the blood and treasure of his people (and James MOTIVES OF THE KING'S AVERSION TO had neither to spare), may be little regarded on WAR. the Continent; the Machiavels of foreign cabinets will look with contempt on the domestic blessings a British sovereign would scatter among his subjects; his presence with the foreigners is only felt in his armies; and they seek to allure him to fight their battles, and to involve him in their interests. James looked with a cold eye on the military adventurer: he said, “No man gains by war but he that hath not wherewith to live in peace.” But there was also a secret motive, which made the king a lover of peace, and which he once thys confidentially opened: "A king of England had no reason but to seek always to decline a war; for though the sword was indeed in his hand, the purse was in the people's. One could not go without the other. Suppose a supply were levied to begin the fray, what certainty could he have that he should not want sufficient to make an honourable end? If he called for THE king's aversion to war has been attributed to his pusillanimity-as if personal was the same thing as political courage, and as if a king placed himself in a field of battle by a proclamation for war. The idle tale that James trembled at the mere view of a naked sword, which is produced as an instance of the effects of sympathy over the infant in the womb from his mother's terror at the assassination of Rizzio, is probably not true, yet it serves the purpose of inconsiderate writers to indicate his excessive pusillanimity; but there is another idle tale of an opposite nature which is certainly true :-In passing from Berwick into his new kingdom, the king, with his own hand, “shot out of a cannon so fayre and with so great judgment" as convinced the cannoniers of the king's skill "in great artillery,” as Stowe records. It is probable, after all, that James I. was not deficient in personal courage, although this is not of consequence in his literary and political cha-subsidies, and did not obtain, he must retreat racter. Several instances are recorded of his intrepidity. But the absurd charge of his pusillanimity and his pedantry has been carried so far, as to suppose that it affected his character as a sovereign. The warm and hasty Burnet says at once of James I.:-"He was despised by all abroad as a pedant without true judgment, courage, or steadiness." This "pedant," however, had "the true judgment and steadiness" to obtain his favourite purpose, which was the pre- JAMES ACKNOWLEDGES HIS DEPENDservation of a continued peace. If James I. was sometimes despised by foreign powers, it was because an insular king, who will not consume ingloriously. He must beg an alms, with such conditions as would break the heart of majesty, through capitulations that some members would make, who desire to improve the reputation of their wisdom, by retrenching the dignity of the crown in popular declamations, and thus he must buy the soldier's pay, or fear the danger of a mutiny." ENCE ON THE COMMONS.-THEIR CON- THUS James I. perpetually accused of exercising arbitrary power, confesses a humiliating dependthis very time, the conduct of a lord-mayor of London has been preserved by Wilson, as a proof time when prerogative and privilege were alike ence on the Commons; and, on the whole, at a of the city magistrate's piety, and, it added, of his wisdom. It is here adduced as anthem hard and rigorous usage. A king of peace indefinite and obscure, the king received from evidence of the king's usual conduct: may be The king's carriages, removing to Theobald's on the Sabbath, occasioned a great clatter and noise in the time of divine service. The lord-mayor commanded them to be stopped, and the officers of the carriages, returning to the king, made violent complaints. The king, in a rage, swore he thought there had been no more kings in England than himself; and sent a warrant to the lord-mayor to let them pass, which he obeyed, observing, "While it was in my power, I did my duty; but that being taken away by a higher power, it is my duty to obey." The good sense of the lord-mayor so highly gratified James, that the king complimented him, and thanked him for it. Of such gentleness was the arbitrary power of James composed! claimed the indulgence, if not the gratitude, of the people; and the sovereign who was zealous to distinguished, by the Commons, from him who correct the abuses of his government, was not insolently would perpetuate them. When the Commons were not in good humour methods of inactivity, running the time to waste with Elizabeth, or James, they contrived three nihil agendo, or aliud agendo, or malè agendo; doing nothing, doing something else, or doing evillyt. In one of these irksome moments, wait -seven weeks." ing for subsidies, Elizabeth anxiously inquired of usual in Elizabeth's reign; yet all our historians the speaker, "What had passed in the lower agree, that his subjects were never grievously house?" He replied, "If it please your Majesty oppressed by such occasional levies; this was even On one of those occasions, the confession of the contemporaries of this monarch. They were every day becoming wealthier by those acts of peace they despised the monarch for maintaining. "The kingdom, since his reign began, was luxuriant in gold and silver, far above the scant of our fathers who lived before us," are the words of a contemporary. All flourished about the king, except the king himself. James I. discovered how light and hollow was his boasted "prerogative-royal," which, by its power of dissolving the Parliament, could only keep silent those who had already refused their aid. : A wit of the day described the Parliaments of James by this ludicrous distich: "Many faults complained of, few things amended, A subsidy granted, the Parliament ended." when the queen broke into a passion when they urged her to a settlement of the succession, one of the deputies of the Commons informed her Majesty, that "the Commons would never speak about a subsidy, or any other matter whatever; and that hitherto nothing but the most trivial discussions had passed in Parliament: which was, therefore, a great assembly rendered entirely useless, and all were desirous of returning home." But the more easy and open nature of James I. endured greater hardships with the habit of studious men, the king had an utter carelessness of money and a generosity of temper, which Hacket, in his Life of the Lord-Keeper Williams, has described. "The king was wont to give like a king, and for the most part to keep one act of liberality warm with the covering of another." He seemed to have had no distinct notions of total amounts; he was once so shocked at the sight of the money he had granted away, lying in heaps on a table, that he instantly reduced it to half the It appears that Parliament never granted even the ordinary supplies they had given to his predecessors; his chief revenue was drawn from the customs; yet his debts, of which I find an account in the parliamentary history, after a reign of twenty-one years, did not amount to 200,000/+. This monarch could not have been so wasteful of At a late hour, when not a third part of the his revenues as it is presumed. James I. was house remained, and those who required a fuller always generous, and left scarcely any debts. He house, amid darkness and confusion, were neither must have lived amidst many self-deprivations ; | seen nor heard, they made a protest,—of which nor was this difficult to practise for this king, for the king approved as little of the ambiguous mathe was a philosopher, indifferent to the common and imaginary wants of the vulgar of royalty. Whenever he threw himself into the arms of his Parliament, they left him without a feeling of his distress. In one of his speeches he says, sum. "In the last Parliament I laid open the true thoughts of my heart; but I may say, with our Saviour, I have piped to you, and you have not danced; I have mourned, and you have not lamented.' I have reigned eighteen years, in which time you have had peace, and I have received far less supply than hath been given to any king since the Conquest." Thus James, denied the relief he claimed, was forced on wretched expedients, selling patents for monopolies, craving benevolences, or free gifts, and such expedients; the monopolies had been * From a MS. letter of the French ambassador, La Mothe Fenelon, to Charles IX., then at the court of London, in my possession. + Parl. Hist. vol. v. p. 147. 66 But this was rarely the fact. Sometimes they addressed James I. by what the king called a stinging-petition ;" or, when the ministers, passing over in silence the motion of the Commons, pressed for supplies, the heads of a party replied, that to grant them were to put an end to Parliament. But they practised expedients and contrivances, which comported as little with the dignity of an English senate, as with the majesty of the sovereign. ter, as the surreptitious means; and it was then, that, with his own hand, he tore the leaf out of the journal §. In the sessions of 1614 the king was still more indignant at their proceedings. He and the Scotch had been vilified by their invectives; and they were menaced by two lawyers, with "a Sicilian vespers, or a Parisian matins." They aimed to reduce the king to beggary, by calling in question a third part of his revenue, contesting his prerogative in levying his customs. On this occasion I find that, publicly in the Banqueting-house at Whitehall, the king tore all their bills before their faces; and, as not a single act was passed, in the phrase of the day this was called an addle Parliament. Such unhappy proceedings indicated the fatal divisions of the succeeding reign. A meeting, of a different complexion, once occurred in 1621, late in James's reign. The Hacket's Life of Lord-Keeper Williams. The monopolies were then abolished. The king and the prince shed reciprocal tears in the house; and the prince wept when he brought an affectionate message of thanks from the Commons. letter-writer says, "It is a day worthy to be kept holiday; some say it shall, but I believe them not." It never was; for even this parliament broke up with the cries of "some tribunitial orators," as James designated the pure and the impure democratic spirits. Smollett remarks in his margin, that the king endeavoured to cajole the Commons. Had he known of the royal tears, he had still heightened the phrase. Hard fate of kings! Should ever their tears attest the warmth of honest feelings, they must be thrown out of the pale of humanity for Francis Osborne, that cynical republican, declares, that "there are as few abominable princes as tolerable kings; because princes must court the public favour before they attain supreme power, and then change their nature!" Such is the egotism of republicanism! : SCANDALOUS CHRONICLES. THE character of James I. has always been taken from certain scandalous chronicles, whose origin requires detection. It is this mud which has darkened and disturbed the clear stream of history. The reigns of Elizabeth and James teemed with libels in church and state from opposite parties: the idleness of the pacific court of James I. hatched a viperous brood of a less hardy, but perhaps of a more malignant nature, than the Martin Mar-prelates of the preceding reign. Those boldly at once wrote treason, and, in some respects, honestly dared the rope which could only silence Penry and his party; but these only reached to scandalum magnatum, and the puny wretches could only have crept into a pillory. In the times of the commonwealth, when all things were agreeable which vilified our kings, these secret histories were dragged from their lurking holes. The writers are meagre Suetoniuses and Procopiuses; a set of self-elected spies in the court; gossippers, lounging in the same circle; eaves-droppers; pryers into corners; buzzers of reports; and punctual scribes of what the French (so skilful in the profession) technically term, les on dit; that is, things that might never have happened, although they are recorded: registered for posterity in many a scandalous chronicle, they have been mistaken for histories; and include so many truths and falsehoods, that it becomes unsafe for the historian either to credit or to disbelieve them*. * Most of these works were meanly printed, and were usually found in a state of filth and rags, and Such was the race generated in this court of peace and indolence! And Hacket, in his Life of the Lord-Keeper Williams, without disguising the would have perished in their own merited neglect, had they not been recently splendidly reprinted by Sir Walter Scott. Thus the garbage has been cleanly laid on a fashionable epergne, and found quite to the taste of certain lovers of authentic history! Sir Anthony Weldon, clerk of the King's kitchen, in his "Court of King James" has been reproached for gaining much of his scandalous chronicle from the purlieus of the court. For this work and some similar ones, especially "The None-Such Charles,” in which it would appear that he had procured materials from the State Paper Office, and for other zealous services to the Parliament, they voted him a grant of £500. "The five years of King James," which passes under the name of Sir Fulk Greville, the dignified friend of the romantic Sir Philip Sidney, and is frequently referred to by grave writers, is certainly a Presbyterian's third day's hash, for there are parts copied from Arthur Wilson's History of James I. who was himself the pensioner of a disappointed courtier; yet this writer never attacks the personal character of the king, though charged with having scraped up many tales maliciously false.-Osborne is a misanthropical politician, who cuts with the most corroding pen that ever rottened a man's name. James was very negligent in dress; graceful appearances did not come into his studies.Weldon tells us how the king was trussed on horseback, and fixed there like a pedlar's pack, or a lump of inanimate matter; the truth is, the king had always an infirmity in his legs. Further we are told, that this ridiculous monarch allowed his hat to remain just as it chanced to be placed on his head.-Osborne once saw this unlucky king "in a green hunting dress, with a feather in his cap, and a horn, instead of a sword, by his side; how suitable to his age, calling, or person, I leave others to judge from his pictures:" and this he bitterly calls " leaving him dressed for posterity!" This is the style which passes for history with some readers.-Hume observes, that hunting," which was James's sole recreation, necessary for his health, as a sedentary scholar, "is the cheapest a king can indulge ;" and, indeed, the empty coffers of this monarch afforded no other. These pseudo-histories are alluded to by Arthur Wilson, as "monstrous satires against the king's own person, that haunted both court and country," when, in the wantonness of the times, "every little miscarriage, exuberantly branched, so that evil report did often perch on them."-Fuller has us, fact, tells that the Lord Keeper "spared not for cost to purchase the most certain intelligence, by his fee'd pensioners, of every hour's occurrences at court; and was wont to say, that no man could be a statesman without a great deal of money." Such was this race of gossippers in the environs of a court, where steeped in a supine lethargy of peace, corrupting or corrupted every man stood for himself through a reckless scene of expedients and of compromises. OF THE TIME. A long reign of peace, which had produced wealth in that age, engendered the extremes of luxury and want. Money traders practised the art of decoying the gallant youths of the day into their nets; and transforming, in a certain time, the estates of the country gentlemen into skins of parchment, "The wax continuing hard, the acres melting." MASSINGER. We catch many glimpses of these times in another branch of the same family. When newsbooks, as the first newspapers were called, did not A PICTURE OF THE AGE FROM A MS. yet exist to appease the hungering curiosity of the country, a voluminous correspondence was carried on between residents in the metropolis and their country friends: these letters chiefly remain in their MS. state*. Great men then employed a scribe who had a talent this way, and sometimes a confidential friend, to convey to them the secret history of the times; and, on the whole, they are composed by a better sort of writers: for, as they had no other design than to inform their friends of the true state of passing events, they were eager to correct, by subsequent accounts, the lies of the day they sometimes sent down. They have preserved some fugitive events useful in historical researches; but their pens are garrulous,—and it requires some experience to discover the character of the writers, to be enabled to adopt their opinions and their statements. Little things were, however, great matters to these diurnalists; much time was spent in learning of those at court, who had quarrelled, or were on the point; who were seen to have bit their lips, and looked downcast; who was budding, and whose full-blown flower was drooping; then we have the sudden reconcilement and the anticipated fallings out; with a deal of the pourquoi of the pourquoi †. designated these suspicious scribes as "a generation of the people who, like moths, have lurked under the carpets of the council-table, and even like fleas, have leaped into pillows of the prince's bed-chamber; and, to enhance the reputation of their knowledge, thence derived that of all things which were, or were not, ever done or thought of."-Church Hist. book x. p. 87. • Mr. Lodge's "Illustrations of British History" is an eminent and elegant work of the minutiæ historica; as are the more recent volumes of Sir Henry Ellis's valuable collections. + Some specimens of this sort of correspondence of the idleness of the times may amuse. The learned Mede, to his friend Sir Martin Stuteville, chronicles a fracas :-"I am told of a great falling out between my Lord Treasurer and my Lord Digby, insomuch that they came to pedlar's blood, and traitor's blood. It was about some money which my Lord Digby should have had, which my Lord Treasurer thought too much for the charge of his employment, and said himself could go in as good a fashion for half the sum. But Projectors and monopolists, who had obtained patents for licensing all the inns and alehouses; for being the sole venders of manufactured articles, such as gold lace, tobacco-pipes, starch, soap, &c., were grinding and cheating the people to an extent which was not at first understood, although the practice had existed in the former reign. The gentry, whose family pride would vie my Lord Digby replies, that he could not peddle so well as his lordship." A lively genius sports with a fanciful pen in conveying the same kind of intelligence, and so nice in the shades of curiosity, that he can describe a quarrel before it takes place. "You know the primum mobile of our court (Buckingham), by whose motion all the other spheres must move, or else stand still: the bright sun of our firmament, at whose splendour or glooming all our marygolds of the court open or shut. There are in higher spheres as great as he, but none so glorious. But the king is in progress, and we are far from court. Now to hear certainties. It is told me, that my Lord of Pembroke and my Lord of Rochester are so far out, as it is almost come to a quarrel; I know not how true this is, but Sir Thomas Overbury and my Lord of Pembroke have been long jarring, and therefore the other is likely." Among the numerous MS. letters of this kind, I have often observed the writer uneasy at the scandal he has seasoned his letter with, and concluding earnestly that his letter, after perusal, should be thrown to the flames. A wish which appears to have been rarely complied with; and this may serve as a hint to some to restrain their tattling pens, if they regard their own peace; for, on most occasions of this nature, the letters are rather preserved with peculiar care. with these nouveaux riches, exhausted themselves in rival profusion; all crowded to "upstart London," deserting their country mansions, which were now left to the care of "a poor alms-woman, or a bed-rid beadsman." In that day, this abandonment of the ancient country hospitality for the metropolis, and this breaking-up of old family establishments, crowded London with new and distinct races of idlers, or, as they would now be called, unproductive members of society. From a contemporary manuscript, one of those spirited remonstrances addressed to the king, which it was probably thought not prudent to publish, I shall draw some extracts, as a forcible picture of the manners of the age *. Masters of ancient families, to maintain a mere exterior of magnificence in dress and equipage in the metropolis, were really at the same time hiding themselves in penury: they thrust themselves into lodgings, and "five or six knights, or justices of peace," with all their retinue, became the inmates of a shopkeeper; yet these gentlemen had once "kept the rusty chimneys of two or three houses smoking, and had been the feeders of twenty or forty serving-men: a single page, with a guarded coat, served their turn now. "Every one strives to be a Diogenes in his house and an emperor in the streets; not caring if they sleep in a tub, so they may be hurried in a coach; giving that allowance to horses and mares that formerly maintained houses full of men; pinching many a belly to paint a few backs, and burying all the treasures of the kingdom into a few citizens' coffers." "There are now," the writer adds, "twenty thousand masterless men turned off, who know not this night where to lodge, where to eat tomorrow, and ready to undertake any desperate flesh; all show, and no substance; all fashion, and no feeding; and fit for no service but masks and May-games. The citizens have dealt with them as it is said the Indians are dealt with; they have given them counterfeit brooches and buglebracelets for gold and silver+; pins and peacock feathers for lands and tenements; gilded coaches and outlandish hobby-horses for goodly castles and ancient mansions; their woods are turned into wardrobes, their leases into laces, and their goods and chattels into guarded coats and gaudy toys. Should your Majesty fly to them for relief, you would fare like those birds that peck at painted fruits; all outside." The writer then describes the affected penurious habits of the grave citizens, who were then preying on the country gentlemen: "When those big swoln leeches, that have thus sucked them, wear rags, eat roots, speak like jugglers that have reeds in their mouths; look like spittle-men, especially when your Majesty hath occasion to use them; their fat lies in their hearts, their substance is buried in their bowels, and he that will have it must first take their lives. Their study is to get, and their chiefest care to conceal; and most from yourself, gracious sir; not a commo + Sir Giles Mompesson and Sir James Mitchell had the monopolies of gold lace, which they sold in a counterfeit state; and, not only cheated the people, but, by a mixture of copper, the ornaments made of it are said to have rotted the flesh. As soon as the grievance was shown to James, he expressed his abhorrence of the practice; and even declared, that no person connected with the villanous fraud should escape punishment. The brother of his favourite, Buckingham, was known to be one, and with Sir Giles Overreach, (as Massinger conceals the name of Mompesson) was compelled to fly the country. The style of James, Yet there was still a more turbulent and dan- in his speech, is indeed different from kings' gerous race of idlers, in speeches in parliament: he speaks as indignantly "A number of younger brothers, of ancient as any individual who was personally aggrieved. houses, who, nursed up in fulness, pampered in "Three patents at this time have been complained their minority, and left in charge to their elder of, and thought great grievances; my purpose is brothers, who were to be fathers to them, followed to strike them all dead, and, that time may not them in despair to London, where these untimely-be lost, I will have it done presently. Had these born youths are left so bare, that their whole life's allowance was consumed in one year." things been complained of to me, before the parliament, I could have done the office of a just king, and have punished them; peradventure more than now ye intend to do. No private person whatsoever, were he ever so dear unto me, shall be respected by me by many degrees as the public good; and I hope, my lords, that ye will do me that right to publish to my people this my heart purposes. Proceed judicially; spare none, where ye find just cause to punish: but remember, that laws have not their eyes in their necks, but in their foreheads."-Rushworth, vol. i. p. 26. |