We now leave the age of Imagination for the age of Doctrines; we have
entered into another reign; and, a new epoch arises in our Literature,
our tastes, and our manners.
We turn from the noble wrestlings of power, the stirrings of adventure,
and the commanding genius of the Maiden Queen, to the uninterrupted
level of a long protracted tranquillity; a fat soil, where all
flourished to the eye, while it grew into rankness, and an atmosphere of
corruption; breeding, in its unnatural heat, clouds of insects. A
monarch arrived in the flush of new dominion with a small people, who,
as an honest soul among them said, "having been forty years in the
desert, were rushing to take possession of the promised land." All was
to be the festival of an unbroken repose--a court of shows and sports,
the rejoicings of three kingdoms.
But the queen, with these dominions, had bequeathed her successor two
troublesome legacies, in two redoubtable portions of the English public;
both the Romanists, and those numerous dissenters, emphatically called
Puritans, were looking up to the new monarch, while the "true
protestants of Elizabeth" closed not their eyes in watchfulness over
both papist and presbyter.
To the monarch from the Kirk of Scotland, which he had extolled for "the
sincerest Kirk in the world," as suited a Scottish sovereign, and who
had once glanced with a presbyter's eye on "an evil mass in England,"
the English bishops hastened to offer the loyalty of their church. His
more ancient acquaintance, the puritans, were not behind the bishops,
nor without hope, to settle what they held to be "the purity" of church
discipline; but James had drunk large draughts of a Scottish presbytery,
and knew what lay at the bottom--he had tasted the dregs. He did not
like the puritans, and he told them why; to unking and to unbishop was
"the parity" of their petty model of Geneva. The new monarch declared,
perhaps he would not otherwise have been received, that "he came to
maintain what the queen had established,"--he demanded from the puritans
conformity to the State, and probably little imagined that they
preferred martyrdom. James lived to see the day when silencing,
ejecting, and expatiating, ended in no other conformity than the common
sufferings of the party.[1]
The claims of the Romanists were more tender than those of the sons of
John Knox; they prayed only for a toleration. The monarch, delayed what
he dared not concede. He is charged by the non-conformist with being
"very charitable" to these votaries of an indefeasible right of
monarchy, and his project of "meeting them half-way" startled the
English protestant. What does the king mean? Are our doctrines the same?
are we to return to the confessional? purchase plenary pardons? require
absolution and the salvation of souls from the bishop of Rome?
The main objection of the king himself to what he styled "the corruption
of the mother-church," was the papal supremacy, and its pretended power
of deposing monarchs, or of granting a dispensation for their murder.
Here the popular patriot exclaimed, "Was the great revolution of civil
liberty made only for the prince's safety?" Whatever might be this
reverie of a coalition with Rome, Rome for ever baffled it, by the
never-ceasing principle of her one and indivisible divine autocracy.
"The celestial court," omnipotent and omniscient, hurled its bolt at the
pacific heretic of England. It menaced his title, while its priests
busily inculcated that "anything may be done against heretics, because
they are worse than Turks and infidels;" then barrels of gunpowder were
placed under his throne, and the papal breves equally shook his dominion
by absolving the Romanists of England from their oath of allegiance. The
English monarch chose to be the advocate of his own cause, to vindicate
his regal rights, and to protest before all Europe against this
monstrous usurpation. He wrote "The Apology for the Oath of Allegiance,"
and we must concede to his tract this merit, that if the cause were
small, boundless and enduring was the effect. In every country in
Europe, through all the ranks of the learned, and for many a year, this
effusion of James occupied the pens alike of the advocates of the
apostolical court, and of the promulgators of the emancipation of
mankind;[2] nor is it remotely connected with the noble genius of Paul
Sarpi, whose great work was first published in London, and patronized by
the English monarch.
It was on a nation divided into unequal parts of irreconcileable
opinions that James conferred the dubious blessing of a long peace; for
twenty years there were no wars but the battle of pens, and the long
artillery of a hundred volumes.
Polemical studies become political when the heads of parties mask
themselves under some particular doctrine. Opinion only can neutralize
opinion; but in the age of doctrines before us, authority was considered
stronger than opinion, and in their unsettled notions and contested
principles, each party seemed to itself impregnable. Every Aeneas
brandished his weapon, but could never wound the flitting chimeras. It
was in the spirit of the age that Dr. Sutcliffe, the Dean of Exeter,
laid the foundations of a college for controversies or disputations at
Chelsea, on the banks of the quiet Thames. In this institution the
provost and the fellows were unceasingly to answer the Romanist and the
Mar-Prelate. The fervent dean scraped together all his properties in
many an odd shape to endow it, obtained a charter, and obscured his own
name by calling it "King James's College." He lived to see a small
building begun, but which, like the controversies, was not to be
finished. A college for controversy verily required inexhaustible funds.
When the day arrived that those became the masters whom those dogmatists
had so constantly refuted, the controversial college was oddly changed
into a manufactory of leather-guns, which probably were not more
efficacious.
James ascended the English throne as a poor man comes to a large
inheritance. In securing peace he deemed he had granted the people all
they desired, and he was the only monarch who cast a generous thought
on their social recreations. That image of peace and of delight was to
be reflected in the court: and in that enchanted circle of flattery and
of hope, the silvery voices of his silken parasites told how "he gave
like a king;" but he himself, a man of simple habits, with an utter
carelessness of money, learned a lesson which he never rightly
comprehended, how an exchequer might be voided.
James was a polemical monarch when polemics were political. But what
creed or system did this royal polemic wholly adopt? Born of Roman
Catholic parents and not abhorrent to the mother-church, for the
childhood of antiquity had its charms for him; brought up among the
Scottish presbyterians, with whom he served a long accommodating
apprenticeship of royalty, and with the doctrines of the Anglican Church
become the sovereign of three realms, did James, like his brother of
France, modify his creed, for a crown, by the state-religion?
Behold this luckless philosopher on the throne closing the last accompts
of his royalty with nothing but zeros in his own favour. By puritans
hated, by Romanists misliked, and surrounded by trains of the
"blue-bonnets," who were acted on the stage, and balladed in the
streets; little gracious with his English subjects, to whom from the
first "the coming-in" seemed as much like an invasion as an accession;
never forgiven by the foreigner for his insular genius, whose pacific
policy refused to enter into a project of visionary conquest; and
finally falling into a new age, when the monarch, reduced to a mere
metaphysical abstraction, whose prerogative and privilege were alike
indefinite, had to wrestle with "the five hundred kings," as James once
called the Commons; deservedly or undeservedly, this monarch for all
parties was a convenient subject for panegyric or for libel, true or
false.
But in reality what was the character of James the First? Where shall we
find it?[3]