POLITICAL SERIES. James E. BORN A. D. 1566-DIED A. D. 1625. THE death of Elizabeth opened up the way for the accession of a new dynasty to the throne of England, in the person of James, the sixth Scottish monarch of that name, the son of Mary, queen of Scots, by Henry Lord Darnley, and great-grandson of Margaret, daughter of Henry VII. James left his Scottish capital on the 5th of April, 1603, to take possession of the richer diadem which, without effort or merit on his part, now awaited his acceptance. He entered London on the 7th of May, and was received with the most gratifying testimonies of respect and attachment; and in the following July, he and his queen were crowned with much solemnity by the archbishop of Canterbury. James was a weak man, and little fitted for the task of empire, more especially in such times as beheld the sceptres of two monarchies committed to his hands. He was fortunate, however, in his English ministry, which was composed of men little inferior to those through whom the maiden-queen had wielded her state so gallantly. Cecil, Bacon, Leicester, Drake, Walsingham, Sussex and Sidney, were no more. But Buckhurst, Cecil, Raleigh, Coke, and Egerton, still surrounded the throne and gave lustre to the court. The flattering auspices under which James ascended the throne of England were soon exchanged for others ominous of evil. There were many peculiarities of personal character about James, which tended to disgust his new subjects. In the son of the beautiful Mary and graceful Darnley, they certainly could anticipate nothing forbidding either in manners or person; their disappointment therefore may be imagined, when a figure answering to the following description stood before them, invested with the title and authority of their liege lord and sovereign. "He was of a middle stature, more corpulent through his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough; his clothes ever being made large and easy, the doublets quilted for stiletto proof; his breeches in plaits and full stuffed. (He was naturally of a timorous disposition, which was the reason of his quilted doublets). His eye large, ever rolling after any stranger who came in his presence; insomuch as many for shame have left the room, as being out of countenance. His beard was very thin; his tongue too large for his mouth, and made his drinking very unseemly, as if eating his drink, which came out into the cup on each side his mouth. His skin was as soft as taffeta-sarsnet, which felt so, because he never washed his hands, only rubbed his finger ends slightly with the wet end of a napkin. His legs were very weak, having, as some thought, some foul play in his youth, or rather before he was born, that he was not able to stand at seven years of age; that weakness made him ever leaning on other men's shoulders; his walk was ever circular." Nor could any thing be more offensive to English feelings in that age, than the partiality which James took every opportunity of showing towards Scotsmen. One of his very first acts after his arrival in London, was to inscribe the names of six Scotsmen on the list of the privy council; in a short time every office that the king had it in his power to bestow, was filled by Scotsmen, who, encouraged by the success of the first adventurers, flocked in crowds to the English court, and beset the king and his ministry with their importunate demands for honours, places, and pensions, under the new regime. The English looked with jealous eyes on these intruders, "by whom nothing was unasked, and to whom nothing was denied." But James persevered in his course of favouritism so long as he possessed the means of gratifying one greedy Scot. We His severity of temper in respect to religious dissentients disgusted a large and powerful body of his subjects. Both presbyterians and puritans suffered at his hands the most unworthy treatment, while the episcopalian party had their fears reasonably alarmed by the language which the king sometimes held in reference to the faith of Rome. have pretty good evidence that James, notwithstanding the many compliments which were paid him on the score of the soundness of his divinity, had a strong leaning towards popery. In his first speech to parliament he made some strange acknowledgments for a protestant: declaring that the church of Rome, though defiled by many corruptions, was, notwithstanding, the mother-church of the faithful, and that he would most willingly indulge the Romish clergy provided they would only renounce the pope's supremacy and his dispensing powers. He even talked of "meeting them in the midway, so that all novelties might be renounced on either side." We know that he heartily disliked the presbyterian form of church government as too republican for his ideas of kingly authority; and upon the same principle he bitterly hated the English puritans, whom he stigmatized as "novelists,"-persons ever discontented with the present government in church, and impatient to suffer any superiority, which," he added, "maketh their seats insufferable in any well-governed commonwealth." James's notions of civil government also were little calculated to win the affections of his subjects. He claimed for himself powers such as even Henry VIII. had never ventured to arrogate. He told his English parliament, that, "the power of kings was like the Divine power; for, as God can create and destroy, make and unmake at his pleasure, so kings can give life and death, judge all, and be judged by none! As it was blasphemy," he added" to dispute what God might do, so it was sedition in subjects to dispute what a king might do in the height of his power!" Mr Brodie has described James's conduct as perfectly consistent with these ideas: "In ecclesiastical matters he assumed supreme power, and struck at the very vitals of the constitution by issuing illegal proclamations with penalties which were enforced by the starchamber, while, by levying taxes without an act of parliament, he prepared the way for the disuse of that assembly. He, of his own accord, imposed new duties on the ports, and arrogated the right of doing so at pleasure,— a pretension in which he was supported by venal statesmen and corrupt lawyers, who concurred in fabricating precedents to deceive the people; nay, his judges solemnly decided so monstrous a principle in his favour. Innumerable projects and monopolies were devised for raising money, but he was latterly obliged to pass an act against them; forced loans, without the pressing emergencies which were used as an apology for 'Osborn. them in the preceding reign, were resorted to, and the hateful measure of benevolence, which had been so much reprobated, and so opposed even in Henry VIII., and so long discontinued, was revived." 2 One of James's first duties as sovereign of England was to give audience to the different embassies of congratulation which presented themselves at his court. Among these was one from Henry IV. o. France, who anxiously desired the support of an alliance with England against the power of Austria. With this view he sent his confidant and prime minister the marquis de Rosni, afterwards duke de Sully, on the first mission to the new sovereign of England. It is interesting to know what was the state of parties at the English court, as they appeared to so acute an observer as Rosni. He informs us that the Scottish party, headed by the duke of Lennox, the earl of Mar, and Lords Erskine, and Kinloss were attached to French interest; that the house of Howard supported the Spanish faction; that the lords Buckhurst and Cecil seemed neither to espouse the interests of France nor those of Spain, but aimed at the restoration of the ancient house of Burgundy; and that the earls of Northumberland, Southampton, and Cumberland, with Cobham, Raleigh, and Markham, seemed to be of no party, nor to have any fixed agreement amongst themselves, but to be agreed only in the love of novelty and a desire for change. The proceedings adopted in consequence of the Raleigh plot, as it was called, placed James in an unfavourable light in the estimation of the public; but the details of this affair will be given in our memoir of Raleigh himself. We next find James gratifying his taste for polemical divinity by the celebrated Hampton-court conference betwixt four puritan divines and as many bishops of the English church, the king himself acting as moderator. We shall quote Sir John Harrington's account of the king's behaviour on this notable occasion." The bishops," says he, " came to the king about the petition of the puritans-I was by and heard much discourse. The king talked much Latin, and disputed with Dr Reynolds at Hampton; but he rather used upbraidings than argument, and told the petitioners that they wanted to strip Christ again, and bid them away with their snivelling. The bishops seemed much pleased, and said his majesty spoke by the power of inspiration. I wist not what they mean, but the spirit was rather foul mouthed." When the puritan champions ventured to petition for the renewal of those meetings for religious purposes among the clergy called prophesyings, James broke out into such coarse invectives as the following:-" If you aim at a Scottish presbytery, it agrees as well with monarchy as God and the devil; then Jack and Tom, and Will and Dick shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my counsel. Therefore, I reiterate my former speech,-Le roi s'avisera.-Stay, I pray, for one seven years before you demand, and then, if you find me grow pursy and fat, I may perchance hearken unto you; for that government will keep me in breath and give me work enough." The royal moderator concluded his harangue by informing the puritan disputants that he would "make them conform themselves, or else harrie them out of the land, or else do worse. The puritan party were thus early made to know that they had nothing to hope for from the new sovereign. Hist. of the Brit. Emp. vol. i. pp. 351, 352. James had been scated nearly a twelvemonth on the throne of England before he convoked his first parliament; and when he at last so far complied with the spirit of the constitution, he took it upon him to instruct the electors what kind of persons they should choose for their representatives, and even to threaten them with forfeiture of their franchise if they disregarded his injunctions in this matter. Where such imprudence presided at the outset, little wisdom could be expected to mark the progress of the king's intercourse with his parliament. Accordingly we find him stumbling upon two of the most alarming subjects which he could have ventured to touch upon in his opening speech to the parliament, namely, his plan for a union of the two kingdoms, and his wish to meet the Roman Catholics half-way as he expressed it. With his usual imprudence, James chose the very moment when his commons had confirmed Sir Francis Goodwin's election in opposition to the royal wish, to press upon them his favourite project for a union of the two kingdoms. It was of course instantly crushed by the undisguised manifestations of antipathy with which the project was met on all sides. James beheld the defeat of his darling scheme with much chagrin, and gave vent to his feelings in an angry and inconsiderate letter to his commons. On the 5th of November 1605, the discovery of the gunpowder-plot filled the country with horror and dismay. The details of this memorable conspiracy will be found in our notice of the principal conspirator, Catesby. James's conduct on this occasion was exceedingly characteristic. He made a speech to parliament in which he extolled his own dexterity in interpreting some dark phrases in Lord Monteagle's letter, "contrary to the ordinary grammar construction of them, and to another sort than any divine or lawyer in any university would have taken them.” He then cautioned them against too hastily inculpating Roman catholics, and avowed his belief that no foreign prince had been concerned in hatching so vile a plot. But after thus instructing the two houses in what manner he desired the affair to be viewed and treated, to the astonishment and indignation of all he prorogued the parliament: thus keeping the nation in a state of feverish excitement for some months. In July 1607, James again announced a prorogation of parliament, which was afterwards extended till February 1610. In the meantime he engaged in a series of negotiations with the Spanish court, with the view to an alliance between his son Charles and a younger infanta, while, with his usual inconsistency, he rushed into the controversy on the oath of allegiance with a zeal which afresh exasperated all the catholic leaders throughout Europe. The oath of allegiance was one of the first defensive measures adopted by the English parliament in the first impulse of horror and fear after the discovery of the gunpowder-plot. It was a simple declaration of civil obedience to the king, with an absolute renunciation of the deposing power of the Some of the English pope. catholics took it at once and without hesitation, but others demurred, Cardinal Bellarmine expressed his opinion against it, and Father Preston, and James himself, defended it. Of the doctors of the Sorbonne, forty-eight approved the test and only six condemned it. The treatise which James wrote on this occasion is unquestionably the best of his pieces. It was at first published anonymously; but, in 1609, he republished it with his name, and a præmonition in reply to Bellarmine. The king's pecuniary necessities at last compelled him to meet parliament in February 1610. His opening speech was on this occasion still more offensive than any which he had yet delivered. He asserted that kings were before laws, and that all laws were granted by them as matter of favour only to the people. He declared that he would not allow his power to be disputed upon; and ended by demanding a pecuniary supply. The commons voted a supply considerably inferior to the royal demand, and in the month of July, parliament was prorogued to the ensuing October. On reassembling, the commons continued as intractable as ever in money-matters, and would vote no supplies without an equivalent in privileges. It was in vain that James alternately flattered and threatened them; they continued inflexible, and James at last dissolved in anger this his first parliament, and had recourse to the meanest shifts to supply his pecuniary necessities. He revived an obsolete law, which compelled all persons possessed of £40 a year in land to compound for not receiving the order of knighthood; he created a new title, that of baronet, and exposed it for sale to any one who could give £1,000 for it. Even the peerage itself was offered to sale: the title of earl might be had for £20,000; of viscount for £10,000; and of baron for £5000. The death of the king's promising son, Prince Henry, in 1612, diffused universal gloom over the nation, which was however somewhat lightened by the nuptials of James's only surviving daughter, the following year, to the elector-palatine. In 1614, the king had recourse to a benevolence which gained him only £50,000. It had always been a favourite project of James's to bring the church of Scotland, in point of government and ceremonies, as near as possible to the model of the English church. Episcopacy had been already established in Scotland, but it was not yet what the king wished it to be; the ceremonies of the Anglican church were wanting; a high-commission court was likewise wanting to complete James's ideas of what a well-ordered ecclesiastical polity should be. Early in the summer of 1617, he undertook a journey to his native kingdom for this purpose, but concealing his real motives under an affectation of attachment to his dear Scotland, or, to use the elegant language of his own proclamation, 66 a salmon-lyke instinct, a great and natural longing to see our native soyle and place of our birth and breeding." The earl of Buckingham, and a party of favourite courtiers, with three bishops, composed his train on this occasion. The royal progress was very magnificent and stately. James wished to impress his old subjects with profound ideas of his new grandeur as sovereign of England, and for that purpose spent a much greater sum than his impoverished finances could well afford in the equipment and accompaniments of his cortege. The Scots on their part prepared to receive his majesty with all honours, and especially with those scenes of pedantic trifling and fulsome adulation for which he had such a liking. One orator told him that his departure from Scotland, though to take possession of a crown, had overwhelmed his faithful Scottish subjects with affliction, " deepe sorrowe and fear possessing their herts, their places of solace only giving a new heate to the fever of the languishing remembrance of their former happiness; the verie hilles and groves, accustomed of before to be refreshed with the dewe of his majesty's presence, had ceased to put on their wonted ap |