BOOK-FIRES UNDER JAMES I.
Despite Mr. D'Israeli's able defence of him, the fashion has
survived of speaking disdainfully of James I. and all his works.
The military men of his day, hating him for that wise love of
peace which saved us at least from one war on the Continent,
complained of a king who preferred to wage war with the pen than
with the pike, and vented his anger on paper instead of with
powder. But for all that, the patron and friend of Ben Jonson,
and the constant promoter of arts and letters, was one of the
best literary workmen of his time; nor will any one who dips into
his works fail to put them aside without a considerably higher
estimate than he had before of the ability of the most learned
king that ever occupied the British throne--a monarch
unapproached by any of his successors, save William III., in any
sort of intellectual power.
Yet here our admiration for James I. must perforce stop. For of
many of his ideas the only excuse is that they were those of his
age; and this is an excuse that is fatal to a claim to the
highest order of merit. All men to some extent are the sport and
victims of their intellectual surroundings; but it is the mark of
superiority to rise above them, and this James I. often failed to
do. He cannot, for instance, in this respect compare with a man
whose works he persecuted, namely, Reginald Scot, who in 1584
published his immortal _Discoverie of Witchcraft_, a book which,
alike for its motive as its matter, occupies one of the highest
places in the history of the literature of Europe.
Yet Scot was only a Kentish country gentleman, who gave himself
up solely, says Wood, to solid reading and the perusal of obscure
but neglected authors, diversifying his studies with agriculture,
and so producing the first extant treatise on hops. Nevertheless,
he is among the heroes of the world, greater for me at least than
any one of our most famous generals, for it was at the risk of
his life that he wrote, as he says himself, "in behalf of the
poor, the aged, and the simple"; and if he has no monument in our
English Pantheon, he has a better and more abiding one in the
hearts of all the well-wishers of humanity. For his reading led
him to the assault of one of the best established, most sacred,
yet most stupid, of the superstitions of mankind; and to have
exposed both the folly of the belief, and the cruelty of the
legal punishments, of witchcraft, more justly entitles his memory
to honour than the capture of many stormed cities or the butchery
of thousands of his fellow-beings on a battlefield.
How trite is the argument that this or that belief must be true
because so many generations have believed it, so many countries,
so many famous men,--as if error, like stolen property, gained a
title from prescription of time! Scot pierced this pretension
with a single sentence: "Truth must not be measured by time, for
every old opinion is not sound." "My great adversaries," he says,
"are young ignorance and old custom. For what folly soever tract
of time hath fostered, it is so superstitiously pursued of some
as though no error could be acquainted with custom." May we not
say, indeed, that beliefs are rendered suspect by the very extent
of their currency and acceptance?
But Scot had a greater adversary than even young ignorance or old
custom; and that was King James, who, whilst King of Scotland,
wrote his _Demonologie_ against Scot's ideas (1597). James's mind
was strictly Bible-bound, and for him the disbelief in witches
savoured of Sadduceeism, or the denial of spirits. Yet Scot had
taken care to guard himself, for he wrote: "I deny not that there
are witches or images; but I detest the idolatrous opinions
conceived of them." Nor can James have carefully read Scot, for
tacked on to the _Discoverie_ is a _Discourse of Devils and
Spirits_, which to the simplest Sadducee would have been the
veriest trash. Scot, for instance, says of the devil that "God
created him purposely to destroy. I take his substance to be such
as no man can by learning define, nor by wisdom search out"; a
conclusion surely as wise as the theology is curious. Anyhow it
is the very reverse of Sadduceean. It is said that one of the
first proceedings of James's reign was to have all the copies of
Scot's book burnt that could be seized, and undoubtedly one of
the first of his Acts of Parliament was the statute that made all
the devices of witchcraft punishable with death, as felony,
without benefit of clergy.
But about the burning there is room for doubt. For there is no
English contemporary testimony of the fact. Voet, a professor of
theology in Holland, is its only known contemporary witness; but
he may have assumed the suppression of the book to have been
identical with its burning; a common assumption, but a no less
common mistake. On the other hand, many books undoubtedly were
burnt under James that are not mentioned by name; and the great
rarity of the first edition of the book, and its absence from
some of our principal libraries, support the possibility of its
having been among them.[52:1] Nevertheless, to quote Mr.
D'Israeli: "On the King's arrival in England, having discovered
the numerous impostures and illusions which he had often referred
to as authorities, he grew suspicious of the whole system of
Daemonologie, and at length recanted it entirely. With the same
conscientious zeal James had written the book, the King condemned
it; and the sovereign separated himself from the author, in the
cause of truth; but the clergy and the Parliament persisted in
making the imaginary crime felony by the statute." So that if
James really burnt the book, he must have burnt it to please
others, not himself; and though he may have done so, the
presumption is rather that he did not.
The wonder is that Scot himself escaped the real or supposed fate
of his book. Pleasing indeed is it to know that he lived out his
days undisturbed to the end (1599) with his family and among his
hops and flowers in Kent; not, however, before he had lived to
see his book make a perceptible impression on the magistracy and
even on the clergy of his time, till a perceptible check was
given to his ideas by the _Demonologie_. But at all events he had
given superstition a reeling blow, from which it never wholly
recovered, and to which it ultimately succumbed. More than this
can few men hope to do, and to have done so much is ample cause
for contentment.
Fundamental questions of all sorts were growing critical in the
reign of James, who had not only the clearest ideas of their
answer, but the firmest determination to have them, if possible,
answered in his own way. The principal ones were: The
relationship of the King to his subjects; of the Pope to kings;
of the Established Church to Puritanism and Catholicism. And on
the leading political and religious questions of his day James
caused certain books to be burnt which advocated opinions
contrary to his own--a mode of reasoning that reflects less
credit on his philosophy than does his conduct in most other
respects.
But the first book that was burnt for its sentiments on
Prerogative was one of which the King was believed personally to
approve. This was probably the gist of its offence, for it
appeared about the time that the King made his very supercilious
speech to the Commons in answer to their complaints about the
High Commission and other grievances.
I allude to the famous _Interpreter_ (1607) by Cowell, Doctor of
Civil Law at Cambridge, which, written at the instigation of
Archbishop Bancroft, was dedicated to him, and caused a storm
little dreamt of by its author. Sir E. Coke disliked Cowell, whom
he nicknamed Cow-heel, and naturally disliked him still more for
writing slightingly of Littleton and the Common Law. He therefore
caused Parliament to take the matter up, with the result that
Cowell was imprisoned and came near to hanging;[54:1] James only
saving his life by suppressing his book by proclamation, for
which the Commons returned him thanks with great exultation over
their victory.
For Cowell had taken too strongly the high monarchical line, and
the episode of his book is really the first engagement in that
great war between Prerogative and People which raged through the
seventeenth century. "I hold it uncontrollable," he wrote, "that
the King of England is an absolute king." "Though it be a
merciful policy, and also a politic policy (not alterable without
great peril) to make laws by the consent of the whole realm . . .
yet simply to bind the prince to or by these laws were repugnant
to the nature and custom of an absolute monarchy." "For those
regalities which are of the higher nature there is not one that
belonged to the most absolute prince in the world which doth not
also belong to our King." But the book was condemned, not only
for its sins against the Subject, but also for passages that were
said to pinch on the authority of the King. Yet, considered
merely as a Law Dictionary, it is still one of the best in our
language.
In the King's proclamation against the _Interpreter_ are some
passages that curiously illustrate the mind of its author. He
thus complains of the growing freedom of thought: "From the very
highest mysteries of the Godhead and the most inscrutable
counsels in the Trinitie to the very lowest pit of Hell and the
confused action of the divells there, there is nothing now
unsearched into by the curiositie of men's brains"; so that "it
is no wonder that they do not spare to wade in all the deepest
mysteries that belong to the persons or the state of Kinges and
Princes, that are gods upon earth." King James's attitude to Free
Thought reminds one of the legendary contention between Canute
and the sea. No one has ever repeated the latter experiment, but
how many thousands still disquiet themselves, as James did, about
or against the progress of the human mind!
In the proclamation itself there is no actual mention of burning,
all persons in possession of the book being required to deliver
their copies to the Lord Mayor or County Sheriffs "for the
further order of its utter suppression" (March 25th, 1610);
neither is there any allusion to burning in the Parliamentary
journals, nor in the letters relating to the subject in Winwood's
_Memorials_. The contemporary evidence of the fact is, however,
supplied by Sir H. Spelman, who says in his _Glossarium_ (under
the word "Tenure") that Cowell's book was publicly burnt.
Otherwise, James's proclamations were not always attended to (by
one, for instance, he prohibited hunting); and Roger Coke says
that the books being out, "the proclamation could not call them
in, but only served to make them more taken notice of."[57:1]
That books were often suppressed or called in without being
publicly burnt is well shown by Heylin's remark about Mocket's
book (presently referred to), that it was "thought fit not only
to call it in, but to expiate the errors of it in a public
flame."[57:2] Among works thus suppressed without being burnt may
be mentioned Bishop Thornborough's two books in favour of the
union between England and Scotland (1604), Lord Coke's Speech and
Charge at the Norwich Assizes (1607), and Sir W. Raleigh's first
volume of the _History of the World_ (1614). I suspect that
Scott's _Discoverie_ was likewise only suppressed, and that Voet
erroneously thought that this involved and implied a public
burning.
But it was not for long that James had saved Cowell's life, for
the latter's death the following year, and soon after the
resignation of his professorship, is said by Fuller to have been
hastened by the trouble about his book. The King throughout
behaved with great judgment, nor is it so true that he
surrendered Cowell to his enemies, as that he saved him from
imminent personal peril. Men like Cowell and Blackwood and
Bancroft were probably more monarchical than the monarch himself;
and, though James held high notions of his own powers, and could
even hint at being a god upon earth, his subjects were far more
ready to accept his divinity than he was to force it upon them.
It was not quite for nothing that James had had for his tutor the
republican George Buchanan, one of the first opponents of
monarchical absolutism in his famous _De Jure Regni apud Scotos_;
nor did he ever quite forget the noble words in which at his
first Parliament he thus defined for ever the position of a
constitutional king: "That I am a servant it is most true, that
as I am head and governor of all the people in my dominion who
are my natural vassals and subjects, considering them in numbers
and distinct ranks: so, if we will take the whole people as one
body and mass, then, as the head is ordained for the body and not
the body for the head, so must a righteous king know himself to
be ordained for his people and not his people for him. . . . _I
will never be ashamed to confess it my principal honour to be the
great servant of the Commonwealth._"
And in this very matter of Cowell's book James not only denied
any preference for the civil over the common law, but professed
"that, although he knew how great and large a king's rights and
prerogatives were, yet that he would never affect nor seek to
extend his beyond the prescription and limits of the municipal
laws and customs of this realm."[59:1]
A few years later Sir Walter Raleigh's first volume of his
_History of the World_ was called in at the King's command,
"especially for being too saucy in censuring princes." This fate
its wonderful author took greatly to heart, as he had hoped
thereby to please the King extraordinarily;[59:2] and,
considering the terms wherewith in his preface he pointed the
contrast between James and our previous rulers, one cannot but
share his astonishment.
This would seem to indicate that the King grew more sensitive
about his position as time went on; and this conclusion is
corroborated by his extraordinary conduct in reference to the
works of David Paraeus, the learned Protestant Professor of
Divinity at Heidelberg. One can conceive no mortal soul ever
reading those three vast folios of closely printed Latin in which
Paraeus commented on the Old and New Testament; but in those days
people must have read everything. At all events, it was
discovered that in his commentary on Romans xiii. Paraeus had
contended at great length and detail in favour of the people's
right to restrain, even by force of arms, tyrannical violence on
the part of the superior magistrate. On March 22nd, 1622,
therefore, the Archbishop of Canterbury and twelve bishops, at
the King's request, represented this doctrine to be most
dangerous and seditious; and accordingly, on July 1st, the books
of Paraeus were publicly burnt after a sermon by the Bishop of
London; and about the same time the Universities of Oxford and
Cambridge, ever on the side of the divine right, proved their
loyalty by condemning and burning the book, perhaps the only book
whose condemnation never tempted to its perusal. But that very
same year (August 22nd, 1622) the King found it necessary to
issue directions concerning preaching and preachers, so freely
was the Puritanical side of the community then beginning to
express itself about the royal prerogative.
As connected with the question of the prerogative must be
mentioned, as burnt by James' order, the _Doctrina et Politia
Ecclesiae Anglicanae_ (1616), a Latin translation of the English
Prayer Book, as well as of Jewell's _Apology_ and Newell's
_Catechism_, by Richard Mocket, then Warden of All Souls'. Mocket
was chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, and wished to recommend the
formularies and doctrines of the Church of England to foreign
nations. History does not, indeed, record any deep impression as
made on foreign nations by the book; though Heylin asserts that
it had given no small reputation to the Church of England beyond
the seas (_Laud_, 70); but it does record the fact of its being
publicly burnt, as well as give some intimations of the reason.
Fuller says that the main objection to it was, that Mocket had
proved himself a better chaplain than subject, touching James in
one of his tenderest points in contending for the right of the
Archbishop of Canterbury to confirm the election of bishops in
his province. Mocket also gave such extracts from the Homilies as
seemed to have a Calvinistic leaning; and treated fast days as
only of political institution. For such reasons the book was
burnt by public edict, a censure which the writer took so much to
heart that, as Fuller says, being "so much defeated in his
expectation to find punishment where he looked for preferment, as
if his life were bound up by sympathy in his book, he ended his
days soon after." Poor Mocket was only forty when he died,
succumbing, like Cowell, to the rough reception accorded to his
book.
Mocket's book is less one to read than to treasure as a sort of
_lusus naturae_ in the literary world; for it would certainly have
seemed safe antecedently to wager a million to one that no Warden
of All Souls' would ever write a book that would be subjected to
the indignity of fire; and, in spite of his example, I would
still wager a million to one that a similar fate will never
befall any literary work of Mocket's successors. Mocket's book,
therefore, has a certain distinction which is all its own; but
those who do not love the Church of England without it will
hardly be led to such love by reading Mocket. And Mocket himself,
if we follow Fuller, seems to have wished to make his love for
the Church a vehicle to his own preferment; but as, perhaps, in
that respect he does not stand alone, I should be sorry that the
implied reproach should rest as any stain upon his memory.
Next to the question of the rights of kings over their subjects,
the most important one of that time was concerning the rights of
popes over kings--a question which, having been intensified by
the Reformation, naturally came to a crisis after the Gunpowder
Plot. James I. then instituted an oath of allegiance as a test of
Catholic loyalty, and many Catholics took the oath without
scruple, including the Archpriest Blackwell. Cardinal Bellarmine
thereupon wrote a letter of rebuke to the latter, and Pope Paul
V. sent a brief forbidding Catholics either to take the oath or
to attend Protestant churches (October 1606). But it is
remarkable that, so little did the Catholics believe in the
authenticity of this brief, another--and an angry one--had to
come from Rome the following September, to confirm and enforce
it. King James very fairly took umbrage at the action and claims
of the Pope, and spent six days in making notes which he wished
the Bishop of Winchester to use in a reply to the Pope and the
Cardinal. But when the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of
Ely saw the King's notes, they thought them answer enough, and so
James's _Apology for the Oath of Allegiance_ came to light, but
without his name, the author, among other reasons, deeming it
beneath his dignity to contend in argument with a cardinal. As
the Cardinal responded, the King took a stronger measure, and
under his own name wrote, in a single week, his _Premonition to
all most Mighty Monarch_, wherein he exposed with great force the
danger to all states from the pretensions of the Papacy.
Thereupon, at Paul's invitation, Suarez penned that vast folio
(778 pp.), the _Defensio Catholicae Fidei contra Anglicanae Sectae
Errores_ (1613), as a counterblast to James's _Apology_.
Considering the subject, it was certainly written with singular
moderation; and James would have done better to have left the
book to the natural penalty of its immense bulk. As it was, he
ordered it to be burnt at London, and at Oxford and Cambridge;
forbade his subjects to read it, under severe penalties; and
wrote to Philip III. of Spain to complain of his Jesuit subject.
But Philip, of course, only expressed his sympathy with Suarez,
and exhorted James to return to the Faith. The Parlement of Paris
also consigned the book to the flames in 1614, as it had a few
years before Bellarmine's _Tractatus de Potestate summi
Pontificis in Temporalibus_, in which the same high pretensions
were claimed for the Pope as were claimed by Suarez.
The question at issue remains, of course, a burning one to this
day. To James I., however, is due the credit of having been one
of the earliest and ablest champions against the Temporal Power;
and therefore side by side on our shelves with Bellarmine and
Suarez should stand copies of the _Apology_ and the
_Premonition_--both of them works which can scarcely fail to
raise the King many degrees in the estimation of all who read
them.
But we have yet to see James as a theologian, for on his divinity
he prided himself no less than on his king-craft. The burnings of
Legatt at Smithfield and of Wightman at Lichfield for heretical
opinions are sad blots on the King's memory; for it would seem
that he personally pressed the bishops to proceed to this
extremity, in the case of Legatt at least. Nor in the case of
poor Conrad Vorst did he manifest more toleration or dignity. It
was no concern of his if Vorst was appointed by the States to
succeed Arminius as Professor of Theology at Leyden; yet, deeming
his duty as Defender of the Faith to be bound by no seas, he
actually interfered to prevent it, and rendered Vorst's life a
burden to him, when he might just as reasonably have protested
against the choice of a Grand Lama of Thibet.
Vorst's book--the _Tractatus Theologicus de Deo_, an ugly,
square, brown book of five hundred pages--is as unreadable as it
is unprepossessing. Bayle says that it was shown to the King
whilst out hunting, and that he forthwith read it with such
energy as to be able to despatch within an hour to his resident
at the Hague a detailed list of its heresies. Nothing in his
reign seems to have excited him so much. Not only did he have it
publicly burnt in St. Paul's Churchyard (October 1611), and at
Oxford and Cambridge, but he entreated the States, under the pain
of the loss of his friendship, to banish Vorst from their
dominions altogether. No heretic, he said, ever better deserved
to be burnt, but that he would leave to their Christian wisdom.
"Such a Disquisition deserved the punishment of the Inquisition."
If Vorst remained, no English youths should repair to "so
infected a place" as the University of Leyden.
The States resented at first the interference of the King of
England, and supported Vorst, but the ultimate result of James's
prolonged agitation was that in 1619 the National Synod of Dort
declared Vorst's works to be impious and blasphemous, and their
author unworthy to be an orthodox professor. He was accordingly
banished from the University and from Holland for life, and died
three years afterwards, fully justified by his persecution in his
original reluctance to exchange his country living for the
dignity of a professorship of theology.
Bayle thinks he was fairly chargeable with Socinian views, but
what most offended James was his metaphysical speculations on the
Divine attributes. I will quote from Vorst two passages which
vexed the royal soul, and should teach us to rejoice that the
reign of such discussions shows signs of passing away:--
"Is there a quantity in God?
There is; but not a physical quantity,
But a supernatural quantity;
One nevertheless that is plainly imperceptible to us,
And merely spiritual."
Or again:--
"Hath God a body? If we will speak properly, He has none; yet is
it no absurdity, speaking improperly, to ascribe a body unto God,
that is, as the word is taken improperly and generally (and yet
not very absurdly) for a true substance, in a large
signification, or, if you will, abusive."
The above are the principal books whose names have come down to
us as burnt in the reign of James, and the initiation of such
burning seems always to have come from the King himself. As yet,
the Star Chamber and Court of High Commission do not appear to
have assumed the direction of this lesser but not unimportant
department of government. Nor is there yet any mention of the
hangman: the mere burning by any menial official being, thought
stigma enough. It is also remarkable that the books which chiefly
roused James's anger to the burning point were the works of
foreigners--of Paraeus, Suarez, and Vorst. After James our country
was too much occupied in burning its own books and pamphlets to
burden itself with the additional labour of burning its
neighbours'; the instances that occur are comparatively few and
far between. But it is clear that, whatever were James's real
views as to the limits of his political prerogative, in the field
of literature he meant to play and did play the despot. Pity that
one who could so deftly wield his pen should have rested his
final argument on the bonfire!
FOOTNOTES:
[52:1] That is Dr. Brinsley Nicholson's conclusion in his preface
to Scot; yet, if the book was burnt, it is highly improbable that
the common hangman officiated.
[54:1] Winwood's _Memorials_, I. 125.
[57:1] _Detection of Court and State of England_ (1696), I. 30.
[57:2] _Life of Laud_, 70.
[59:1] Winwood's _Memorials_, III. 136.
[59:2] Letter of January 5th, 1614, in _Court and Times of James
I._