ENGLAND UNDER JAMES THE FIRST
‘Our cousin of Scotland’ was ugly, awkward, and shuffling both in mind
and person. His tongue was much too large for his mouth, his legs were
much too weak for his body, and his dull goggle-eyes stared and rolled
like an idiot’s. He was cunning, covetous, wasteful, idle, drunken,
greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer, and the most conceited man on
earth. His figure—what is commonly called rickety from his
birth—presented a most ridiculous appearance, dressed in thick padded
clothes, as a safeguard against being stabbed (of which he lived in
continual fear), of a grass-green colour from head to foot, with a
hunting-horn dangling at his side instead of a sword, and his hat and
feather sticking over one eye, or hanging on the back of his head, as
he happened to toss it on. He used to loll on the necks of his
favourite courtiers, and slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their
cheeks; and the greatest favourite he ever had, used to sign himself in
his letters to his royal master, His Majesty’s ‘dog and slave,’ and
used to address his majesty as ‘his Sowship.’ His majesty was the worst
rider ever seen, and thought himself the best. He was one of the most
impertinent talkers (in the broadest Scotch) ever heard, and boasted of
being unanswerable in all manner of argument. He wrote some of the most
wearisome treatises ever read—among others, a book upon witchcraft, in
which he was a devout believer—and thought himself a prodigy of
authorship. He thought, and wrote, and said, that a king had a right to
make and unmake what laws he pleased, and ought to be accountable to
nobody on earth. This is the plain, true character of the personage
whom the greatest men about the court praised and flattered to that
degree, that I doubt if there be anything much more shameful in the
annals of human nature.
He came to the English throne with great ease. The miseries of a
disputed succession had been felt so long, and so dreadfully, that he
was proclaimed within a few hours of Elizabeth’s death, and was
accepted by the nation, even without being asked to give any pledge
that he would govern well, or that he would redress crying grievances.
He took a month to come from Edinburgh to London; and, by way of
exercising his new power, hanged a pickpocket on the journey without
any trial, and knighted everybody he could lay hold of. He made two
hundred knights before he got to his palace in London, and seven
hundred before he had been in it three months. He also shovelled
sixty-two new peers into the House of Lords—and there was a pretty
large sprinkling of Scotchmen among them, you may believe.
His Sowship’s prime Minister, Cecil (for I cannot do better than call
his majesty what his favourite called him), was the enemy of Sir Walter
Raleigh, and also of Sir Walter’s political friend, Lord Cobham; and
his Sowship’s first trouble was a plot originated by these two, and
entered into by some others, with the old object of seizing the King
and keeping him in imprisonment until he should change his ministers.
There were Catholic priests in the plot, and there were Puritan
noblemen too; for, although the Catholics and Puritans were strongly
opposed to each other, they united at this time against his Sowship,
because they knew that he had a design against both, after pretending
to be friendly to each; this design being to have only one high and
convenient form of the Protestant religion, which everybody should be
bound to belong to, whether they liked it or not. This plot was mixed
up with another, which may or may not have had some reference to
placing on the throne, at some time, the Lady Arabella Stuart; whose
misfortune it was, to be the daughter of the younger brother of his
Sowship’s father, but who was quite innocent of any part in the scheme.
Sir Walter Raleigh was accused on the confession of Lord Cobham—a
miserable creature, who said one thing at one time, and another thing
at another time, and could be relied upon in nothing. The trial of Sir
Walter Raleigh lasted from eight in the morning until nearly midnight;
he defended himself with such eloquence, genius, and spirit against all
accusations, and against the insults of Coke, the Attorney-General—who,
according to the custom of the time, foully abused him—that those who
went there detesting the prisoner, came away admiring him, and
declaring that anything so wonderful and so captivating was never
heard. He was found guilty, nevertheless, and sentenced to death.
Execution was deferred, and he was taken to the Tower. The two Catholic
priests, less fortunate, were executed with the usual atrocity; and
Lord Cobham and two others were pardoned on the scaffold. His Sowship
thought it wonderfully knowing in him to surprise the people by
pardoning these three at the very block; but, blundering, and bungling,
as usual, he had very nearly overreached himself. For, the messenger on
horseback who brought the pardon, came so late, that he was pushed to
the outside of the crowd, and was obliged to shout and roar out what he
came for. The miserable Cobham did not gain much by being spared that
day. He lived, both as a prisoner and a beggar, utterly despised, and
miserably poor, for thirteen years, and then died in an old outhouse
belonging to one of his former servants.
This plot got rid of, and Sir Walter Raleigh safely shut up in the
Tower, his Sowship held a great dispute with the Puritans on their
presenting a petition to him, and had it all his own way—not so very
wonderful, as he would talk continually, and would not hear anybody
else—and filled the Bishops with admiration. It was comfortably settled
that there was to be only one form of religion, and that all men were
to think exactly alike. But, although this was arranged two centuries
and a half ago, and although the arrangement was supported by much
fining and imprisonment, I do not find that it is quite successful,
even yet.
His Sowship, having that uncommonly high opinion of himself as a king,
had a very low opinion of Parliament as a power that audaciously wanted
to control him. When he called his first Parliament after he had been
king a year, he accordingly thought he would take pretty high ground
with them, and told them that he commanded them ‘as an absolute king.’
The Parliament thought those strong words, and saw the necessity of
upholding their authority. His Sowship had three children: Prince
Henry, Prince Charles, and the Princess Elizabeth. It would have been
well for one of these, and we shall too soon see which, if he had
learnt a little wisdom concerning Parliaments from his father’s
obstinacy.
Now, the people still labouring under their old dread of the Catholic
religion, this Parliament revived and strengthened the severe laws
against it. And this so angered Robert Catesby, a restless Catholic
gentleman of an old family, that he formed one of the most desperate
and terrible designs ever conceived in the mind of man; no less a
scheme than the Gunpowder Plot.
His object was, when the King, lords, and commons, should be assembled
at the next opening of Parliament, to blow them up, one and all, with a
great mine of gunpowder. The first person to whom he confided this
horrible idea was Thomas Winter, a Worcestershire gentleman who had
served in the army abroad, and had been secretly employed in Catholic
projects. While Winter was yet undecided, and when he had gone over to
the Netherlands, to learn from the Spanish Ambassador there whether
there was any hope of Catholics being relieved through the intercession
of the King of Spain with his Sowship, he found at Ostend a tall, dark,
daring man, whom he had known when they were both soldiers abroad, and
whose name was Guido—or Guy—Fawkes. Resolved to join the plot, he
proposed it to this man, knowing him to be the man for any desperate
deed, and they two came back to England together. Here, they admitted
two other conspirators; Thomas Percy, related to the Earl of
Northumberland, and John Wright, his brother-in-law. All these met
together in a solitary house in the open fields which were then near
Clement’s Inn, now a closely blocked-up part of London; and when they
had all taken a great oath of secrecy, Catesby told the rest what his
plan was. They then went up-stairs into a garret, and received the
Sacrament from Father Gerard, a Jesuit, who is said not to have known
actually of the Gunpowder Plot, but who, I think, must have had his
suspicions that there was something desperate afoot.
Percy was a Gentleman Pensioner, and as he had occasional duties to
perform about the Court, then kept at Whitehall, there would be nothing
suspicious in his living at Westminster. So, having looked well about
him, and having found a house to let, the back of which joined the
Parliament House, he hired it of a person named Ferris, for the purpose
of undermining the wall. Having got possession of this house, the
conspirators hired another on the Lambeth side of the Thames, which
they used as a storehouse for wood, gunpowder, and other combustible
matters. These were to be removed at night (and afterwards were
removed), bit by bit, to the house at Westminster; and, that there
might be some trusty person to keep watch over the Lambeth stores, they
admitted another conspirator, by name Robert Kay, a very poor Catholic
gentleman.
All these arrangements had been made some months, and it was a dark,
wintry, December night, when the conspirators, who had been in the
meantime dispersed to avoid observation, met in the house at
Westminster, and began to dig. They had laid in a good stock of
eatables, to avoid going in and out, and they dug and dug with great
ardour. But, the wall being tremendously thick, and the work very
severe, they took into their plot Christopher Wright, a younger brother
of John Wright, that they might have a new pair of hands to help. And
Christopher Wright fell to like a fresh man, and they dug and dug by
night and by day, and Fawkes stood sentinel all the time. And if any
man’s heart seemed to fail him at all, Fawkes said, ‘Gentlemen, we have
abundance of powder and shot here, and there is no fear of our being
taken alive, even if discovered.’ The same Fawkes, who, in the capacity
of sentinel, was always prowling about, soon picked up the intelligence
that the King had prorogued the Parliament again, from the seventh of
February, the day first fixed upon, until the third of October. When
the conspirators knew this, they agreed to separate until after the
Christmas holidays, and to take no notice of each other in the
meanwhile, and never to write letters to one another on any account.
So, the house in Westminster was shut up again, and I suppose the
neighbours thought that those strange-looking men who lived there so
gloomily, and went out so seldom, were gone away to have a merry
Christmas somewhere.
It was the beginning of February, sixteen hundred and five, when
Catesby met his fellow-conspirators again at this Westminster house. He
had now admitted three more; John Grant, a Warwickshire gentleman of a
melancholy temper, who lived in a doleful house near
Stratford-upon-Avon, with a frowning wall all round it, and a deep
moat; Robert Winter, eldest brother of Thomas; and Catesby’s own
servant, Thomas Bates, who, Catesby thought, had had some suspicion of
what his master was about. These three had all suffered more or less
for their religion in Elizabeth’s time. And now, they all began to dig
again, and they dug and dug by night and by day.
They found it dismal work alone there, underground, with such a fearful
secret on their minds, and so many murders before them. They were
filled with wild fancies. Sometimes, they thought they heard a great
bell tolling, deep down in the earth under the Parliament House;
sometimes, they thought they heard low voices muttering about the
Gunpowder Plot; once in the morning, they really did hear a great
rumbling noise over their heads, as they dug and sweated in their mine.
Every man stopped and looked aghast at his neighbour, wondering what
had happened, when that bold prowler, Fawkes, who had been out to look,
came in and told them that it was only a dealer in coals who had
occupied a cellar under the Parliament House, removing his stock in
trade to some other place. Upon this, the conspirators, who with all
their digging and digging had not yet dug through the tremendously
thick wall, changed their plan; hired that cellar, which was directly
under the House of Lords; put six-and-thirty barrels of gunpowder in
it, and covered them over with fagots and coals. Then they all
dispersed again till September, when the following new conspirators
were admitted; Sir Edward Baynham, of Gloucestershire; Sir Everard
Digby, of Rutlandshire; Ambrose Rookwood, of Suffolk; Francis Tresham,
of Northamptonshire. Most of these were rich, and were to assist the
plot, some with money and some with horses on which the conspirators
were to ride through the country and rouse the Catholics after the
Parliament should be blown into air.
Parliament being again prorogued from the third of October to the fifth
of November, and the conspirators being uneasy lest their design should
have been found out, Thomas Winter said he would go up into the House
of Lords on the day of the prorogation, and see how matters looked.
Nothing could be better. The unconscious Commissioners were walking
about and talking to one another, just over the six-and-thirty barrels
of gunpowder. He came back and told the rest so, and they went on with
their preparations. They hired a ship, and kept it ready in the Thames,
in which Fawkes was to sail for Flanders after firing with a slow match
the train that was to explode the powder. A number of Catholic
gentlemen not in the secret, were invited, on pretence of a hunting
party, to meet Sir Everard Digby at Dunchurch on the fatal day, that
they might be ready to act together. And now all was ready.
But, now, the great wickedness and danger which had been all along at
the bottom of this wicked plot, began to show itself. As the fifth of
November drew near, most of the conspirators, remembering that they had
friends and relations who would be in the House of Lords that day, felt
some natural relenting, and a wish to warn them to keep away. They were
not much comforted by Catesby’s declaring that in such a cause he would
blow up his own son. Lord Mounteagle, Tresham’s brother-in-law, was
certain to be in the house; and when Tresham found that he could not
prevail upon the rest to devise any means of sparing their friends, he
wrote a mysterious letter to this lord and left it at his lodging in
the dusk, urging him to keep away from the opening of Parliament,
‘since God and man had concurred to punish the wickedness of the
times.’ It contained the words ‘that the Parliament should receive a
terrible blow, and yet should not see who hurt them.’ And it added,
‘the danger is past, as soon as you have burnt the letter.’
The ministers and courtiers made out that his Sowship, by a direct
miracle from Heaven, found out what this letter meant. The truth is,
that they were not long (as few men would be) in finding out for
themselves; and it was decided to let the conspirators alone, until the
very day before the opening of Parliament. That the conspirators had
their fears, is certain; for, Tresham himself said before them all,
that they were every one dead men; and, although even he did not take
flight, there is reason to suppose that he had warned other persons
besides Lord Mounteagle. However, they were all firm; and Fawkes, who
was a man of iron, went down every day and night to keep watch in the
cellar as usual. He was there about two in the afternoon of the fourth,
when the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Mounteagle threw open the door and
looked in. ‘Who are you, friend?’ said they. ‘Why,’ said Fawkes, ‘I am
Mr. Percy’s servant, and am looking after his store of fuel here.’
‘Your master has laid in a pretty good store,’ they returned, and shut
the door, and went away. Fawkes, upon this, posted off to the other
conspirators to tell them all was quiet, and went back and shut himself
up in the dark, black cellar again, where he heard the bell go twelve
o’clock and usher in the fifth of November. About two hours afterwards,
he slowly opened the door, and came out to look about him, in his old
prowling way. He was instantly seized and bound, by a party of soldiers
under Sir Thomas Knevett. He had a watch upon him, some touchwood, some
tinder, some slow matches; and there was a dark lantern with a candle
in it, lighted, behind the door. He had his boots and spurs on—to ride
to the ship, I suppose—and it was well for the soldiers that they took
him so suddenly. If they had left him but a moment’s time to light a
match, he certainly would have tossed it in among the powder, and blown
up himself and them.
They took him to the King’s bed-chamber first of all, and there the
King (causing him to be held very tight, and keeping a good way off),
asked him how he could have the heart to intend to destroy so many
innocent people? ‘Because,’ said Guy Fawkes, ‘desperate diseases need
desperate remedies.’ To a little Scotch favourite, with a face like a
terrier, who asked him (with no particular wisdom) why he had collected
so much gunpowder, he replied, because he had meant to blow Scotchmen
back to Scotland, and it would take a deal of powder to do that. Next
day he was carried to the Tower, but would make no confession. Even
after being horribly tortured, he confessed nothing that the Government
did not already know; though he must have been in a fearful state—as
his signature, still preserved, in contrast with his natural
hand-writing before he was put upon the dreadful rack, most frightfully
shows. Bates, a very different man, soon said the Jesuits had had to do
with the plot, and probably, under the torture, would as readily have
said anything. Tresham, taken and put in the Tower too, made
confessions and unmade them, and died of an illness that was heavy upon
him. Rookwood, who had stationed relays of his own horses all the way
to Dunchurch, did not mount to escape until the middle of the day, when
the news of the plot was all over London. On the road, he came up with
the two Wrights, Catesby, and Percy; and they all galloped together
into Northamptonshire. Thence to Dunchurch, where they found the
proposed party assembled. Finding, however, that there had been a plot,
and that it had been discovered, the party disappeared in the course of
the night, and left them alone with Sir Everard Digby. Away they all
rode again, through Warwickshire and Worcestershire, to a house called
Holbeach, on the borders of Staffordshire. They tried to raise the
Catholics on their way, but were indignantly driven off by them. All
this time they were hotly pursued by the sheriff of Worcester, and a
fast increasing concourse of riders. At last, resolving to defend
themselves at Holbeach, they shut themselves up in the house, and put
some wet powder before the fire to dry. But it blew up, and Catesby was
singed and blackened, and almost killed, and some of the others were
sadly hurt. Still, knowing that they must die, they resolved to die
there, and with only their swords in their hands appeared at the
windows to be shot at by the sheriff and his assistants. Catesby said
to Thomas Winter, after Thomas had been hit in the right arm which
dropped powerless by his side, ‘Stand by me, Tom, and we will die
together!’—which they did, being shot through the body by two bullets
from one gun. John Wright, and Christopher Wright, and Percy, were also
shot. Rookwood and Digby were taken: the former with a broken arm and a
wound in his body too.
It was the fifteenth of January, before the trial of Guy Fawkes, and
such of the other conspirators as were left alive, came on. They were
all found guilty, all hanged, drawn, and quartered: some, in St. Paul’s
Churchyard, on the top of Ludgate-hill; some, before the Parliament
House. A Jesuit priest, named Henry Garnet, to whom the dreadful design
was said to have been communicated, was taken and tried; and two of his
servants, as well as a poor priest who was taken with him, were
tortured without mercy. He himself was not tortured, but was surrounded
in the Tower by tamperers and traitors, and so was made unfairly to
convict himself out of his own mouth. He said, upon his trial, that he
had done all he could to prevent the deed, and that he could not make
public what had been told him in confession—though I am afraid he knew
of the plot in other ways. He was found guilty and executed, after a
manful defence, and the Catholic Church made a saint of him; some rich
and powerful persons, who had had nothing to do with the project, were
fined and imprisoned for it by the Star Chamber; the Catholics, in
general, who had recoiled with horror from the idea of the infernal
contrivance, were unjustly put under more severe laws than before; and
this was the end of the Gunpowder Plot.
SECOND PART
His Sowship would pretty willingly, I think, have blown the House of
Commons into the air himself; for, his dread and jealousy of it knew no
bounds all through his reign. When he was hard pressed for money he was
obliged to order it to meet, as he could get no money without it; and
when it asked him first to abolish some of the monopolies in
necessaries of life which were a great grievance to the people, and to
redress other public wrongs, he flew into a rage and got rid of it
again. At one time he wanted it to consent to the Union of England with
Scotland, and quarrelled about that. At another time it wanted him to
put down a most infamous Church abuse, called the High Commission
Court, and he quarrelled with it about that. At another time it
entreated him not to be quite so fond of his archbishops and bishops
who made speeches in his praise too awful to be related, but to have
some little consideration for the poor Puritan clergy who were
persecuted for preaching in their own way, and not according to the
archbishops and bishops; and they quarrelled about that. In short, what
with hating the House of Commons, and pretending not to hate it; and
what with now sending some of its members who opposed him, to Newgate
or to the Tower, and now telling the rest that they must not presume to
make speeches about the public affairs which could not possibly concern
them; and what with cajoling, and bullying, and fighting, and being
frightened; the House of Commons was the plague of his Sowship’s
existence. It was pretty firm, however, in maintaining its rights, and
insisting that the Parliament should make the laws, and not the King by
his own single proclamations (which he tried hard to do); and his
Sowship was so often distressed for money, in consequence, that he sold
every sort of title and public office as if they were merchandise, and
even invented a new dignity called a Baronetcy, which anybody could buy
for a thousand pounds.
These disputes with his Parliaments, and his hunting, and his drinking,
and his lying in bed—for he was a great sluggard—occupied his Sowship
pretty well. The rest of his time he chiefly passed in hugging and
slobbering his favourites. The first of these was Sir Philip Herbert,
who had no knowledge whatever, except of dogs, and horses, and hunting,
but whom he soon made Earl of Montgomery. The next, and a much more
famous one, was Robert Carr, or Ker (for it is not certain which was
his right name), who came from the Border country, and whom he soon
made Viscount Rochester, and afterwards, Earl of Somerset. The way in
which his Sowship doted on this handsome young man, is even more odious
to think of, than the way in which the really great men of England
condescended to bow down before him. The favourite’s great friend was a
certain Sir Thomas Overbury, who wrote his love-letters for him, and
assisted him in the duties of his many high places, which his own
ignorance prevented him from discharging. But this same Sir Thomas
having just manhood enough to dissuade the favourite from a wicked
marriage with the beautiful Countess of Essex, who was to get a divorce
from her husband for the purpose, the said Countess, in her rage, got
Sir Thomas put into the Tower, and there poisoned him. Then the
favourite and this bad woman were publicly married by the King’s pet
bishop, with as much to-do and rejoicing, as if he had been the best
man, and she the best woman, upon the face of the earth.
But, after a longer sunshine than might have been expected—of seven
years or so, that is to say—another handsome young man started up and
eclipsed the Earl of Somerset. This was George Villiers, the youngest
son of a Leicestershire gentleman: who came to Court with all the Paris
fashions on him, and could dance as well as the best mountebank that
ever was seen. He soon danced himself into the good graces of his
Sowship, and danced the other favourite out of favour. Then, it was all
at once discovered that the Earl and Countess of Somerset had not
deserved all those great promotions and mighty rejoicings, and they
were separately tried for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and for
other crimes. But, the King was so afraid of his late favourite’s
publicly telling some disgraceful things he knew of him—which he darkly
threatened to do—that he was even examined with two men standing, one
on either side of him, each with a cloak in his hand, ready to throw it
over his head and stop his mouth if he should break out with what he
had it in his power to tell. So, a very lame affair was purposely made
of the trial, and his punishment was an allowance of four thousand
pounds a year in retirement, while the Countess was pardoned, and
allowed to pass into retirement too. They hated one another by this
time, and lived to revile and torment each other some years.
While these events were in progress, and while his Sowship was making
such an exhibition of himself, from day to day and from year to year,
as is not often seen in any sty, three remarkable deaths took place in
England. The first was that of the Minister, Robert Cecil, Earl of
Salisbury, who was past sixty, and had never been strong, being
deformed from his birth. He said at last that he had no wish to live;
and no Minister need have had, with his experience of the meanness and
wickedness of those disgraceful times. The second was that of the Lady
Arabella Stuart, who alarmed his Sowship mightily, by privately
marrying William Seymour, son of Lord Beauchamp, who was a descendant
of King Henry the Seventh, and who, his Sowship thought, might
consequently increase and strengthen any claim she might one day set up
to the throne. She was separated from her husband (who was put in the
Tower) and thrust into a boat to be confined at Durham. She escaped in
a man’s dress to get away in a French ship from Gravesend to France,
but unhappily missed her husband, who had escaped too, and was soon
taken. She went raving mad in the miserable Tower, and died there after
four years. The last, and the most important of these three deaths, was
that of Prince Henry, the heir to the throne, in the nineteenth year of
his age. He was a promising young prince, and greatly liked; a quiet,
well-conducted youth, of whom two very good things are known: first,
that his father was jealous of him; secondly, that he was the friend of
Sir Walter Raleigh, languishing through all those years in the Tower,
and often said that no man but his father would keep such a bird in
such a cage. On the occasion of the preparations for the marriage of
his sister the Princess Elizabeth with a foreign prince (and an unhappy
marriage it turned out), he came from Richmond, where he had been very
ill, to greet his new brother-in-law, at the palace at Whitehall. There
he played a great game at tennis, in his shirt, though it was very cold
weather, and was seized with an alarming illness, and died within a
fortnight of a putrid fever. For this young prince Sir Walter Raleigh
wrote, in his prison in the Tower, the beginning of a History of the
World: a wonderful instance how little his Sowship could do to confine
a great man’s mind, however long he might imprison his body.
And this mention of Sir Walter Raleigh, who had many faults, but who
never showed so many merits as in trouble and adversity, may bring me
at once to the end of his sad story. After an imprisonment in the Tower
of twelve long years, he proposed to resume those old sea voyages of
his, and to go to South America in search of gold. His Sowship, divided
between his wish to be on good terms with the Spaniards through whose
territory Sir Walter must pass (he had long had an idea of marrying
Prince Henry to a Spanish Princess), and his avaricious eagerness to
get hold of the gold, did not know what to do. But, in the end, he set
Sir Walter free, taking securities for his return; and Sir Walter
fitted out an expedition at his own coast and, on the twenty-eighth of
March, one thousand six hundred and seventeen, sailed away in command
of one of its ships, which he ominously called the Destiny. The
expedition failed; the common men, not finding the gold they had
expected, mutinied; a quarrel broke out between Sir Walter and the
Spaniards, who hated him for old successes of his against them; and he
took and burnt a little town called Saint Thomas. For this he was
denounced to his Sowship by the Spanish Ambassador as a pirate; and
returning almost broken-hearted, with his hopes and fortunes shattered,
his company of friends dispersed, and his brave son (who had been one
of them) killed, he was taken—through the treachery of Sir Lewis
Stukely, his near relation, a scoundrel and a Vice-Admiral—and was once
again immured in his prison-home of so many years.
His Sowship being mightily disappointed in not getting any gold, Sir
Walter Raleigh was tried as unfairly, and with as many lies and
evasions as the judges and law officers and every other authority in
Church and State habitually practised under such a King. After a great
deal of prevarication on all parts but his own, it was declared that he
must die under his former sentence, now fifteen years old. So, on the
twenty-eighth of October, one thousand six hundred and eighteen, he was
shut up in the Gate House at Westminster to pass his late night on
earth, and there he took leave of his good and faithful lady who was
worthy to have lived in better days. At eight o’clock next morning,
after a cheerful breakfast, and a pipe, and a cup of good wine, he was
taken to Old Palace Yard in Westminster, where the scaffold was set up,
and where so many people of high degree were assembled to see him die,
that it was a matter of some difficulty to get him through the crowd.
He behaved most nobly, but if anything lay heavy on his mind, it was
that Earl of Essex, whose head he had seen roll off; and he solemnly
said that he had had no hand in bringing him to the block, and that he
had shed tears for him when he died. As the morning was very cold, the
Sheriff said, would he come down to a fire for a little space, and warm
himself? But Sir Walter thanked him, and said no, he would rather it
were done at once, for he was ill of fever and ague, and in another
quarter of an hour his shaking fit would come upon him if he were still
alive, and his enemies might then suppose that he trembled for fear.
With that, he kneeled and made a very beautiful and Christian prayer.
Before he laid his head upon the block he felt the edge of the axe, and
said, with a smile upon his face, that it was a sharp medicine, but
would cure the worst disease. When he was bent down ready for death, he
said to the executioner, finding that he hesitated, ‘What dost thou
fear? Strike, man!’ So, the axe came down and struck his head off, in
the sixty-sixth year of his age.
The new favourite got on fast. He was made a viscount, he was made Duke
of Buckingham, he was made a marquis, he was made Master of the Horse,
he was made Lord High Admiral—and the Chief Commander of the gallant
English forces that had dispersed the Spanish Armada, was displaced to
make room for him. He had the whole kingdom at his disposal, and his
mother sold all the profits and honours of the State, as if she had
kept a shop. He blazed all over with diamonds and other precious
stones, from his hatband and his earrings to his shoes. Yet he was an
ignorant presumptuous, swaggering compound of knave and fool, with
nothing but his beauty and his dancing to recommend him. This is the
gentleman who called himself his Majesty’s dog and slave, and called
his Majesty Your Sowship. His Sowship called him Steenie; it is
supposed, because that was a nickname for Stephen, and because St.
Stephen was generally represented in pictures as a handsome saint.
His Sowship was driven sometimes to his wits’-end by his trimming
between the general dislike of the Catholic religion at home, and his
desire to wheedle and flatter it abroad, as his only means of getting a
rich princess for his son’s wife: a part of whose fortune he might cram
into his greasy pockets. Prince Charles—or as his Sowship called him,
Baby Charles—being now Prince of Wales, the old project of a marriage
with the Spanish King’s daughter had been revived for him; and as she
could not marry a Protestant without leave from the Pope, his Sowship
himself secretly and meanly wrote to his Infallibility, asking for it.
The negotiation for this Spanish marriage takes up a larger space in
great books, than you can imagine, but the upshot of it all is, that
when it had been held off by the Spanish Court for a long time, Baby
Charles and Steenie set off in disguise as Mr. Thomas Smith and Mr.
John Smith, to see the Spanish Princess; that Baby Charles pretended to
be desperately in love with her, and jumped off walls to look at her,
and made a considerable fool of himself in a good many ways; that she
was called Princess of Wales and that the whole Spanish Court believed
Baby Charles to be all but dying for her sake, as he expressly told
them he was; that Baby Charles and Steenie came back to England, and
were received with as much rapture as if they had been a blessing to
it; that Baby Charles had actually fallen in love with Henrietta Maria,
the French King’s sister, whom he had seen in Paris; that he thought it
a wonderfully fine and princely thing to have deceived the Spaniards,
all through; and that he openly said, with a chuckle, as soon as he was
safe and sound at home again, that the Spaniards were great fools to
have believed him.
Like most dishonest men, the Prince and the favourite complained that
the people whom they had deluded were dishonest. They made such
misrepresentations of the treachery of the Spaniards in this business
of the Spanish match, that the English nation became eager for a war
with them. Although the gravest Spaniards laughed at the idea of his
Sowship in a warlike attitude, the Parliament granted money for the
beginning of hostilities, and the treaties with Spain were publicly
declared to be at an end. The Spanish ambassador in London—probably
with the help of the fallen favourite, the Earl of Somerset—being
unable to obtain speech with his Sowship, slipped a paper into his
hand, declaring that he was a prisoner in his own house, and was
entirely governed by Buckingham and his creatures. The first effect of
this letter was that his Sowship began to cry and whine, and took Baby
Charles away from Steenie, and went down to Windsor, gabbling all sorts
of nonsense. The end of it was that his Sowship hugged his dog and
slave, and said he was quite satisfied.
He had given the Prince and the favourite almost unlimited power to
settle anything with the Pope as to the Spanish marriage; and he now,
with a view to the French one, signed a treaty that all Roman Catholics
in England should exercise their religion freely, and should never be
required to take any oath contrary thereto. In return for this, and for
other concessions much less to be defended, Henrietta Maria was to
become the Prince’s wife, and was to bring him a fortune of eight
hundred thousand crowns.
His Sowship’s eyes were getting red with eagerly looking for the money,
when the end of a gluttonous life came upon him; and, after a
fortnight’s illness, on Sunday the twenty-seventh of March, one
thousand six hundred and twenty-five, he died. He had reigned
twenty-two years, and was fifty-nine years old. I know of nothing more
abominable in history than the adulation that was lavished on this
King, and the vice and corruption that such a barefaced habit of lying
produced in his court. It is much to be doubted whether one man of
honour, and not utterly self-disgraced, kept his place near James the
First. Lord Bacon, that able and wise philosopher, as the First Judge
in the Kingdom in this reign, became a public spectacle of dishonesty
and corruption; and in his base flattery of his Sowship, and in his
crawling servility to his dog and slave, disgraced himself even more.
But, a creature like his Sowship set upon a throne is like the Plague,
and everybody receives infection from him.