard. When the Chief Justice's messenger
arrived at Royston with the warrant, he found the king hanging about
Somerset's neck, kissing him in the true Judas style, and saying, "When
shall I see thee again? When shall I see thee again?"
When the warrant was delivered to Somerset, in the midst of these
disgusting affectations of endearment, he exclaimed that never had
such an affront been offered to a peer of England in presence of his
sovereign. "Nay, man," replied the royal hypocrite, coaxingly, "if Coke
sends for _me_, I maun go;" and as soon as Somerset's back was turned, he
added, "Now the deil go with thee, for I will never see thy face mair."
Soon after Coke himself arrived, to whom James indignantly complained
that Somerset and his wife had made him a go-between in their adultery
and murder. Even his enormous self-conceit was so far overcome, as to
compel him to admit that he had been grossly duped. He commanded Coke
to search the affair to the bottom, and to spare no man or woman that
he found guilty, however great or powerful. "And," added he, "may God's
curse be upon you and your house if you spare any of them; and God's
curse be upon me and mine, if I pardon any of them."
Coke seemed quite willing to act as vigorously and unsparingly as
the king could desire. The commissioners, of whom he was the chief,
subjected the adulterous pair to no less than three hundred examinations,
and then announced that they found ample proofs of their guilt; that
Frances Howard, formerly Countess of Essex, had resorted to sorcery
to incapacitate her then husband, the Earl of Essex, and to procure
the love of Lord Rochester; that, finding Sir Thomas Overbury an
obstacle to their criminal designs, they had, by the assistance of the
countess's late uncle, the Earl of Northampton, procured the commitment
of Sir Thomas to the Tower, and the removal of the lieutenant, and the
appointment in his place of their creature Elwes, and of one Weston to
be the warder of the prisoner; that this Weston had formerly been the
servant of Mrs. Turner, a woman famous for the introduction of yellow
starch for ruffs, and an early companion of the said Lady Frances Howard;
that, through Weston and Mrs. Turner, the countess had procured three
kinds of poison from one Franklin, an apothecary; and that Weston had
administered these poisons to his prisoner Overbury, and thus procured
his death. Coke added that, from private memorandum books and letters
which he had found amongst the papers of the prisoners, he had discovered
that Somerset had undoubtedly poisoned Prince Henry. The queen is said to
have been greatly excited by this intelligence, and had all her former
belief of this poisoning revived. She declared her full conviction that
Somerset and his clique had planned the removal of herself, and her son
Charles also, in order to marry the Princess Elizabeth to the son of
the Earl of Suffolk, brother to the countess. But James was too well
satisfied by the _post mortem_ examination of the body of Prince Henry,
and by the insufficiency of Coke's proof, to be led into this absurd
belief, though he admitted a persuasion that Somerset had received money
from Spain on condition of delivering up the Prince Charles to that
monarch.
Though the minor confederates were promptly hanged, the trial of Somerset
and his wife was deferred till April, 1616. The real cause of delay was
probably the fear of bringing a man like Somerset, who had been so long
in all James's secrets, to trial, lest he should avow something in his
despair to the damage of the royal reputation. Certain it is that, when
the time of trial approached, James betrayed the most extreme terror
and uneasiness, and omitted no means to induce Somerset to make a full
confession in private, offering him both life and restoration to his
estates. He sent messenger after messenger to Somerset in prison, the
Attorney-General Bacon being the principal, James Hay, afterwards Earl
of Carlisle, another, with whom was employed Somerset's late private
secretary. They did all in their power to induce Somerset to accept the
king's terms, but he remained obstinate, replying, when offered life
and fortune, "Of what use is life when honour is gone?" He demanded
earnestly to be permitted to see the king himself, declaring that in half
an hour's interview he could place all in so clear a light as should
perfectly satisfy his majesty. This interview James declined, as well as
a proposal to send a private letter to the king. These requests being
refused, he assumed an attitude of menace, declaring that whenever he was
brought into court, he would make such avowals as should astonish the
country, and cause the king to rue his rejection of his offers. James
displayed much alarm on hearing of this.
[Illustration: GREENWICH PALACE IN THE TIME OF JAMES I.]
On the 24th of May the countess was brought before the Peers, where,
as she had already confessed, she had only to plead guilty. She was
extremely agitated, pale, spiritless. She trembled greatly all the
time that the clerk was reading the indictment, and put her fan before
her face at the mention of Weston. Her words were nearly inaudible,
through weeping, as she pleaded guilty, and threw herself on the royal
mercy. This done, she was removed from the bar before the sentence was
pronounced, during which interval Bacon delivered a perfectly unnecessary
speech, as she had pleaded guilty, detailing the damning facts which
he was prepared to produce, had he been compelled by her denying her
guilt. This manoeuvre was intended to criminate Somerset, without the
hazard of his wife's declaring his innocence on hearing him implicated.
Bacon's purpose being served, she was recalled, and the Lord Chancellor
Ellesmere, who acted as High Steward on the trials, pronounced sentence
of death upon her.
That day Somerset was informed that he would go to trial on the morrow:
they had not deemed it safe to try him and his wife together. On hearing
this he went into a great rage, declaring that the king had assured him
that he should never go to trial, and protesting that if they took him
there, it should be by force and in his bed. He repeated his former
threats, adding the king dared not bring him into open court. More, the
lieutenant of the Tower, was so alarmed at this temper and language, that
he hastened away to James at Greenwich, though it was getting late, and
was midnight when he reached the palace. He was hastily admitted to the
king's chamber, and James, on hearing his statement, burst into an agony
of tears, and exclaimed: "On my soul, More, I wot not what to do. Thou
art a wise man: help me in this great strait, and thou shalt find thou
dost it for a thankful master." More promised to do his best, and was
afterwards actually rewarded for his services on this occasion with a
suit worth to him fifteen hundred pounds, though the Earl of Annandale,
his great friend, managed to get half of it.
[Illustration: SIR EDWARD COKE.
(_From the Portrait by Cornelius Janssen._)]
The lieutenant hastened back to the Tower, and told Somerset that he
had communicated his wishes to the king, who was in the most gracious
disposition towards him, and sent him assurance that though for form's
sake he must appear in court, he should not be detained there by any
proceedings; but whilst he had there an opportunity of seeing his enemies
and their malice towards him, the royal power should protect him from any
harm.
This appeased the rage of Somerset, and he prepared calmly to make his
appearance in the morning. But even then the officers of the court were
by no means secure of the result when he should find himself compelled to
plead, notwithstanding the royal promise. Bacon had planned all necessary
cautions for this emergency, as we find from his "Particular Remembrances
for his Majesty," preserved in the State Trials. "It were good," he says,
"that after he is come into the hall, so that he may perceive that he
must go to trial, and shall be retired to the place appointed till the
court call for him, then the lieutenant shall tell him roundly that, if
in his speeches he shall tax the king, the justice of England is that
he shall be taken away, and the evidence go on without him; and then all
the people will cry away with him, and then it shall not be in the king's
power to save his life, the people will be so set on fire."
The lieutenant had carefully acted on this plan, and had provided two
servants, each with a cloak on his arm, to stand behind Somerset, so
that if More's representations did not after all prevent Somerset from
speaking out to the discredit of the king, they should throw the cloaks
instantly over his head, and drag him from the bar, from all consequence
of which proceeding he promised to protect them.
These singular precautions, which betrayed an awful terror on the part of
the king of some withering exposure from the exasperated favourite, so
far prevailed, that Somerset stood upon his trial with apparent calmness,
but refused steadfastly to plead guilty. Bacon, on his part, was careful
in stating the charges against him, to do it so mildly that the prisoner
should not be excited to any dangerous pitch. Somerset never mentioned
the king, but he defended himself resolutely and with consummate ability.
He analysed the whole string of charges brought against him, explained
away whatever appeared to tell most forcibly to his disadvantage, and for
eleven hours prolonged the trial and the intolerable agony and suspense
of the king, who, during the whole time, was in the most pitiable
condition of terror. "But who had seen," says Sir Anthony Weldon, in a
passage which is fully borne out by the letters of More, the lieutenant,
"the king's restless motion all that day, sending to every boat landing
at the bridge, cursing all that came without tidings, would have easily
judged that all was not right, and that there had been some grounds for
his fears of Somerset's boldness; but at last, one bringing him word that
he was condemned, all was quiet."
In the course of a few weeks James actually granted a pardon to the
murder-stained countess, on the plea that she was not tried as a
principal, but as an accessory before the fact; though all the facts of
the case go to show that she was the chief instrumental instigator of the
death of Overbury. He also offered the same grace to Somerset; but the
proud, though fallen, favourite haughtily refused it, saying that he was
an innocent man, who therefore needed no pardon, but expected a reversal
of his sentence.
Time, however, showed him that the favour of the prince had passed on to
others, and that his enemies were working for further injury to him; he
therefore condescended in the autumn of 1624 to petition for the pardon
formerly rejected. It was granted on the 24th of October, with a promise
of the restoration of his property. James meanwhile allowed him an
income of four thousand pounds a year, and protected him from the infamy
attaching to his condemnation. He would not allow him to be expelled from
the Order of St. George, nor his arms to be reversed in the chapel of
that saint at Windsor.
The guilty earl and countess are said to have retired together into the
country, not to the felicity of innocent affection but, as it was said,
to mutual hatred and recrimination. The countess died in 1632; the earl,
who never recovered his estates, lived on thirteen years longer. Their
only child, Lady Ann Carr, who was born in the Tower, was married to
William, the fifth Earl, and afterwards Duke, of Bedford, and became
the mother of the celebrated Lord William Russell, who perished on the
scaffold under Charles II. Out of such a soil can rise such plants;
nay, even the daughter of this infamous couple is declared to have been
a woman of the purest and noblest character; and so carefully was the
horrible history of her parents kept from her, that it never reached her
ears till a few years before her own death. The Earl of Essex, so cruelly
treated in this revolting affair, lived to lead with high distinction the
army of the Commonwealth.
Fast on the fall of Somerset followed that of the Chief Justice Coke.
He had rendered distinguished service to James in hunting out the
evidence and bringing to punishment the favourite and his wife; but
he had neutralised this benefit by his haughtiness and opposition to
the royal authority in other respects. Coke and Bacon had pursued two
opposite systems of policy in their courses towards the highest honours
of the State. Bacon had affected liberalism and a championship of popular
rights, which the higher he rose the more he sacrificed to the pleasure
of the monarch. There was a profound flattery in this, for it seemed to
give an additional value to his growing attachment to the Crown, that it
was won from his original bias towards the people. On the other hand,
Coke commenced as a thorough-going supporter of the prerogative, and as
his abilities were pre-eminent, and his prosecution of State offenders
unrestrained by any scruples of conscience, he did the work of that
despotic prince with a gusto and a ruthlessness which highly delighted
his employer. No lawyer, except Jeffreys, in a later age, ever indulged
in the same unsparing abuse of those against whom he was retained. His
disposition was not merely unfeeling, it was truculent, and the insolence
of his language was beyond all former experience. When let loose on a
victim, he certainly was no respecter of persons; an Arabella Stuart or a
Raleigh were abused in a style which would not now be tolerated towards
the most abject criminal. But when Coke had reached the summit of his
ambition, and thought the height to which he had climbed secure, he began
to display the inherent pride of his nature, by assuming an independence
of manner and a haughtiness of opinion, exhibited even towards the
Throne, which astonished and irritated James. In the Commons he openly
opposed the claims of prerogative, came out in defence of popular rights,
and ended where Bacon had begun. From abject servility he rapidly passed
to daring opposition. On the subject of the late benevolences, he stood
forward as a patriot in the Commons; in the case of Peacham, that which
was prosecuted as treason, Coke declared was only defamation; and in that
of Owen, he agreed with the prisoner that he had committed no treason
in saying that the king, if excommunicated, might lawfully be killed,
because the king not having been excommunicated, the opinion could not
apply to him. These declarations, both in Parliament and on the Bench,
roused James to a keen resentment, and this was continually augmented. He
set his own court of the King's Bench above every other, and threatened
with the penalties of a Præmunire the judges of the Court of Chancery,
and all other judges who should grant relief in Equity after judgment
had been pronounced in the King's Bench; and he extended the same menace
to all suitors who sought for such relief. The judges of the Courts of
Admiralty, of High Commission, of Requests, of the Duchy of Lancaster,
and even the presidents of the Councils of the North and of Wales, felt
their jurisdictions invaded and repressed by his pretensions. The Court
of Star Chamber even, hitherto above all law, was called in question by
him, and its power to levy fines in many cases denied. He went farther,
and, as in the case of Owen and Peacham, dictated to the Privy Council,
and contradicted the Sovereign to his very face.
It would seem as if at the moment when Coke was hunting down his former
benefactor Somerset, the secret decree had gone out from the king
against the Lord Chief Justice himself. Somerset was condemned on the
25th of May, and on the 30th of June Coke received an order from the
king to absent himself from the Council chamber, and not to proceed on
his circuit, but to employ himself in correcting the errors in his Book
of Reports. He had outraged James's sense of his own supreme authority,
by opposing him in the matter of Commendams and bishoprics, and had,
moreover, contended with Villiers, the new favourite, respecting a patent
place at Court. Long before he received this startling order for the
suspension of his diplomatic and judicial functions, the Archbishop,
the Chancellor, and Mr. Attorney-General Bacon had been employed by
royal command to collect charges against him. He was now charged with
concealing a debt of twelve thousand pounds, due from the late Chancellor
Hatton to the Crown; with contempt of the king's authority in declaring
from the Bench that the Common Law would be overthrown by proceedings in
Equity, or by claims of prerogative; and for disrespect to the Crown in
the affair of the Commendams.
The charge regarding the money Coke refuted when brought before the
Council, and confirmed his case by a decision at law; as to the second
charge, he explained it as in no way reflecting on the king; and for the
third, he humbly solicited his majesty's forgiveness. James professed to
retain the highest regard for the Lord Chief Justice, and intended, on
his showing a proper humility, to continue to him his favour; but when
Coke brought in his Book of Reports, and maintained that he could only
find five trivial errors in it, James, in great anger for his "deceit,
contempt, and slander of government," dismissed him from the Bench, and
made Montague, the Recorder of London, chief justice in his place. Coke,
with all his harshness and cutting style to others, felt for himself
keenly, and is said to have wept like a child on receiving his dismissal.
Bacon displayed anything but a philosophical magnanimity on the fall of
his rival. He not only joked with Villiers on the disgrace of the great
man who had offended the favourite, but he wrote a most insulting letter
to the fallen judge, which was particularly odious from being garnished
with the cant of piety.
Bacon now looked confidently towards the Chancellorship, and in March
of the next year (1617) Brackley resigning from age, the Great Seal
was transferred to him, with the title of Lord Keeper. Sir Francis had
reached the elevation to which he had so long and so ardently aspired,
by a slavish advocacy of the most unlimited claims of prerogative and,
as far as in him lay, the restriction of constitutional liberty--a
deplorable instance of how completely the most transcendent talents can
be united in an ignoble and mercenary nature. Indeed, the conduct of
Bacon on this occasion was vain and weak to a pitiable degree. Though
he had now reached the mature age of fifty-four, and drew an enormous
income from his grants and offices, he was so profuse of expenditure
that he was a needy man, pressed with difficulties, which he saw in the
Chancellorship an exhaustless means of dispersing. His vanity burst forth
to a surprising extent and he assumed all the state of a Wolsey. He rode
to Westminster Hall on horseback, in a gown of rich purple satin, and
attended by a crowd of nobles, judges, great law officers, lawyers, and
students, rivalling even the splendour of the king.
While these affairs were progressing at home, the credit of James abroad
had sunk very low. At the conference for effecting a truce between
Holland and Spain, held at the Hague--a conference which established the
independence of the Low Countries--the English ministers had been made
to feel the ignominy of their position, compared with the dignity of the
ambassadors of Elizabeth. Prince Maurice told them openly that their
master dare not open his mouth in contradiction to the King of Spain; and
their allies, the French, in consequence assumed a superiority throughout
the negotiations which mortified deeply the English envoys. Nor was that
the only slight which James's truckling policy brought on him abroad. He
was anxious to ally his son to the Court of Spain, notwithstanding the
intense aversion of his subjects from the idea of a Catholic Princess.
But Spain declined the offer. He next applied for the hand of Madame
Christine, sister to Louis XIII. of France; but here again he was met
with the contempt which his mean and insecure character merited: France
preferred the suit of the Duke of Savoy. It was never before the fortune
of England to have to go begging to the Continental states for wives for
its princes: they had hitherto been only too officiously pressed on its
acceptance.
We must now trace the proceedings of James in Scotland and Ireland, where
he was anxious to establish his principles of Church and State supremacy
as thoroughly as in England, and where the seed he sowed rapidly grew
into the same harvest of bloodshed and revolution as on the south side of
the Tweed.
The Church of Scotland, as established by Knox and his contemporaries,
was, like Switzerland (from which they brought the idea), a republic.
It acknowledged no head but Christ, nor any concern which the State had
with it, except to furnish the support of the ministers whose lives were
devoted to the civilisation and religious improvement of the community.
The minister and the lay elders of a parish constituted the parochial
assembly, which governed all the spiritual affairs of that little
circle; a certain number of these assemblies constituted a presbytery,
which heard all appeals from the parochial assemblies, and sanctioned
the appointment, suspension, or dismissal of their ministers. Beyond
the presbytery extended the provincial synod, and the General Assembly
claimed the supreme management of the affairs of the Church under God.
This free form of the Scottish Church had always been extremely repugnant
to James's despotic notions. Even when he professed to admire its
constitution as the purest and most perfect on earth, he was writhing
under its authority; and no sooner did he ascend the English throne
than he avowed his real opinion of its inconsistency with monarchy.
The hierarchy of England delighted him; he regarded it as the surest
bulwark of the Throne, and bishops he seemed to regard as the guarantees
of royal security. "No bishop no king," was his favourite motto; and
the hatred of presbytery which he expressed at Hampton Court led him
to seek its utter overthrow in Scotland. He knew the sturdy materials
that he had to deal with in the Scottish ministry and people, who had
driven out his mother in their hatred of Catholicism; yet this did not
deter him from endeavouring to plant episcopacy as firmly in Scotland
as in England. He looked on the spirit and form of the Scottish Church
but as one remove from republicanism in the State; and his first step,
taken in 1605, was a bold one, being no less than to assume the right
to prorogue the General Assembly at will. This was at once annihilating
the theocratic constitution of the Assembly, and placing the king at its
head. This measure was carried out by Sir George Home the Lord Treasurer
of Scotland, afterwards Earl of Dunbar. The ministers, though prorogued,
met again in defiance of the royal fiat, but were dissolved again and
again. The ministers from nine presbyteries still boldly met in assertion
of the paramount right of the Church, at Aberdeen, called themselves "an
Assembly," appointed a moderator, and before dissolving at the command of
the Council, adjourned their sitting to a fixed time that year.
[Illustration: ANDREW MELVILLE BEFORE THE SCOTTISH PRIVY COUNCIL. (_See
p._ 462.)]
Thirteen of the most prominent ministers were immediately arrested on
the charge of having violated the Act of 1584, "for maintenance of the
royal power over all estates." The jury was packed by Dunbar, and six
of the most refractory clergy were condemned as guilty of high treason,
and banished for life. They retired into Holland and France, and were
followed thither by numbers of their admirers. Meanwhile, at home,
undaunted by this lawless exercise of power, the ministers offered up
prayers for their exiled brethren, whom they boldly proclaimed from their
pulpits as martyrs to the freedom of the faith; and unsilenced by the
menaces of the Court, loudly warned the people of the impending danger to
the Church.
But James, with the blind hardihood of a true Stuart, went on, and in
1606 appointed thirteen clergymen to the ancient abolished bishoprics,
and gave them precedency in the synods and Assembly. The ministers
refused to submit to their authority, and, as they were unsupported by
the old reverence, treated their assumed dignity with contempt. But
James went on to repeal the Act which had confiscated the episcopal
estates, endowed the bishops, and made them moderators of both synods
and presbyteries within their own districts. He erected two courts of
High Commission, and indeed gave them a power such as their predecessors
had never possessed. In 1610 three of these bishops went to England, and
received episcopal ordination from the English prelates, and on their
return conferred it on their colleagues. And finally, in 1612, it was
enacted by the Scottish Parliament that all General Assemblies should
only be appointed by the Crown; that the bishops only should present to
livings; that they should admit no one who would not first take the Oath
of Supremacy to the king, and of canonical obedience to the bishop; that
they should possess the power of deprivation and the right of visitation,
each in his own diocese.
Andrew Melville, the successor of Knox, boldly though respectfully denied
these innovations, asserting the freedom of conscience, and its immunity
from the power of any earthly potentate. When pressed by some slavish
Scottish lords to conform, he said: "My lords, I am a free subject of
Scotland, a free kingdom, that has laws and privileges of its own. By
these I stand. No legal citation has been issued against me; nor are
you and I in our own country, where such an inquisition, so oppressive
as the present, is condemned by Parliament. I am bound by no law to
criminate or to furnish accusations against myself. My lords, remember
what you are; mean as I am, remember that I am a free-born Scotsman, to
be dealt with as you would be dealt with yourselves, according to the
laws of the Scottish nation."
This was noble and patriotic language; but Melville had to deal with a
vain despot, who declared himself above all laws. He insisted on their
attending the royal chapel to hear the preaching of his bishops. The
plain presbyterian Scots were scandalised at both what they saw and heard
there: at the ceremonies, the gilded altar, the chalices, and tapers,
but above all, at the slavish doctrines of those courtly preachers.
The Scottish ministers did not hesitate to express their contempt and
indignation at the whole spectacle, and Melville ridiculed the entire
service in a Latin epigram. For this audacity James summoned him before
his Privy Council; but the preacher's blood was now chafed beyond
restraint, for he and his colleagues, though they were impatient to get
away from what they considered this idolatrous scene, where the conduct
of the bishops and clergy was by no means edifying, had been compelled
to stay. So far from expressing any regret for his satire on the royal
mode of worship, he denounced in the strongest terms the whole system
of the Anglican Church, and in his excitement seized the surplice of
the primate, and shook angrily what he called the Romish rags of the
Archbishop of Canterbury.
James committed him to the Tower for his contumacy (1606), where he kept
him four years, and then banished him for life. He went to reside at
Sedan, where he died in 1622. His nephew, James Melville, was shut up at
Berwick, and died six years before his uncle; the rest of the preachers
were banished to remote districts of Scotland, wide apart from each other.
To put the finish to this daring change, James determined to make a
journey to Scotland himself in 1617. On leaving that country he had
assured his Scottish subjects that he would visit his ancient capital
at least once in three years: fourteen years had now elapsed without
his redeeming his word, his poverty having hitherto presented an
insurmountable obstacle. But he had now consented to yield up the
cautionary towns, Brell, Flushing, and Rammekens, for 2,728,000 florins
instead of 8,000,000, which were due to him. He had been induced to
this by his necessities and the persuasions of Secretary Winwood, who
was said to have received £29,000 from the Dutch for his services on
the occasion. James now discharged some of his most pressing debts, and
obtained a loan of £96,000, with which he set forward to Scotland in the
spring of 1617.
On the 7th of June the Scottish Estates met, and James excluded such of
the representatives as he knew were hostile to his object of establishing
the English Church in all its forms and authority, as the State Church of
Scotland for ever. But the Peers, alarmed lest he should restore to his
pet church the lands of which they now were in possession, rejected the
articles which he recommended. To win over these nobles, James invited
them to a secret conference, in which he assured them that no revocation
of these lands should be made. Reassured on this head, the Peers were
ready to vote as he pleased, and he opened the Estates in one of his
vaunting speeches about his power, in which he told his audience that "he
had nothing more at heart than to reduce their barbarity to the sweet
civility of their neighbours; and if the Scots would be as docible to
learn the goodness of the English as they were teachable to limp after
their ill, then he should not doubt of success; for they had already
learnt of the English to drink healths, to wear coaches and gay clothes,
to take tobacco, and to speak a language which was neither English nor
Scottish."
In this insolent speech the king might have included himself both as to
clothes and language; but these were small matters in comparison with
those which he had in view. He brought in a Bill to enact that what the
king might determine upon regarding the Church, with the concurrence of
the bishops and a certain number of the clergy, should be good in law.
At this proposition the ministers were instantly in arms, and presented
so determined a remonstrance against it, that he became afraid and gave
it up, saying it was unnecessary to give him that by statute which was
already his by authority of the Crown. He managed, however, to carry a
Bill adding chapters to the bishoprics, regulating the appointment of
bishops, and also one for converting the hereditary offices of sheriffs
into annual ones, which he would thus be able to influence. Never,
surely, with a spirit so essentially cowardly, was there a monarch
so ingrained with the bigotry of absolutism, or who so perseveringly
laboured to annihilate every liberty of the subject, and leave the nation
a base and soulless heritage of the Crown. But the nation was not thus
to be trodden into a horde of serfs; and though James escaped to a
quiet tomb, it took a terrible vengeance on his children, whom he had
inoculated with his incorrigible lust of absolutism.
As nothing more was to be obtained from Parliament, the uncouth tyrant
wended his way to St. Andrews, where he had planned a severe retribution
for the remonstrant ministers, from a more obsequious tribunal. There
the ministers having met at his summons, he singled out Simpson, Ewart,
and Calderwood, who had signed the remonstrance which baulked him of his
full intentions, and brought them before the High Commission Court, and
condemned Simpson and Ewart to suspension and imprisonment. Calderwood,
who by his influence and ability excited most of all his dread and
resentment, he banished for life. Having thus given the ministers a
sharp lesson, he now announced to them that it was his will that the
whole ritual of the English Church should be adopted in Scotland in five
articles, the name of which afterwards became famous, namely:--1st,
That the Eucharist should be received in a kneeling, and not in a
sitting, posture, as had been hitherto the mode in Scotland; 2nd, That
the Sacrament should be given to the sick at their own houses when they
were in danger of death; 3rd, That baptism should, in like cases, be
administered in private houses; 4th, That the youth should be confirmed
by the bishops; and 5th, That the festivals of Christmas, Good Friday,
Easter, Ascension Day, and Whit-Sunday, should be observed in Scotland
just as in England. These commands were received with unequivocal marks
of displeasure by the ministers, but the fate of the three remonstrants
availed to keep them silent for a time, and James regarded his plans
as fully accomplished; but presently the preachers fell on their knees
and implored him to refer the Five Articles to the General Assembly of
the Kirk. James for some time refused to listen to them, but on Patrick
Galloway assuring him that matters should be so managed that all should
go right, he consented.
He then kept his Whitsuntide in the English fashion, with all his
crouching prelates and courtiers around him; and afterwards took his way
homeward, in the full persuasion that he had succeeded in his object.
Time told a very different tale; nor was he himself long in perceiving
that, though he had overawed, he had not subdued the sturdy Scottish
clergy. Scarcely had he reached England when he learned that the Scots,
both clergy and laity, were loud in denouncing the administration of
the Eucharist in private houses as a remnant of Popery; the revival of
the festivals of Christmas as the return to the ancient Saturnalia;
and of those of Easter and Whitsuntide as the renewal of the feasts of
the Jews. And on the 24th of November the ministers, in their assembly
at St. Andrews, confirmed none of the Five Articles except that of the
administration of the Sacrament at the houses of the sick, provided
that the sick person first took an oath that he or she did not expect
to recover. James was highly enraged. He ordered the observance of
the Five Articles to be commanded by proclamation, and withdrew the
promised augmentations of stipend. Nor did the king give way in the
slightest degree. The next year he managed the Assembly so far, through
Lord Binning, as to carry the Articles by a majority of eighty-six
against forty-one; and in 1621, three years later, he obtained an Act
of Parliament enforcing these Articles on the repugnant spirit of the
people. Dr. Laud, whose name we now meet for the first time, afterwards
to become so notorious, even urged James to go further lengths; but his
fatal advice was destined to act with more force on the next generation.
Whilst James's hand was in, however, he hit upon another mode of
incensing the Puritans, and showing his dislike of them. He had been
extremely annoyed by the severity of the Presbyterian manners during his
visit; and when, on returning, the Catholics of Lancashire presented to
him petitions complaining of the strictness of the Puritans, who forbade
those sports and recreations to which they had been accustomed on Sundays
after service, adding that it drove men to the ale-house, a bright
idea occurred to him, and he determined to publish a Book of Sports,
encouraging the people on Sundays, after church, to play at running,
leaping, archery, morris-dances, and to enjoy their church-ales and
festivities as aforetime. These sports, however, were not to be indulged
in by the recusants, nor any who had not attended Church in the morning.
He also prohibited on Sundays bull and bear-baitings, interludes, and
bowls; the last, probably, because they led to gambling. He restored all
the jollity of may-poles and rush-bearings.
Many of the established clergy were conscientiously opposed to this
mode of spending the Sunday, which appeared to them to savour greatly
of Papacy; but James persisted in his scheme, and not only published
his Book of Sports, but ordered the bishops, each in his own diocese,
to publish his ordinance regarding the Sunday amusements. Abbot, the
Primate, is said to have steadfastly refused to read the book in his
own church at Croydon, but the other bishops complied. Laud was zealous
in its promulgation, and in after years roused the stern and undaunted
spirit of the reformers by recommending the revival of the Book to
Charles I.
In Ireland the same system had been pursued by James from the
commencement of his reign, of endeavouring to force the consciences of
his subjects into the mould of his own ideas. On the death of Elizabeth
the Irish had openly resumed the Catholic worship in most of the South
of Ireland. Mountjoy, the Lord-Deputy, issued a proclamation for its
immediate suppression; but the fear of the old lioness of a queen being
removed, they treated his orders with contempt and defiance. Mountjoy
marched down upon them, and compelled submission at the point of the
bayonet, and then passed over to England, having with him the two great
chiefs, Tyrone and O'Donnell, with a number of their followers.
These chieftains being well received by James, Tyrone being restored to
his honours and estates, and O'Donnell created Earl of Tyrconnel, the
Irish conceived wonderful hopes of the clemency and liberality of James.
They sent a deputation to join the two earls in petitioning for the
full enjoyment of their religion, but they found themselves grievously
deceived. James declared that he would never consent to anything of the
kind, but so long as he had a hundred men left, he would fight to the
death to put down so idolatrous a worship. In his anger he committed four
of the delegates to the Tower, where he kept them three months; and this
practice of committing Irish deputies to prison for daring to present
petitions on such subjects, became his regular practice.
The British Solomon never relaxed his war upon the religion of his
subjects, if it were not of the same colour and shape as his own, so long
as breath was left in him. It was in his eyes akin to the sin against
the Holy Ghost to differ from or doubt the infallibility of his wisdom,
for he deemed himself, according to his open avowal, a god upon earth.
In 1605, two years only after ascending the throne of England, he issued
a proclamation, commanding all Catholic priests to quit Ireland on pain
of death; and he commanded all officers, magistrates, and chief citizens
of Dublin to attend the Established Church, or suffer the fine of twenty
pounds a month, and moreover, imprisonment. The nobility prayed to be
permitted the exercise of their religion, but the ill-fated presenters of
the petition were thrown into the Castle of Dublin, and their spokesman,
Sir Patrick Barnewell, was sent over to England, and incarcerated in the
Tower.
[Illustration: KEEPING SUNDAY, ACCORDING TO KING JAMES'S BOOK OF SPORTS.
(_See p._ 464.)]
James now hit on a bold scheme for breaking down the clanship of Ireland,
and so weakening the opposition of the people to his despotic will. He
ordered all possessors of lands to bring in their titles to commissioners
appointed for the purpose, on the promise that they should receive them
again in a more valid and advantageous form. As, from the disturbed state
of the country for ages past, many of these titles were defective, the
landowners accepted the offer in good faith, but they found that the
commissioners, instead of returning them of the same value, and bearing
the same conditions, only returned them freehold titles of such lands as
were in their own hands. All such lands as were in the hands of tenants,
were made over to these tenants, only subject to the rent charges and
dues which they had formerly paid. Thus the great bulk of the tenantry
of Ireland was freed from its dependence on the will of the chief _in
capite_, and now set him at naught. But though the power of the chiefs
was broken, the commonalty showed no more inclination to adhere to a
Government which persecuted them on account of their faith. They were now
more at liberty, and readier than ever to follow some bold and defiant
leader who promised them protection and vengeance on their tyrants. The
great lords, thus tricked out of their hereditary rights, were converted
into deadly enemies of the English Government.
Tyrone and Tyrconnel, on taking leave of the English Court to return to
Ireland, professed extreme gratitude for the kindness of their reception,
but in reality they were full of the most hostile sentiments. They looked
on this transfer of their seigneurial rights as a measure intended to
sever their vassals from them, and thus to subjugate the whole island to
the yoke of the English hierarchy. No sooner did they land in Ireland,
than Richard Nugent, Lord Delvin, invited them to meet him at his
Castle of Maynooth. They unanimously agreed that the destruction of the
hereditary faith of Ireland was planned, and they bound themselves by
oath to act together for its defence.
Two years later, intelligence was gathered by some one at Brussels, in
the service of the archduke, that Tyrone had renewed his relations with
the Court of Spain; and, in order to decoy him into England, a pretender
to a large extent of his lands was set up, and both parties were summoned
over to have the cause tried before the Privy Council. Tyrone, aware of
the design, avoided the snare by sending an attorney with full powers
to act in his behalf. This stratagem did not succeed. Tyrone received
from the Lord-Deputy information that his presence would be necessary in
London to defeat the pretensions of his opponent. Tyrone, feigning to
comply, only solicited a delay of a month, in order to settle his affairs
and raise money for his journey and sojourn at Court. The request being
acceded to, he escaped in a vessel sent on purpose from Dunkirk, with two
of his sons and nephew, accompanied by Tyrconnel, with his son, and Lord
Dungannon, his brother, with thirty of their retainers, and reached in a
few days Quillebeque in Normandy.
On the discovery of the escape of these nobles, James was greatly
alarmed, believing that they had gone to Spain to join the Armada which
during the summer had been collecting in the Spanish ports, and to
conduct it to Ireland. The news of their real resort abated his fears.
He demanded their delivery from France, and then from the Netherlands,
whither they betook themselves, describing them as traitors, and men
of mean birth, who had been merely ennobled for purposes of State. He
accused them of an intention to excite a rebellion, and returning to
Ireland with foreign confederates, to put to death all Irishmen of
English descent. The Court of Brussels declined to give up men exiled
only on account of their religion, and admitted them into the Spanish
army of Brabant. Tyrone himself proceeded to Rome, where the King of
Spain allowed him a pension of six hundred crowns per month, and the Pope
one hundred.
Active search was made in Ireland for the accomplices of the fugitives;
many were arrested in Ulster, some were sent over for trial to England.
Lord Delvin, with the eldest son of Tyrone, and Sir Christopher St.
Lawrence, were secured and lodged in Dublin Castle. Delvin was tried and
condemned as a traitor, but he escaped on the morning fixed for his
execution; and no trace of him could be found till he suddenly appeared
at the English Court, and throwing himself on his knees before the king,
presented such a list of real wrongs inflicted on himself and his father,
as compelled James to pardon him and to make him amends by creating him
Earl of Westmeath; a clemency, as it proved, well bestowed, and which
might have taught the king a more successful way to secure obedience and
loyalty from his subjects, than those which he unhappily pursued.
Another Irish chief, O'Dogherty of Inishowen, having received a mortal
insult from Paulet, the Governor of Derry, surprised him at table, and by
the aid of his followers succeeded in killing him and five others. The
avengers captured alive Hart, the governor of the Fortress of Culmore,
and leading him to the gates of the Castle, called on the governor's wife
to surrender the place, or see her husband murdered on the spot. Conjugal
affection prevailed, and O'Dogherty found himself in possession of the
stronghold. Possessed by this means of arms and ammunition, O'Dogherty
marched with a strong force to Derry, and received the submission of the
castle and town. The hopes of the exiles were wonderfully raised by so
unexpected an event. They despatched messengers instructing O'Dogherty
to hold the place, if possible, till their arrival with foreign aid;
but after two unsuccessful attacks, the place was evacuated on the
approach of Wingfield, the marshal of the camp, and O'Dogherty fled to
the mountains. There, in the month of June, 1608, he was accidentally
discovered, and shot.
The rebellion of these great chiefs, by throwing into the hands of the
Crown an immense territory, suggested to James the planting of a new
English Colony. Undeterred by the failure of Elizabeth's plantation of
Ulster, he proceeded to divide the confiscated region, which included
nearly the whole of the northern counties of Cavan, Fermanagh, Armagh,
Derry, Tyrone, and Tyrconnel, amounting to two millions of acres, into
four great divisions. Two of these were again divided into lots of one
thousand acres each, a third into lots of fifteen hundred acres, and
the fourth into lots of two thousand acres. The two thousand acre lots
were appropriated to a class of men called "undertakers and servitors,"
adventurers of capital from England and Scotland, with the civil and
military officers of the Crown. The lesser lots went amongst these
and the natives of the province also; but the natives were only to
receive their lots in the plains and open country, not in the hills
and fastnesses, where they might become formidable to Government. The
possessors were bound to pay a mark a year for every sixty acres, and the
lesser ones besides to take the Oath of Supremacy, and engage to admit no
recusant as tenant.
By these means some hundred thousand acres were planted; but whole
districts in the hills were never divided at all, whilst many of the
undertakers managed to get immensely more land than they had any right
to. It was at this time (1611) that the scheme, already mentioned, of
creating baronets was proposed to James by Sir Anthony Shirley, as a
means of raising money for the support of the army in Ulster. James
caught eagerly at the idea, coined upwards of one hundred thousand pounds
out of it, but neither sent any of the money to Ireland, nor gave a
handsome gratuity to Shirley for the suggestion, as he promised.
After these measures, James ventured to call a Parliament in Ireland,
in 1613, the first for seven-and-twenty years. He wanted money, and
he wanted also to enact new laws. But the Catholics were naturally
apprehensive of these intended laws, for the whole of James's policy
went to crush their religion out of the majority of the inhabitants, and
impose on them his own model church. So little had this shallow sovereign
profited by the lessons of history, that he expected to convert a whole
nation by the sword and confiscation. But Ireland had by all former
English monarchs, down to Elizabeth, been taught to regard the Pope as
the lord paramount of the island; it was a doctrine that secured the
obedience of the people under all their oppressions. But since Elizabeth
had separated from the Catholic Church, and stood excommunicated by
the pontiff, this maxim, so convenient before, was become extremely
inconvenient. To the political causes of discontent was now added the far
more irritating one of violated religious faith, which has continued till
our time.
Under these circumstances the Lord-Deputy summoned the Parliament,
and soon found that, though he had a majority of more than twenty
Protestants, the spirit of the Catholics was such that he did not dare
to proceed. Since the former Parliament, no less than seventeen new
counties and forty new boroughs had been created, and these had been
filled by men devoted to the measures of the Crown; the boroughs, the
Catholics complained, had been put into the hands of attorneys' clerks
and servants, and they expected to find on the projected new plantations
only evil-disposed persons, ready to insult and injure the old
inhabitants. They objected to many of the returns; they complained that
obsolete statutes had been revived for the purposes of oppression; that
Catholics of noble birth were excluded from posts of honour; that they
were expelled from the magistracy; that they were forbidden to educate
their children abroad; that Catholic barristers were not permitted to
practise; that Catholic citizens were excluded from all influence in
the corporations; and that the whole community was subjected to fines,
excommunications, and punishments, which spread poverty and misery over
the island.
The Lord-Deputy prorogued the impracticable assembly, and both parties
appealed to the king. The Catholics sent as deputies the Lords
Gormansbury and Dunboyne, and two knights and two barristers to plead
their cause. The expense of the mission was defrayed by a general
collection, which was made in spite of a severe proclamation against
it. James received them at first graciously, but his anger soon broke
out when he found them impervious to his controversial eloquence; and,
as usual, he threw two of them into prison--Luttrel into the Fleet, and
Talbot into the Tower. He soon had Talbot before the Star Chamber, and
strictly interrogated him on the point of loyalty to the Crown, and he
severely reprimanded the whole deputation on the same ground; but Lord
Delvin on his knees declared that he would ever be faithful to the king
as his rightful liege, yet that nothing should ever induce him to abandon
his religion. James dismissed them, after having appointed a commission
of inquiry regarding the representatives of the new Irish boroughs, which
decided that none of the four boroughs incorporated after the writs were
issued had a right to sit that Session.
As to the religious grievances, no concession was made, and scarcely had
the deputies reached home, when a proclamation appeared ordering all
the Catholic clergy to quit Ireland on pain of death. When Parliament
met again in Dublin, in 1615, there was an outward air of conciliation;
the two parties avoided the grand subjects of discord, except that both
Houses joined in a petition that Catholic barristers might be permitted
to plead. The attainders of Tyrone, Tyrconnel, and O'Dogherty were
confirmed, as well as the plantation of Ulster, and all distinctions
between the two races of the Irish--that is, the native Irish and the
Anglo-Irish--were abolished by statute, and a liberal subsidy was
obtained.
The conciliatory air did not long continue. The Lord-Deputy Chichester
made a cautious attempt to enforce the fines for absence from church,
beginning with a few timid persons in each county, whose compliance might
influence others. In 1623, Lord Falkland, then Lord-Deputy, repeated
the proclamation ordering all Catholic priests to leave the kingdom on
pain of death; but they only retired into the mountains and morasses and
defied his authority. James saw that it was useless to hope for success
in his scheme of crushing out Catholicism, till he had planted the whole
island after the Ulster fashion, and this was set about in good earnest.
Commissions were issued for the examination of all grants and titles,
and, by the most iniquitous proceedings, hardly a single foot of land was
exempted from the claim of forfeiture to the Crown. It was found that the
proprietors of the vast counties of Connaught, Galway, and Clare, had
been induced to surrender their titles to Elizabeth, on condition that
they should receive fresh ones, and that they had paid three thousand
pounds for the enrolment of these titles, but had never got them. On this
discovery James was advised to claim the whole island, with the exception
of the small portion which he had himself planted; but the owners
declared on all hands that they would defend their lands with their
swords rather than admit such a claim; and James preferred getting a sum
of money. His pretensions were commuted for a double annual rent and a
fine of ten thousand pounds. He, however, proceeded to plant the coast
between Dublin and Wexford, then the counties of Leitrim and Longford,
and finally Westmeath, and King's and Queen's Counties. In this business
all law and justice were set aside. James gave orders that three-fourths
of the lands should be settled on the original proprietors, but no regard
was paid to this. Few of the old possessors obtained above a quarter of
their lands again, and many were stripped of every acre which they had
inherited from their fathers. Whole septs were removed to the parts most
distant from their native localities. Seven such septs were transported
from Queen's County to King's, and menaced with instant death by martial
law if they dared return. Sir Patrick Crosby received the seigniory
of Tarbert, on condition that he leased out one-fourth of it to those
unhappy exiles, but very few of them got anything; and, in a word, Carte
declares that the injustice and cruelty then committed are scarcely to
be paralleled in the history of any age or country. At the same time, the
north of Ireland, hitherto a mere wilderness, began immediately to assume
an appearance of prosperity.
Such was the condition of Ireland as left by James. He imagined that he
had pacified it; it was only the sullen lull before the storm which burst
forth in the days of his successor, with a fury only the more terrible
from its temporary delay.
During the king's absence in Scotland, Bacon had shown such arrogance in
the Council, that he had disgusted everybody. He had appeared to imagine
himself king, took up his quarters in Whitehall, and gave audiences
in the great Banqueting-house at Whitehall. Mr. Secretary Winwood was
so incensed at his presumption that he quitted the Council Chamber,
declaring, that he would not enter it again till the king's return;
and he wrote at once an account of Bacon's proceedings, assuring the
king that it was high time that he returned, for his throne was already
occupied. The vain, foolish conduct of the Lord Keeper was watched by
an eye which owed him no favour, and a spirit smarting with envy, which
was relentless in his revenge. Coke, by offending the favourite, lost
his position, but he now saw a way to turn this opposition to Buckingham
against Bacon. Buckingham, since his rising into favour, had taken care
to promote the fortunes of his friends and relatives. He had cast his
eyes on the daughter of the fallen Chief Justice Coke, by Lady Hatton,
the widow of Queen Elizabeth's Chancellor; this young lady, who was
likely to have a large fortune from her mother, he determined to obtain
for his brother John Villiers, a sickly and nearly idiotic youth. Coke,
who despised the favourite, and was at feud with him respecting the
already mentioned patent place at Court, opposed the match, which was
agreeable neither to the young lady nor her mother. But when Coke found
himself deprived of his office, and his rival, Bacon, advanced, he
bethought himself that by the means of his daughter he had the power of
regaining the goodwill of the favourite, and pulling down the arrogant
Lord Keeper. Before Buckingham had left for Scotland, Coke had had a
private interview with him, in which he agreed to consent to the marriage
on condition of regaining his honours and position in the Council and on
the Bench.
During the absence of the Court in Scotland, and while Bacon was in the
full tide of his assumed greatness, he discovered this compact, which
boded him nothing but destruction. Without delay he incited the Lady
Hatton, who was in almost everything violently opposed to her husband,
to make haste and secure her daughter by secreting her with herself in
the house of Sir Edward Withipole near Oxford, and by contracting her
in marriage to Henry de Vere, Earl of Oxford, for whom the young lady
really entertained a regard. Coke, enraged at this flight, and at the
attempt to marry his daughter contrary to his own plans, applied for a
search-warrant to enter the house where she was secreted. Bacon refused
it, but Winwood was only too happy to grant it. Coke, supported by
twelve armed men, made a forcible entry and carried away his daughter.
On this Bacon procured the new Attorney-General, Yelverton, to file an
information against Coke in the Star Chamber for a breach of the peace.
Bacon also wrote to the king and the favourite in Scotland, representing
to Buckingham that it was by no means to his honour or interest to ally
his family to that of Coke, a fallen, disgraced man, and disliked of
the king, especially as much better matches might be found. To James he
represented the trouble which Coke had given to his majesty, his fondness
for opposing the king's wishes, and the disturbances there had been in
the kingdom and courts of justice so long as Coke had been in power. Sir
Francis added that now everything was quiet, and that his majesty knew
that he had in him an officer always anxious to do his will.
[Illustration: PARLIAMENT HOUSE, DUBLIN, IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.]
The answer of the king struck him at once to the earth. The great
philosopher was not aware how far the compact with Coke had really
gone; and when he read the king's letter, reprimanding his presumption,
accompanied by another from Buckingham, in which he rated him for his
officious meddling, and telling him that the same hand which had made him
could unmake him, he saw the gulf into which he had plunged. At once he
wrote off to both monarch and minion, imploring the humblest pardon for
this unworthy offence, which he would now do all in his power to wipe
away. Accordingly, he stopped the proceedings before the Council and in
the Star Chamber against Coke, and assured Lady Hatton and her friends
that he could not assist them in a course so opposed to the wishes of the
young lady's father.
On the return of the Court, Bacon hastened to pay his homage to the proud
favourite; but he was then made to feel how much it is in the power of a
base and little-souled man in favour, to humiliate the most gigantic mind
when it forgets to be submissive. The great renovator of science, the
proud and vaunting Lord Keeper, was made to wait for two whole days in
the lobby of the upstart. This is Weldon's account of it:--"He attended
two days at Buckingham's chamber, being not admitted to any better place
than the room where trencher-scrapers and lackeys attended, there sitting
upon an old wooden chest, amongst such as for his baseness were only fit
for his companions, although the honour of his place did merit far more
respect, with his purse and Seal lying by him on that chest. Myself told
a servant of my Lord of Buckingham, it was a shame to see the purse and
Seal of so little value or esteem in his chamber, though the carrier
without it merited nothing but scorn, being worst amongst the basest. But
the servant told me they had command it must be so. After two days he had
admittance. At his first entrance he fell down flat at the duke's foot,
kissing it, and vowing never to rise till he had his pardon; and thus was
he again reconciled. And since that time so very a slave to the duke and
all that family, that he durst not deny the command of the meanest of
the kindred, nor yet oppose anything. By which you see a base spirit is
even most concomitant with the proudest mind; and surely, never so many
brave parts, and so base and abject a spirit, tenanted together in any
one earthen cottage, as in this one man."
Buckingham condescended to forgive the suppliant Lord Keeper: the
projected marriage was accomplished, and Bacon soon after--that is, on
the 4th of January, 1618--was raised to the dignity of Lord Chancellor,
with a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year and the title of Baron
Verulam. For, provided he threw no obstacle in the way of the marriage,
both James and Buckingham preferred his pliancy to the sturdy spirit of
Coke.
The consequences of this forced and unnatural marriage were as deplorable
as the means of effecting it were vile. The brother of Villiers was
created Viscount Purbeck; but no title could give him a sound body or
a healthy intellect. It was not long before he was pronounced utterly
mad, was shut up in an asylum, and Buckingham took possession of Lady
Purbeck's property under pretence of managing it for her and Lord
Purbeck, but spent it for his own purposes; and Coke's daughter, outraged
in all her feelings as a woman and her rights as a subject, became a
degraded and abandoned character.
Buckingham now reigned supreme at Court. He had rapidly risen from a
simple country youth into a baron, viscount, earl, and marquis; he was
a member of the Privy Council, Knight of the Garter, had been a Master
of the Horse, and was now Lord High Admiral; the Earl of Nottingham--the
brave old Howard, hero of the Armada--having been compelled to resign
to make way for him. He and his mother disposed of all places about
Court, in the Church, in the courts of law, and in the Government. Peers,
prelates, and men of all degrees courted humbly his favour, and paid him
large sums of money for the places they sought, or agreed to annuities
out of their salaries and emoluments. The king seemed to rejoice in the
wealth which flowed in on his favourite from these corrupt services, and
could not bear him out of his sight.
Let us take Weldon's account of this state of things:--"And now
Buckingham, having the Chancellor or Treasurer, and all great officers,
his very slaves, swells in the height of pride, and summons up all his
country kindred, the old countess providing a place for them to learn to
carry themselves in a Court-like garb." The old countess, as Weldon calls
her, was far from old, but a woman yet in her prime, and of singular
beauty and notorious wickedness. She was another Elizabeth Woodville in
looking out for rich heirs and heiresses, and marrying her kin to them.
The brothers, half-brothers, cousins of Buckingham, were all matched
to rich women, and the women were matched to the eldest sons of earls,
barons, and men of large estate. And where there was no title, such was
soon conferred. The madman that they gave to Coke's daughter, as we
have seen, was made Lord Purbeck; another brother was created Earl of
Anglesea. Fielding, who married Buckingham's sister, was made Earl of
Denbigh, and his brother Earl of Desmond. Cranfield, who married a female
relative, was made Earl of Middlesex. But the most shameful case of all,
perhaps, was that of Williams, Dean of Westminster, a paramour of the
countess's, who was made Bishop of Lincoln, and allowed to retain not
only the deanery of Westminster, but the rectories of Dinam, Waldgrave,
Grafton, and Peterborough; the prebends of Asgarbie and Nonnington,
besides other dignities; so that, says Heylin, he was a perfect diocese
in himself, being bishop, dean, prebendary, residentiary, and parson,
and these all at once. Other livings and bishoprics were sold as highly
as these were freely given. Fotherby of Salisbury paid three thousand
five hundred pounds for his see, and all other dignities and benefices
in the Church were equally at the disposal of this upstart and his
venal, lascivious mother. "There were books of rates," says Weldon, "on
all offices, bishoprics, and deaneries in England, that could tell you
what fines and pensions were to pay." He adds, "that Buckingham's female
relatives were numerous enough to have peopled any plantation. So that
King James, that naturally in former times hated women, had his lodgings
replenished with them, and all of the kindred, and little children did
run up and down the king's lodgings like rabbits startled out of their
burrows. Here was a strange change, that the king, who formerly would not
endure his queen and children in his lodgings, now you would have judged
that none but women frequented them. Nay, this was not all; but the
kindred had all the houses about Whitehall, as if bulwarks and flankers
to that citadel."
Buckingham himself, in time, seemed to clothe himself with half the
offices in the country. He became Warden of the Cinque Ports, chief
justice in eyre of all the parks and forests south of the Trent, Master
of the King's Bench Office, High Steward of Westminster, and Constable of
Windsor Castle. In his person he was lavish and showy even to tawdriness.
He was skilled in dancing, and therefore kept the Court one scene of
balls and masques. He had his clothes trimmed at even an ordinary dance
with great buttons of diamond, with diamond hatbands, cockades, and
earrings; "he was yoked with manifold ropes and knots of pearl; in short,
he was accustomed to be manacled, fettered, and imprisoned in jewels."
But one of the most interesting and painful events of the reign of
James, and one which does him little credit, now occurred. Sir Walter
Raleigh, deprived (as we have seen, to gratify the favourite Carr) of his
beautiful estate of Sherborne in Dorsetshire--"which he had beautified
with orchards, gardens, and groves, of much variety and delight"--had
remained in the Tower from the time of his trial in 1603, that is,
thirteen years. His captivity was rendered less severe by the presence
in the Tower of other prisoners of intelligence, and, more than all
the rest, of the Earl of Northumberland, who gathered around him in
his prison men of science and literature, and thus was instrumental in
converting his cell into a palace of knowledge and refined delight.
Northumberland was another of those men who revelled in learning, whom a
king really wise and learned would have rejoiced to honour. But James's
love was not a love of learning or literature on its own account, it
was a love of himself. It was the vanity of passing for a sagacious and
learned king which he possessed, and not the sagacity and the learning
themselves. Therefore, so far from cherishing science and learning,
and loving the possessor of them, James was too shallow to comprehend
the one, and so egotistical that he hated the other. Northumberland
had been in prison ever since the year of the Gunpowder Plot, 1605,
eleven years, a victim to the suspicions of the king and the tyranny
of the Star Chamber, for no participation in the plot was ever proved
against him. Amongst his visitants and pensioners were the most profound
mathematicians of the age, Allen, Hariot, Warner--"the Atlantes of the
mathematical world," Burchill--the celebrated Greek and Hebrew scholar,
and other noted characters. Amongst them Sir Walter found the pleasure
of cultivating inquiries which his busy public and Court life had before
kept unknown to him. He commenced a series of chemical experiments, and
the celebrated Lucy Hutchinson, who was the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley,
Lieutenant of the Tower, in the preface to her interesting life of her
husband, Colonel Hutchinson, says:--"Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. Ruthin,
being prisoners in the Tower, and addicting themselves to chemistry,
my mother suffered them to make their rare experiments at her cost,
partly to comfort and divert the poor prisoners, and partly to gain the
knowledge of their experiments and the medicines, to help such poor
people as were not able to seek physicians."
In these chemical inquiries, Sir Walter imagined that he had discovered
a universal panacea. The queen in an illness had taken it, and appeared
cured by it, and afterwards, as we have seen, tried it in the case of
Prince Henry, but without effect.
[Illustration: SIR FRANCIS BACON WAITING AN AUDIENCE OF BUCKINGHAM. (_See
p._ 470.)]
Sir Walter next turned his attention to history, and commenced a History
of the World, a gigantic undertaking, but no doubt one that offered great
consolation to the mind of a prisoner for life, from the very fact of
its immensity, thus promising to him a constant forgetfulness of his
captivity, and a busy discursiveness amid the peoples of the whole globe.
Such men as Burchill, who was not only a great classical scholar but a
distinguished Latin poet, could furnish him with books and translations,
by which means he has displayed so vast an acquaintance with Greek and
Rabbinical writers. Raleigh commenced his History for the instruction of
Prince Henry, who had a high regard for the author, but the death of that
prince in 1612, gave a check to the undertaking, and all that Raleigh has
completed extends from the Creation to about a century and a half before
the Christian era.
The fall of Somerset and the rise of Buckingham awoke new hopes of
liberty in Raleigh. His friends made zealous applications to the
favourite, which for a time produced little effect because the true
persuasive with the greedy Villiers family was not applied. In the
meantime, however, Raleigh managed to interest Secretary Winwood in
a grand scheme which he had for discovering and working gold mines
in Guiana. Raleigh, as our readers are aware, was of a romantic and
adventurous turn. The Admirals Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, with
whom he had had the honour of defeating the Grand Armada, had brought
home immense treasures from the Spanish and Portuguese territories
of South America. Raleigh himself had been engaged in the scheme of
settling Virginia in North America, in the year 1584, when he procured
a patent from Elizabeth--a copy of one granted still earlier to his
half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert--with full power to discover and
settle any heathen lands not already in the possession of any Christian
prince. In consequence, he had equipped various expeditions to the
coast of Virginia, which, however, had all proved failures, and Sir
Humphrey Gilbert, who conducted one of them, lost his life at sea. Sir
Walter's enterprises, which had cost him much money, were immediate
failures--failures to himself and his associates, but ultimate successes
to the country, for they led to the settlement of that great Federated
Republic of Northern America.
But still earlier, in 1595, he had made a voyage to Guiana. The glories
of Drake and the other piratical admirals, and the wondrous legend of
the golden empire of Guiana, with its inconceivable affluence, and the
reported splendours of its capital, Manoa, called by the Spaniards
El Dorado, or the golden city, inflamed his imagination. He sailed
thither, touching at Trinidad, as if on his way to Virginia; and the
Spaniards, deluded by this belief, entered into friendly relations and
bartered various commodities with him. But suddenly Raleigh, watching
his opportunity, fell on the garrison, killed the guard, and secured the
person of Berrio the governor, whom he carried away as guide to Guiana,
Berrio having already settled a colony there. This transaction, which
was in the true spirit of Drake and the rest, who acted in those regions
as if the Spaniards were at war, though they were at entire peace with
England, was one of the charges afterwards brought against him. To this
Raleigh replied that Berrio, at Trinidad, had formerly made prisoners of
eight Englishmen, and that to leave him at his back when he was about
to ascend the Orinoco, was to have been an ass. Whether the story of
the eight Englishmen was true or not, it was clearly no business of
Raleigh's, and the real motive was partly the last assigned--to secure
so dangerous a person as Berrio, and at the same time so valuable a
guide. In fact, Raleigh, with all his genius, was never renowned for very
scrupulous ideas of right and wrong, and shared in all the loose maritime
notions of the age.
Thus provided, he sailed for the Orinoco and advanced up it three hundred
miles in boats. He seemed to have heard many wonderful rumours of gold
mines, and cities built of gold and silver and embossed with precious
stones; but he discovered no magnificent Manoa, with pinnacles blazing
with diamonds and rubies, nor any gold mines, only signs of gold in the
mountains beyond the Spanish town of St. Thomas. He gave out to the
natives that he was come to relieve them of the Spaniards, and by their
assistance explored the country for a month, when the waters of the
mighty Orinoco rose so suddenly and with such impetuosity, that they were
carried down at the peril of their lives to their ships.
On his return, Raleigh, although he brought no riches, brought marvellous
descriptions of them. Though he had seen nothing but a pleasant country
and friendly natives, he did not hesitate to publish the most amazing
stories to draw fresh colleagues to the enterprise. He described the
country and the climate in colours of heaven, and as for its riches, "the
common soldier," he said--detailing the discovery of the large, rich, and
beautiful empire of Guiana, with relations of the great and golden city,
Manoa--"shall here fight for gold, and pay himself, instead of pence,
with plates of half a foot broad, whereas he breaks his bones in other
wars for provant and penury. Those commanders and chieftains that shoot
at honour and abundance, shall find here more rich and beautiful cities,
more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with
treasure, than either Cortez found in Mexico, or Pizarro in Peru."
Probably Raleigh believed all this himself, on the faith of the
natives; but though several expeditions went out nothing of the kind
was discovered. Yet these failures in no degree abated the enthusiasm
of Raleigh. He represented to objectors that the adventurers sent out
were ignorant alike of the locality and of the art of conciliating the
natives. Were _he_ permitted to go, he would make Guiana to England what
Peru was to Spain.
His glowing descriptions at length captivated the imagination of Winwood,
who did his best to excite the cupidity of James on the subject, and
not without effect, for he began to speak of Raleigh as a very clever
and gallant fellow. The scheme suited James extremely well, as he was
always in want of money, and Raleigh asked for nothing, not even a ship
to accomplish the enterprise, but guaranteed to the king one-fifth of the
gold. Still there was one obstacle; James dared not issue the desired
commission without the approbation of the favourite, and this Raleigh
and his friends were obliged to purchase by a present of fifteen hundred
pounds to Buckingham's uncles, Sir Edward Villiers and Sir William St.
John.
In the month of August, 1616, Sir Walter issued from his thirteen years'
captivity in the Tower, and commenced preparations for the voyage. Plenty
of adventurers and co-operators were found: the Countess of Bedford
advanced eight thousand pounds, and Lady Raleigh sold her estate at
Mitcham for two thousand five hundred pounds. A fleet of fourteen sail
was equipped and manned. But before Raleigh could get out to sea, the
Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, had caught wind of the real destination of
the squadron. The Spaniard was a deep politician, who assumed an air of
gaiety and freedom which won on the courtiers, and not less on James,
whose vanity he flattered to the utmost; often speaking false Latin, that
James might correct him, he would reply, "Ah, your majesty speaks Latin
like a pedant, but I only speak it like a gentleman."
On making the discovery, Gondomar rushed into the presence of the king,
exclaiming, "Pirates! pirates! pirates!" James, who was always paralysed
at the very idea of war, sent in a hurry for Raleigh, took back the
patent which he had granted him, and altered it with his own hand. He
strictly prohibited the adventurers from invading any territories in
possession of his allies, especially of the King of Spain, but commanded
that they should confine their enterprise to countries still in the hands
of the heathen. They were allowed to trade and to defend themselves if
attacked, but not to act on the offensive. He moreover demanded from
Raleigh a memorandum under his own hand, of the places with which he
meant to trade, and the force he proposed to take out. All this James is
said to have shown to Gondomar, so that, fully forewarned, the Spanish
ambassador despatched a squadron with troops to St. Thomas, of which his
brother was governor.
In all this, it is clear that Raleigh was imposing on the king. This
Raleigh himself admits in his address to Lord Carew:--"I acquainted his
majesty with my intention to land in Guiana, yet I never made it known to
his majesty that the Spaniards had any footing there. Neither had I any
authority from my patent to remove them thence." But this was a point on
which Gondomar could and probably did enlighten James.
After the guarantees given by Raleigh, Gondomar appears to have ceased
his opposition; having, moreover, taken measures to guard against any
attack in Guiana. On the 28th of March, 1617, the fleet set sail, but
owing to bad weather was obliged to put into Cork, where they lay till
August, and did not reach the coast of Guiana till November 12th, after
a troublesome voyage of four months. On arriving, two of his ships were
missing: disease had reduced his men to a state of miserable weakness,
forty-two on board Raleigh's own vessel having died. He himself was
disabled for active service, and to his mortification he learned that
a Spanish fleet was cruising near in order to intercept them. He wrote
to his wife, that reduced as they were, he deemed himself in sufficient
force to accomplish the enterprise if the care taken at home to let the
Spaniards know of their numbers, had not caused all approaches to be
fortified against them.
[Illustration: THE DEPARTURE OF THE MAYFLOWER.
FROM AN ENGRAVING AFTER THE PICTURE BY A. W. BAYES.]
Being unable to proceed immediately, he sent Captain Keymis up the river
in boats to discover the mine, while he lay at its mouth to ward off
the Spanish squadron. Keymis was said to have been at the mine they
were in search of in the expedition of 1595. He began the ascent of
the river on the 10th of December, under orders to make straight for
the mine, and if he found it rich to fix himself there; if but poor,
to bring away a basket of the ore to convince the king that they had
gone out after a reality. The exploring force landed near St. Thomas,
but found the Spaniards prepared for them; a battle ensued, in which
the governor, the brother of Gondomar, was killed, but at the same time
also fell the eldest son of Sir Walter, Captain Walter Raleigh. This
enraged the soldiers, who carried the town of St. Thomas by storm and set
fire to it. They expected to find in it great wealth, but all that they
discovered was two ingots of gold and four refining houses, whence any
ore that there might have been was carried off. The Spaniards entrenched
themselves in formidable positions amongst the hills--as the invaders
supposed, between them and the mines; but Keymis was so much discouraged
by the death of young Raleigh, and the violent discontent of the men
on discovering the emptiness of the place, and the preparations of the
enemy, who again fired upon and killed several of them, that he gave up
the enterprise and dropped down the river again.
When Keymis reached the ships with the news of their ill success and of
the death of Raleigh's son, Sir Walter was beside himself. Though Keymis
had been a faithful officer and friend of his for many years, sharing the
dangers and hardships of his former adventures, he upbraided him bitterly
with his ruin. Keymis replied that when the young captain was dead, the
men set him at defiance, and that to have attempted to reach the mines
with them would have been an act of madness; had it succeeded even,
it would only have enriched these murderous villains; had it failed,
both himself, and probably Sir Walter, would have fallen their victims.
Recollecting the feeble condition of his commander-in-chief, he deemed it
his duty to return to him.
All was lost on Raleigh, who, feeling the acutest grief for the death
of his son, and seeing nothing but destruction await him at home from
the wrath of the Spaniards and the disappointed cupidity of the king,
raved against Keymis like a madman. The unfortunate officer drew up
a statement of the real facts of the case, addressed to the Earl of
Arundel, and asked Raleigh to sign it in justice to him: he peremptorily
refused. Some days passed on, but instead of moderating his bitterness
when Keymis again urged him to sign the statement, he refused, heaping
upon him reproaches of imbecility or cowardice. Stung by this ungenerous
conduct, the unhappy officer retired to his cabin, and shot himself with
a pocket-pistol, and as that had not killed him, finished the bloody deed
by a stab with a long knife.
Horror took possession of the fleet at the news of Keymis's suicide, and
discord and mutiny broke out on all sides. The officers and men alike
expressed their indignation. Captain Whitney, in whom Raleigh reposed
the most confidence, and who was under great obligations to him, sailed
for England. Others followed his example, and Raleigh soon found himself
with only five ships. Yet still he had a larger fleet, manned with a
stronger force of daring fellows than the brave crews who had done
amazing things under Drake, Hawkins, and others, had Raleigh been in a
mood to lead them. Death and disgrace awaited his return home; death or
the acquisition of wealth capable of appeasing the royal resentment, was
the alternative which attended a bold onslaught on the Spanish shores.
But Raleigh's spirit was crushed. In a letter to his wife he declared
that "his brains were broken;" and he sailed away to Newfoundland, where
he refitted his ships.
He now contemplated the chance of intercepting one of the Spanish
treasure-ships, which he felt assured would set all right with James; but
fresh mutinies arose and he took his course homewards. In the month of
June, 1618, after much hesitation, he entered the harbour of Plymouth,
where he was met with the news that a royal warrant was out for his
apprehension. Gondomar, furious at the fate of his brother, demanded
condign punishment for Raleigh's outrages on the subjects of his most
Catholic majesty in Guiana. There were many reasons why the Spanish
Court should long for the destruction of Raleigh. He was by far the
ablest naval commander that James possessed. He had been one of those who
led the English fleet to the triumph over the Armada. He had committed
terrible depredations in the Azores and Canary Isles when he sailed with
Essex, besides his seizure of the Governor of Trinidad.
Sir Walter was advised by his friends to fly instantly to France, a
vessel lying ready to carry him over. But he seemed to have lost all
power of self-direction, or it might be that, as his younger son Carew
relates, the Earls of Arundel and Pembroke were sureties for his return,
and it was a point of honour to keep faith with them. He landed, and was
arrested by his near kinsman, Sir Lewis Stukeley, Vice-Admiral of Devon,
who conducted him to the house of Sir Christopher Harris, near the port,
where he detained him for nearly a week, till he received the royal order
for his disposal. No sooner was it announced at Court that Raleigh was
secured, than Buckingham wrote, by direction of the king, to inform the
Spanish ambassador of the fact, and to assure him that he would give him
up to him to be sent to Spain, and dealt with as his royal master should
see fit, unless his most Catholic majesty preferred that he should suffer
the penalty of his crimes here. Gondomar sent off a special messenger
to learn the decision of the King of Spain, and meantime Stukeley was
ordered to proceed to London with his prisoner.
[Illustration: SIR WALTER RALEIGH RE-ARRESTED BY STUKELEY. (_See p._
477.)]
Struck now with awe at the prospect of once more being immured in the
Tower, and with only the most gloomy prospect of his exit thence, Sir
Walter procured some drugs from Manourie a Frenchman, with which he
brought on violent sickness, and aquafortis, with which he produced
blisters and excoriations on his face, arms, breast, and legs. He was
found in his shirt on all fours, gnawing the rushes on the floor and
affecting madness; the physicians pronounced him to be in considerable
danger, and James, who was then at Salisbury, ordered him to be conveyed
for a short time to his own house in London, lest he should convey some
infection into the Tower.
This was Raleigh's object, and he now employed the time afforded him to
effect his escape in earnest. He despatched his faithful friend, Captain
King, to provide a ship for his purpose. This was arranged, but Raleigh,
not aware that Manourie was a spy upon him, confided the secret to him,
and it was immediately communicated to Stukeley. Raleigh, observing the
strict watch which Stukeley kept over him, and deeming him worthy of his
confidence, gave him a valuable jewel and a bond for one thousand pounds,
on condition that he allowed him to escape. Stukeley took the bribe, but
while pretending to be now his sworn friend, only the more effectually
played the traitor. He was commissioned to procure all possible evidence
of Raleigh's connection with France, and circumstances favoured him. At
Brentford Raleigh received a visit from De Chesne, the secretary of the
French Envoy in London, offering him, from Le Clerk, his master, the
use of a French barque and a safe-conduct to the Governor of Calais.
On arriving in London, Le Clerk himself waited on him and renewed the
offer. Raleigh expressed his gratitude, but concluded to take the vessel
engaged by Captain King, and lying near Tilbury Fort. All this Stukeley
communicated daily to the Council.
At the time fixed, Raleigh in disguise, and accompanied by King and
Stukeley, who expressed much interest in seeing his relative safely off,
took a boat and dropped down the river to reach the vessel at Gravesend.
But from the moment that they were on the water, the quick eye of Raleigh
noticed a wherry which kept steadily in their wake; and the tide failing,
it was judged useless to proceed to Gravesend. They went, therefore, into
Greenwich; the wherry also lay to there, and Sir Walter found himself
immediately re-arrested by the traitor Stukeley, whose men were in the
wherry. King also was arrested, and Sir Walter was conveyed next morning
to the Tower. The French Envoy was forbidden the Court and soon after
ordered to leave the country.
[Illustration: SIR WALTER RALEIGH BEFORE THE JUDGES. (_See p._ 478.)]
The answer from the King of Spain did not arrive for five weeks. It
stated that in his opinion the punishment of Raleigh's offences should
take place where his commission--which he had violated--was issued. It
was, therefore, necessary to bring him to trial in London. Meanwhile,
he had been subjected to close and repeated interrogations before a
commission appointed for the purpose, composed of Lord Chancellor
Bacon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sir Edward Coke, and several other
members of Council. He was charged with having imposed upon the king, by
representing that his object was to discover a gold mine, when he only
wanted to get out of prison and commence piracy; that he had endeavoured
to provoke a war with Spain; that he had barbarously deserted his ships'
companies, and pushed them into unnecessary danger; that he had ridiculed
and maligned the king; that he had feigned madness to deceive his
majesty; and that he had attempted to escape in defiance of his authority.
Raleigh denied the charge of treating the name of the king
disrespectfully; asserted that nothing proved his sincerity in expecting
to reach mines so completely, as his having expended two thousand pounds
in the necessary apparatus for refining the ore; that he had never
exposed his men to any danger that he did not share himself, except when
illness incapacitated him; and that as to feigning madness and trying to
escape, the charges were true, but they were, under the circumstances,
perfectly natural and pardonable.