JAMES I. A.D. 1602--1625.
After Queen Elizabeth's death, the next heir was James, the son of
Mary of Scotland, and had reigned there ever since his mother had been
driven away. He had been brought up very strictly by the Scottish
Reformers, who had made him very learned, and kept him under great
restraint; and all that he had undergone had tended to make him
awkward and strange in his manners. He was timid, and could not bear
to see a drawn sword; and he was so much afraid of being murdered,
that he used to wear a dress padded and stuffed out all over with
wool, which made him look even more clumsy than he was by nature.
The English did not much admire their new king, though it really was
a great blessing that England and Scotland should be under the same
king at last, so as to end all the long and bloody wars that had gone
on for so many years. Still, the Puritans thought that, as James had
been brought up in their way of thinking, they would be allowed to
make all the changes that Queen Elizabeth had stopped; and the Roman
Catholics recollected that he was Queen Mary's son, and that his
Reformed tutors had not made his life very pleasant to him as a boy,
so they had hopes from him.
But they both were wrong. James had really read and thought much, and
was a much wiser man at the bottom than anyone would have thought who
had seen his disagreeable ways, and heard his silly way of talking.
He thought the English Church was much more in the right than either
of them, and he only wished that things should go on the same in
England, and that the Scots should be brought to have bishops, and
to use the prayers that Christians had used from the very old times,
instead of each minister praying out of his own head, as had become
the custom. But though he could not change the ways of the Scots at
once, he caused all the best scholars and clergymen in his kingdom to
go to work to make the translation of the Bible as right and good as
it could be.
Long before this was finished, however, some of the Roman Catholics
had formed a conspiracy for getting rid of all the chief people in
the kingdom; and so, as they hoped, bringing the rest back to the
pope. There were good men among the Roman Catholics who knew such
an act would be horrible; but there were some among them who had
learnt to hate everyone that they did not reckon as of the right
religion, and to believe that everything was right that was done for
the cause of their Church. So these men agreed that on the day of
the meeting of Parliament, when the king, with the queen and Prince
of Wales, would all be meeting the lords and commons, they would blow
the whole of them up with gunpowder; and, while the country was all
in confusion, the king dead, and almost all his lords and the chief
country squires, they would take the king's younger children--Elizabeth
or Charles, who were both quite little--and bring one up as a Roman
Catholic to govern England.
They hired some cellars under the Houses of Parliament, and stored
them with barrels of gunpowder, hidden by faggots; and the time was
nearly come, when one of the lords called Monteagle, received a letter
that puzzled him very much, advising him not to attend the meeting of
Parliament, since a sudden destruction, would come upon all who would
there be present, and yet so that they would not know the doer of it.
No one knows who wrote the letter, but most likely it was one of the
gentlemen who had been asked to join in the plot, and, though he would
not betray his friends, could not bear that Lord Monteagle should
perish. Lord Monteagle took the letter to the council, and there,
after puzzling over it and wondering if it were a joke, the king said
gunpowder was a means of sudden destruction; and it was agreed that,
at any rate, it would be safer to look into the vaults. A party was
sent to search, and there they found all the powder ready prepared,
and, moreover, a man with a lantern, one Guy Fawkes, who had undertaken
to be the one to set fire to the train of gunpowder, hoping to escape
before the explosion. However he was seized in time, and was forced
to make confession. Most of the gentlemen concerned fled into the
country, and shut themselves up in a fortified house; but there,
strange to say, a barrel of gunpowder chanced to get lighted, and
thus many were much hurt in the very way that meant to hurt others.
There was a great thanksgiving all over the country, and it became the
custom that, on the 5th of November--the day when the gunpowder plot
was to have taken effect--there should be bonfires and fireworks, and
Guy Fawkes' figure burnt, but people are getting wiser now, and think
it better not to keep up the memory old crimes and hatreds.
Henry, Prince of Wales, was a fine lad, fond of all that was good,
but a little too apt to talk of wars, and of being like Henry V.
He was very fond of ships and sailors, and delighted in watching
the building of a grand vessel that was to take his sister Elizabeth
across the sea, when she was to marry the Count Palatine of the Rhine.
Before the wedding, however, Prince Henry fell suddenly ill and died.
King James was a fond of favorites as ever Elizabeth had been, though
not of the same persons. One of the worst things he ever did was the
keeping Sir Walter Raleigh in the Tower for many years, and a last
cutting off his head. It was asserted that Sir Walter had tried, when
first James came, to set up a lady named Arabella Stuart to be queen;
but if he was to be punished for that, it ought to have been directly,
instead of keeping the sentence hanging over his head for years. The
truth was that Sir Walter had been a great enemy to the Spaniards, and
James wanted to please them, for he wished his son Charles to marry the
daughter of the King of Spain. Charles wanted to see her first, and
set off for Spain, in disguise, with the Duke of Buckingham, who was
his friend, and his father's greatest favorite. But when reached he
Madrid, he found that the princesses were not allowed to speak to any
gentleman, nor to show their faces; and though he climbed over a wall
to speak to her when she was walking in the garden, an attendant
begged him to go away, or all her train would be punished. Charles
went back disappointed, and, on his way through Paris, saw Henrietta
Maria, the bright-eyed sister of the King of France, and set his heart
on marrying her.
Before this was settled, however, King James was seized with an ague
and died, in the year 1625. He was the first king of the family of
Stuart, and a very strange person he was--wonderfully learned and
exceedingly conceited; indeed, he like nothing better than to be
called the English Solomon. The worst of him was that, like
Elizabeth, he thought kings and rulers might tell falsehoods and
deceive. He called this kingcraft, and took this very bad sort of
cunning for wisdom.