Chapter XVIII: JAMES I. (concluded) (2)

This free form of the Scottish Church had always been extremely repugnant to James's despotic notions. Even when he professed to admire its constitution as the purest and most perfect on earth, he was writhing under its authority; and no sooner did he ascend the English throne than he avowed his real opinion of its inconsistency with monarchy. The hierarchy of England delighted him; he regarded it as the surest bulwark of the Throne, and bishops he seemed to regard as the guarantees of royal security. "No bishop no king," was his favourite motto; and the hatred of presbytery which he expressed at Hampton Court led him to seek its utter overthrow in Scotland. He knew the sturdy materials that he had to deal with in the Scottish ministry and people, who had driven out his mother in their hatred of Catholicism; yet this did not deter him from endeavouring to plant episcopacy as firmly in Scotland as in England. He looked on the spirit and form of the Scottish Church but as one remove from republicanism in the State; and his first step, taken in 1605, was a bold one, being no less than to assume the right to prorogue the General Assembly at will. This was at once annihilating the theocratic constitution of the Assembly, and placing the king at its head. This measure was carried out by Sir George Home the Lord Treasurer of Scotland, afterwards Earl of Dunbar. The ministers, though prorogued, met again in defiance of the royal fiat, but were dissolved again and again. The ministers from nine presbyteries still boldly met in assertion of the paramount right of the Church, at Aberdeen, called themselves "an Assembly," appointed a moderator, and before dissolving at the command of the Council, adjourned their sitting to a fixed time that year.

Thirteen of the most prominent ministers were immediately arrested on the charge of having violated the Act of 1584, "for maintenance of the royal power over all estates." The jury was packed by Dunbar, and six of the most refractory clergy were condemned as guilty of high treason, and banished for life. They retired into Holland and France, and were followed thither by numbers of their admirers. Meanwhile, at home, undaunted by this lawless exercise of power, the ministers offered up prayers for their exiled brethren, whom they boldly proclaimed from their pulpits as martyrs to the freedom of the faith; and unsilenced by the menaces of the Court, loudly warned the people of the impending danger to the Church.

But James, with the blind hardihood of a true Stuart, went on, and in 1606 appointed thirteen clergymen to the ancient abolished bishoprics, and gave them precedency in the synods and Assembly. The ministers refused to submit to their authority, and, as they were unsupported by the old reverence, treated their assumed dignity with contempt. But James went on to repeal the Act which had confiscated the episcopal estates, endowed the bishops, and made them moderators of both synods and presbyteries within their own districts. He erected two courts of High Commission, and indeed gave them a power such as their predecessors had never possessed. In 1610 three of these bishops went to England, and received episcopal ordination from the English prelates, and on their return conferred it on their colleagues. And finally, in 1612, it was enacted by the Scottish Parliament that all General Assemblies should only be appointed by the Crown; that the bishops only should present to livings; that they should admit no one who would not first take the Oath of Supremacy to the king, and of canonical obedience to the bishop; that they should possess the power of deprivation and the right of visitation, each in his own diocese.

Andrew Melville, the successor of Knox, boldly though respectfully denied these innovations, asserting the freedom of conscience, and its immunity from the power of any earthly potentate. When pressed by some slavish Scottish lords to conform, he said: "My lords, I am a free subject of Scotland, a free kingdom, that has laws and privileges of its own. By these I stand. No legal citation has been issued against me; nor are you and I in our own country, where such an inquisition, so oppressive as the present, is condemned by Parliament. I am bound by no law to criminate or to furnish accusations against myself. My lords, remember what you are; mean as I am, remember that I am a free-born Scotsman, to be dealt with as you would be dealt with yourselves, according to the laws of the Scottish nation."

This was noble and patriotic language; but Melville had to deal with a vain despot, who declared himself above all laws. He insisted on their attending the royal chapel to hear the preaching of his bishops. The plain presbyterian Scots were scandalised at both what they saw and heard there: at the ceremonies, the gilded altar, the chalices, and tapers, but above all, at the slavish doctrines of those courtly preachers. The Scottish ministers did not hesitate to express their contempt and indignation at the whole spectacle, and Melville ridiculed the entire service in a Latin epigram. For this audacity James summoned him before his Privy Council; but the preacher's blood was now chafed beyond restraint, for he and his colleagues, though they were impatient to get away from what they considered this idolatrous scene, where the conduct of the bishops and clergy was by no means edifying, had been compelled to stay. So far from expressing any regret for his satire on the royal mode of worship, he denounced in the strongest terms the whole system of the Anglican Church, and in his excitement seized the surplice of the primate, and shook angrily what he called the Romish rags of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

James committed him to the Tower for his contumacy (1606), where he kept him four years, and then banished him for life. He went to reside at Sedan, where he died in 1622. His nephew, James Melville, was shut up at Berwick, and died six years before his uncle; the rest of the preachers were banished to remote districts of Scotland, wide apart from each other.

To put the finish to this daring change, James determined to make a journey to Scotland himself in 1617. On leaving that country he had assured his Scottish subjects that he would visit his ancient capital at least once in three years: fourteen years had now elapsed without his redeeming his word, his poverty having hitherto presented an insurmountable obstacle. But he had now consented to yield up the cautionary towns, Brell, Flushing, and Rammekens, for 2,728,000 florins instead of 8,000,000, which were due to him. He had been induced to this by his necessities and the persuasions of Secretary Winwood, who was said to have received £29,000 from the Dutch for his services on the occasion. James now discharged some of his most pressing debts, and obtained a loan of £96,000, with which he set forward to Scotland in the spring of 1617.

On the 7th of June the Scottish Estates met, and James excluded such of the representatives as he knew were hostile to his object of establishing the English Church in all its forms and authority, as the State Church of Scotland for ever. But the Peers, alarmed lest he should restore to his pet church the lands of which they now were in possession, rejected the articles which he recommended. To win over these nobles, James invited them to a secret conference, in which he assured them that no revocation of these lands should be made. Reassured on this head, the Peers were ready to vote as he pleased, and he opened the Estates in one of his vaunting speeches about his power, in which he told his audience that "he had nothing more at heart than to reduce their barbarity to the sweet civility of their neighbours; and if the Scots would be as docible to learn the goodness of the English as they were teachable to limp after their ill, then he should not doubt of success; for they had already learnt of the English to drink healths, to wear coaches and gay clothes, to take tobacco, and to speak a language which was neither English nor Scottish."

In this insolent speech the king might have included himself both as to clothes and language; but these were small matters in comparison with those which he had in view. He brought in a Bill to enact that what the king might determine upon regarding the Church, with the concurrence of the bishops and a certain number of the clergy, should be good in law. At this proposition the ministers were instantly in arms, and presented so determined a remonstrance against it, that he became afraid and gave it up, saying it was unnecessary to give him that by statute which was already his by authority of the Crown. He managed, however, to carry a Bill adding chapters to the bishoprics, regulating the appointment of bishops, and also one for converting the hereditary offices of sheriffs into annual ones, which he would thus be able to influence. Never, surely, with a spirit so essentially cowardly, was there a monarch so ingrained with the bigotry of absolutism, or who so perseveringly laboured to annihilate every liberty of the subject, and leave the nation a base and soulless heritage of the Crown. But the nation was not thus to be trodden into a horde of serfs; and though James escaped to a quiet tomb, it took a terrible vengeance on his children, whom he had inoculated with his incorrigible lust of absolutism.

As nothing more was to be obtained from Parliament, the uncouth tyrant wended his way to St. Andrews, where he had planned a severe retribution for the remonstrant ministers, from a more obsequious tribunal. There the ministers having met at his summons, he singled out Simpson, Ewart, and Calderwood, who had signed the remonstrance which baulked him of his full intentions, and brought them before the High Commission Court, and condemned Simpson and Ewart to suspension and imprisonment. Calderwood, who by his influence and ability excited most of all his dread and resentment, he banished for life. Having thus given the ministers a sharp lesson, he now announced to them that it was his will that the whole ritual of the English Church should be adopted in Scotland in five articles, the name of which afterwards became famous, namely:--1st, That the Eucharist should be received in a kneeling, and not in a sitting, posture, as had been hitherto the mode in Scotland; 2nd, That the Sacrament should be given to the sick at their own houses when they were in danger of death; 3rd, That baptism should, in like cases, be administered in private houses; 4th, That the youth should be confirmed by the bishops; and 5th, That the festivals of Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day, and Whit-Sunday, should be observed in Scotland just as in England. These commands were received with unequivocal marks of displeasure by the ministers, but the fate of the three remonstrants availed to keep them silent for a time, and James regarded his plans as fully accomplished; but presently the preachers fell on their knees and implored him to refer the Five Articles to the General Assembly of the Kirk. James for some time refused to listen to them, but on Patrick Galloway assuring him that matters should be so managed that all should go right, he consented.

He then kept his Whitsuntide in the English fashion, with all his crouching prelates and courtiers around him; and afterwards took his way homeward, in the full persuasion that he had succeeded in his object. Time told a very different tale; nor was he himself long in perceiving that, though he had overawed, he had not subdued the sturdy Scottish clergy. Scarcely had he reached England when he learned that the Scots, both clergy and laity, were loud in denouncing the administration of the Eucharist in private houses as a remnant of Popery; the revival of the festivals of Christmas as the return to the ancient Saturnalia; and of those of Easter and Whitsuntide as the renewal of the feasts of the Jews. And on the 24th of November the ministers, in their assembly at St. Andrews, confirmed none of the Five Articles except that of the administration of the Sacrament at the houses of the sick, provided that the sick person first took an oath that he or she did not expect to recover. James was highly enraged. He ordered the observance of the Five Articles to be commanded by proclamation, and withdrew the promised augmentations of stipend. Nor did the king give way in the slightest degree. The next year he managed the Assembly so far, through Lord Binning, as to carry the Articles by a majority of eighty-six against forty-one; and in 1621, three years later, he obtained an Act of Parliament enforcing these Articles on the repugnant spirit of the people. Dr. Laud, whose name we now meet for the first time, afterwards to become so notorious, even urged James to go further lengths; but his fatal advice was destined to act with more force on the next generation.

Whilst James's hand was in, however, he hit upon another mode of incensing the Puritans, and showing his dislike of them. He had been extremely annoyed by the severity of the Presbyterian manners during his visit; and when, on returning, the Catholics of Lancashire presented to him petitions complaining of the strictness of the Puritans, who forbade those sports and recreations to which they had been accustomed on Sundays after service, adding that it drove men to the ale-house, a bright idea occurred to him, and he determined to publish a Book of Sports, encouraging the people on Sundays, after church, to play at running, leaping, archery, morris-dances, and to enjoy their church-ales and festivities as aforetime. These sports, however, were not to be indulged in by the recusants, nor any who had not attended Church in the morning. He also prohibited on Sundays bull and bear-baitings, interludes, and bowls; the last, probably, because they led to gambling. He restored all the jollity of may-poles and rush-bearings.

Many of the established clergy were conscientiously opposed to this mode of spending the Sunday, which appeared to them to savour greatly of Papacy; but James persisted in his scheme, and not only published his Book of Sports, but ordered the bishops, each in his own diocese, to publish his ordinance regarding the Sunday amusements. Abbot, the Primate, is said to have steadfastly refused to read the book in his own church at Croydon, but the other bishops complied. Laud was zealous in its promulgation, and in after years roused the stern and undaunted spirit of the reformers by recommending the revival of the Book to Charles I.

In Ireland the same system had been pursued by James from the commencement of his reign, of endeavouring to force the consciences of his subjects into the mould of his own ideas. On the death of Elizabeth the Irish had openly resumed the Catholic worship in most of the South of Ireland. Mountjoy, the Lord-Deputy, issued a proclamation for its immediate suppression; but the fear of the old lioness of a queen being removed, they treated his orders with contempt and defiance. Mountjoy marched down upon them, and compelled submission at the point of the bayonet, and then passed over to England, having with him the two great chiefs, Tyrone and O'Donnell, with a number of their followers.

These chieftains being well received by James, Tyrone being restored to his honours and estates, and O'Donnell created Earl of Tyrconnel, the Irish conceived wonderful hopes of the clemency and liberality of James. They sent a deputation to join the two earls in petitioning for the full enjoyment of their religion, but they found themselves grievously deceived. James declared that he would never consent to anything of the kind, but so long as he had a hundred men left, he would fight to the death to put down so idolatrous a worship. In his anger he committed four of the delegates to the Tower, where he kept them three months; and this practice of committing Irish deputies to prison for daring to present petitions on such subjects, became his regular practice.

The British Solomon never relaxed his war upon the religion of his subjects, if it were not of the same colour and shape as his own, so long as breath was left in him. It was in his eyes akin to the sin against the Holy Ghost to differ from or doubt the infallibility of his wisdom, for he deemed himself, according to his open avowal, a god upon earth. In 1605, two years only after ascending the throne of England, he issued a proclamation, commanding all Catholic priests to quit Ireland on pain of death; and he commanded all officers, magistrates, and chief citizens of Dublin to attend the Established Church, or suffer the fine of twenty pounds a month, and moreover, imprisonment. The nobility prayed to be permitted the exercise of their religion, but the ill-fated presenters of the petition were thrown into the Castle of Dublin, and their spokesman, Sir Patrick Barnewell, was sent over to England, and incarcerated in the Tower.

James now hit on a bold scheme for breaking down the clanship of Ireland, and so weakening the opposition of the people to his despotic will. He ordered all possessors of lands to bring in their titles to commissioners appointed for the purpose, on the promise that they should receive them again in a more valid and advantageous form. As, from the disturbed state of the country for ages past, many of these titles were defective, the landowners accepted the offer in good faith, but they found that the commissioners, instead of returning them of the same value, and bearing the same conditions, only returned them freehold titles of such lands as were in their own hands. All such lands as were in the hands of tenants, were made over to these tenants, only subject to the rent charges and dues which they had formerly paid. Thus the great bulk of the tenantry of Ireland was freed from its dependence on the will of the chief _in capite_, and now set him at naught. But though the power of the chiefs was broken, the commonalty showed no more inclination to adhere to a Government which persecuted them on account of their faith. They were now more at liberty, and readier than ever to follow some bold and defiant leader who promised them protection and vengeance on their tyrants. The great lords, thus tricked out of their hereditary rights, were converted into deadly enemies of the English Government.

Tyrone and Tyrconnel, on taking leave of the English Court to return to Ireland, professed extreme gratitude for the kindness of their reception, but in reality they were full of the most hostile sentiments. They looked on this transfer of their seigneurial rights as a measure intended to sever their vassals from them, and thus to subjugate the whole island to the yoke of the English hierarchy. No sooner did they land in Ireland, than Richard Nugent, Lord Delvin, invited them to meet him at his Castle of Maynooth. They unanimously agreed that the destruction of the hereditary faith of Ireland was planned, and they bound themselves by oath to act together for its defence.

Two years later, intelligence was gathered by some one at Brussels, in the service of the archduke, that Tyrone had renewed his relations with the Court of Spain; and, in order to decoy him into England, a pretender to a large extent of his lands was set up, and both parties were summoned over to have the cause tried before the Privy Council. Tyrone, aware of the design, avoided the snare by sending an attorney with full powers to act in his behalf. This stratagem did not succeed. Tyrone received from the Lord-Deputy information that his presence would be necessary in London to defeat the pretensions of his opponent. Tyrone, feigning to comply, only solicited a delay of a month, in order to settle his affairs and raise money for his journey and sojourn at Court. The request being acceded to, he escaped in a vessel sent on purpose from Dunkirk, with two of his sons and nephew, accompanied by Tyrconnel, with his son, and Lord Dungannon, his brother, with thirty of their retainers, and reached in a few days Quillebeque in Normandy.

On the discovery of the escape of these nobles, James was greatly alarmed, believing that they had gone to Spain to join the Armada which during the summer had been collecting in the Spanish ports, and to conduct it to Ireland. The news of their real resort abated his fears. He demanded their delivery from France, and then from the Netherlands, whither they betook themselves, describing them as traitors, and men of mean birth, who had been merely ennobled for purposes of State. He accused them of an intention to excite a rebellion, and returning to Ireland with foreign confederates, to put to death all Irishmen of English descent. The Court of Brussels declined to give up men exiled only on account of their religion, and admitted them into the Spanish army of Brabant. Tyrone himself proceeded to Rome, where the King of Spain allowed him a pension of six hundred crowns per month, and the Pope one hundred.

Active search was made in Ireland for the accomplices of the fugitives; many were arrested in Ulster, some were sent over for trial to England. Lord Delvin, with the eldest son of Tyrone, and Sir Christopher St. Lawrence, were secured and lodged in Dublin Castle. Delvin was tried and condemned as a traitor, but he escaped on the morning fixed for his execution; and no trace of him could be found till he suddenly appeared at the English Court, and throwing himself on his knees before the king, presented such a list of real wrongs inflicted on himself and his father, as compelled James to pardon him and to make him amends by creating him Earl of Westmeath; a clemency, as it proved, well bestowed, and which might have taught the king a more successful way to secure obedience and loyalty from his subjects, than those which he unhappily pursued.

Another Irish chief, O'Dogherty of Inishowen, having received a mortal insult from Paulet, the Governor of Derry, surprised him at table, and by the aid of his followers succeeded in killing him and five others. The avengers captured alive Hart, the governor of the Fortress of Culmore, and leading him to the gates of the Castle, called on the governor's wife to surrender the place, or see her husband murdered on the spot. Conjugal affection prevailed, and O'Dogherty found himself in possession of the stronghold. Possessed by this means of arms and ammunition, O'Dogherty marched with a strong force to Derry, and received the submission of the castle and town. The hopes of the exiles were wonderfully raised by so unexpected an event. They despatched messengers instructing O'Dogherty to hold the place, if possible, till their arrival with foreign aid; but after two unsuccessful attacks, the place was evacuated on the approach of Wingfield, the marshal of the camp, and O'Dogherty fled to the mountains. There, in the month of June, 1608, he was accidentally discovered, and shot.

The rebellion of these great chiefs, by throwing into the hands of the Crown an immense territory, suggested to James the planting of a new English Colony. Undeterred by the failure of Elizabeth's plantation of Ulster, he proceeded to divide the confiscated region, which included nearly the whole of the northern counties of Cavan, Fermanagh, Armagh, Derry, Tyrone, and Tyrconnel, amounting to two millions of acres, into four great divisions. Two of these were again divided into lots of one thousand acres each, a third into lots of fifteen hundred acres, and the fourth into lots of two thousand acres. The two thousand acre lots were appropriated to a class of men called "undertakers and servitors," adventurers of capital from England and Scotland, with the civil and military officers of the Crown. The lesser lots went amongst these and the natives of the province also; but the natives were only to receive their lots in the plains and open country, not in the hills and fastnesses, where they might become formidable to Government. The possessors were bound to pay a mark a year for every sixty acres, and the lesser ones besides to take the Oath of Supremacy, and engage to admit no recusant as tenant.

By these means some hundred thousand acres were planted; but whole districts in the hills were never divided at all, whilst many of the undertakers managed to get immensely more land than they had any right to. It was at this time (1611) that the scheme, already mentioned, of creating baronets was proposed to James by Sir Anthony Shirley, as a means of raising money for the support of the army in Ulster. James caught eagerly at the idea, coined upwards of one hundred thousand pounds out of it, but neither sent any of the money to Ireland, nor gave a handsome gratuity to Shirley for the suggestion, as he promised.

After these measures, James ventured to call a Parliament in Ireland, in 1613, the first for seven-and-twenty years. He wanted money, and he wanted also to enact new laws. But the Catholics were naturally apprehensive of these intended laws, for the whole of James's policy went to crush their religion out of the majority of the inhabitants, and impose on them his own model church. So little had this shallow sovereign profited by the lessons of history, that he expected to convert a whole nation by the sword and confiscation. But Ireland had by all former English monarchs, down to Elizabeth, been taught to regard the Pope as the lord paramount of the island; it was a doctrine that secured the obedience of the people under all their oppressions. But since Elizabeth had separated from the Catholic Church, and stood excommunicated by the pontiff, this maxim, so convenient before, was become extremely inconvenient. To the political causes of discontent was now added the far more irritating one of violated religious faith, which has continued till our time.

Under these circumstances the Lord-Deputy summoned the Parliament, and soon found that, though he had a majority of more than twenty Protestants, the spirit of the Catholics was such that he did not dare to proceed. Since the former Parliament, no less than seventeen new counties and forty new boroughs had been created, and these had been filled by men devoted to the measures of the Crown; the boroughs, the Catholics complained, had been put into the hands of attorneys' clerks and servants, and they expected to find on the projected new plantations only evil-disposed persons, ready to insult and injure the old inhabitants. They objected to many of the returns; they complained that obsolete statutes had been revived for the purposes of oppression; that Catholics of noble birth were excluded from posts of honour; that they were expelled from the magistracy; that they were forbidden to educate their children abroad; that Catholic barristers were not permitted to practise; that Catholic citizens were excluded from all influence in the corporations; and that the whole community was subjected to fines, excommunications, and punishments, which spread poverty and misery over the island.

The Lord-Deputy prorogued the impracticable assembly, and both parties appealed to the king. The Catholics sent as deputies the Lords Gormansbury and Dunboyne, and two knights and two barristers to plead their cause. The expense of the mission was defrayed by a general collection, which was made in spite of a severe proclamation against it. James received them at first graciously, but his anger soon broke out when he found them impervious to his controversial eloquence; and, as usual, he threw two of them into prison--Luttrel into the Fleet, and Talbot into the Tower. He soon had Talbot before the Star Chamber, and strictly interrogated him on the point of loyalty to the Crown, and he severely reprimanded the whole deputation on the same ground; but Lord Delvin on his knees declared that he would ever be faithful to the king as his rightful liege, yet that nothing should ever induce him to abandon his religion. James dismissed them, after having appointed a commission of inquiry regarding the representatives of the new Irish boroughs, which decided that none of the four boroughs incorporated after the writs were issued had a right to sit that Session.

As to the religious grievances, no concession was made, and scarcely had the deputies reached home, when a proclamation appeared ordering all the Catholic clergy to quit Ireland on pain of death. When Parliament met again in Dublin, in 1615, there was an outward air of conciliation; the two parties avoided the grand subjects of discord, except that both Houses joined in a petition that Catholic barristers might be permitted to plead. The attainders of Tyrone, Tyrconnel, and O'Dogherty were confirmed, as well as the plantation of Ulster, and all distinctions between the two races of the Irish--that is, the native Irish and the Anglo-Irish--were abolished by statute, and a liberal subsidy was obtained.

The conciliatory air did not long continue. The Lord-Deputy Chichester made a cautious attempt to enforce the fines for absence from church, beginning with a few timid persons in each county, whose compliance might influence others. In 1623, Lord Falkland, then Lord-Deputy, repeated the proclamation ordering all Catholic priests to leave the kingdom on pain of death; but they only retired into the mountains and morasses and defied his authority. James saw that it was useless to hope for success in his scheme of crushing out Catholicism, till he had planted the whole island after the Ulster fashion, and this was set about in good earnest. Commissions were issued for the examination of all grants and titles, and, by the most iniquitous proceedings, hardly a single foot of land was exempted from the claim of forfeiture to the Crown. It was found that the proprietors of the vast counties of Connaught, Galway, and Clare, had been induced to surrender their titles to Elizabeth, on condition that they should receive fresh ones, and that they had paid three thousand pounds for the enrolment of these titles, but had never got them. On this discovery James was advised to claim the whole island, with the exception of the small portion which he had himself planted; but the owners declared on all hands that they would defend their lands with their swords rather than admit such a claim; and James preferred getting a sum of money. His pretensions were commuted for a double annual rent and a fine of ten thousand pounds. He, however, proceeded to plant the coast between Dublin and Wexford, then the counties of Leitrim and Longford, and finally Westmeath, and King's and Queen's Counties. In this business all law and justice were set aside. James gave orders that three-fourths of the lands should be settled on the original proprietors, but no regard was paid to this. Few of the old possessors obtained above a quarter of their lands again, and many were stripped of every acre which they had inherited from their fathers. Whole septs were removed to the parts most distant from their native localities. Seven such septs were transported from Queen's County to King's, and menaced with instant death by martial law if they dared return. Sir Patrick Crosby received the seigniory of Tarbert, on condition that he leased out one-fourth of it to those unhappy exiles, but very few of them got anything; and, in a word, Carte declares that the injustice and cruelty then committed are scarcely to be paralleled in the history of any age or country. At the same time, the north of Ireland, hitherto a mere wilderness, began immediately to assume an appearance of prosperity.

Such was the condition of Ireland as left by James. He imagined that he had pacified it; it was only the sullen lull before the storm which burst forth in the days of his successor, with a fury only the more terrible from its temporary delay.

During the king's absence in Scotland, Bacon had shown such arrogance in the Council, that he had disgusted everybody. He had appeared to imagine himself king, took up his quarters in Whitehall, and gave audiences in the great Banqueting-house at Whitehall. Mr. Secretary Winwood was so incensed at his presumption that he quitted the Council Chamber, declaring, that he would not enter it again till the king's return; and he wrote at once an account of Bacon's proceedings, assuring the king that it was high time that he returned, for his throne was already occupied. The vain, foolish conduct of the Lord Keeper was watched by an eye which owed him no favour, and a spirit smarting with envy, which was relentless in his revenge. Coke, by offending the favourite, lost his position, but he now saw a way to turn this opposition to Buckingham against Bacon. Buckingham, since his rising into favour, had taken care to promote the fortunes of his friends and relatives. He had cast his eyes on the daughter of the fallen Chief Justice Coke, by Lady Hatton, the widow of Queen Elizabeth's Chancellor; this young lady, who was likely to have a large fortune from her mother, he determined to obtain for his brother John Villiers, a sickly and nearly idiotic youth. Coke, who despised the favourite, and was at feud with him respecting the already mentioned patent place at Court, opposed the match, which was agreeable neither to the young lady nor her mother. But when Coke found himself deprived of his office, and his rival, Bacon, advanced, he bethought himself that by the means of his daughter he had the power of regaining the goodwill of the favourite, and pulling down the arrogant Lord Keeper. Before Buckingham had left for Scotland, Coke had had a private interview with him, in which he agreed to consent to the marriage on condition of regaining his honours and position in the Council and on the Bench.

During the absence of the Court in Scotland, and while Bacon was in the full tide of his assumed greatness, he discovered this compact, which boded him nothing but destruction. Without delay he incited the Lady Hatton, who was in almost everything violently opposed to her husband, to make haste and secure her daughter by secreting her with herself in the house of Sir Edward Withipole near Oxford, and by contracting her in marriage to Henry de Vere, Earl of Oxford, for whom the young lady really entertained a regard. Coke, enraged at this flight, and at the attempt to marry his daughter contrary to his own plans, applied for a search-warrant to enter the house where she was secreted. Bacon refused it, but Winwood was only too happy to grant it. Coke, supported by twelve armed men, made a forcible entry and carried away his daughter. On this Bacon procured the new Attorney-General, Yelverton, to file an information against Coke in the Star Chamber for a breach of the peace. Bacon also wrote to the king and the favourite in Scotland, representing to Buckingham that it was by no means to his honour or interest to ally his family to that of Coke, a fallen, disgraced man, and disliked of the king, especially as much better matches might be found. To James he represented the trouble which Coke had given to his majesty, his fondness for opposing the king's wishes, and the disturbances there had been in the kingdom and courts of justice so long as Coke had been in power. Sir Francis added that now everything was quiet, and that his majesty knew that he had in him an officer always anxious to do his will.

The answer of the king struck him at once to the earth. The great philosopher was not aware how far the compact with Coke had really gone; and when he read the king's letter, reprimanding his presumption, accompanied by another from Buckingham, in which he rated him for his officious meddling, and telling him that the same hand which had made him could unmake him, he saw the gulf into which he had plunged. At once he wrote off to both monarch and minion, imploring the humblest pardon for this unworthy offence, which he would now do all in his power to wipe away. Accordingly, he stopped the proceedings before the Council and in the Star Chamber against Coke, and assured Lady Hatton and her friends that he could not assist them in a course so opposed to the wishes of the young lady's father.

On the return of the Court, Bacon hastened to pay his homage to the proud favourite; but he was then made to feel how much it is in the power of a base and little-souled man in favour, to humiliate the most gigantic mind when it forgets to be submissive. The great renovator of science, the proud and vaunting Lord Keeper, was made to wait for two whole days in the lobby of the upstart. This is Weldon's account of it:--"He attended two days at Buckingham's chamber, being not admitted to any better place than the room where trencher-scrapers and lackeys attended, there sitting upon an old wooden chest, amongst such as for his baseness were only fit for his companions, although the honour of his place did merit far more respect, with his purse and Seal lying by him on that chest. Myself told a servant of my Lord of Buckingham, it was a shame to see the purse and Seal of so little value or esteem in his chamber, though the carrier without it merited nothing but scorn, being worst amongst the basest. But the servant told me they had command it must be so. After two days he had admittance. At his first entrance he fell down flat at the duke's foot, kissing it, and vowing never to rise till he had his pardon; and thus was he again reconciled. And since that time so very a slave to the duke and all that family, that he durst not deny the command of the meanest of the kindred, nor yet oppose anything. By which you see a base spirit is even most concomitant with the proudest mind; and surely, never so many brave parts, and so base and abject a spirit, tenanted together in any one earthen cottage, as in this one man."

Buckingham condescended to forgive the suppliant Lord Keeper: the projected marriage was accomplished, and Bacon soon after--that is, on the 4th of January, 1618--was raised to the dignity of Lord Chancellor, with a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year and the title of Baron Verulam. For, provided he threw no obstacle in the way of the marriage, both James and Buckingham preferred his pliancy to the sturdy spirit of Coke.

The consequences of this forced and unnatural marriage were as deplorable as the means of effecting it were vile. The brother of Villiers was created Viscount Purbeck; but no title could give him a sound body or a healthy intellect. It was not long before he was pronounced utterly mad, was shut up in an asylum, and Buckingham took possession of Lady Purbeck's property under pretence of managing it for her and Lord Purbeck, but spent it for his own purposes; and Coke's daughter, outraged in all her feelings as a woman and her rights as a subject, became a degraded and abandoned character.

Buckingham now reigned supreme at Court. He had rapidly risen from a simple country youth into a baron, viscount, earl, and marquis; he was a member of the Privy Council, Knight of the Garter, had been a Master of the Horse, and was now Lord High Admiral; the Earl of Nottingham--the brave old Howard, hero of the Armada--having been compelled to resign to make way for him. He and his mother disposed of all places about Court, in the Church, in the courts of law, and in the Government. Peers, prelates, and men of all degrees courted humbly his favour, and paid him large sums of money for the places they sought, or agreed to annuities out of their salaries and emoluments. The king seemed to rejoice in the wealth which flowed in on his favourite from these corrupt services, and could not bear him out of his sight.

Let us take Weldon's account of this state of things:--"And now Buckingham, having the Chancellor or Treasurer, and all great officers, his very slaves, swells in the height of pride, and summons up all his country kindred, the old countess providing a place for them to learn to carry themselves in a Court-like garb." The old countess, as Weldon calls her, was far from old, but a woman yet in her prime, and of singular beauty and notorious wickedness. She was another Elizabeth Woodville in looking out for rich heirs and heiresses, and marrying her kin to them. The brothers, half-brothers, cousins of Buckingham, were all matched to rich women, and the women were matched to the eldest sons of earls, barons, and men of large estate. And where there was no title, such was soon conferred. The madman that they gave to Coke's daughter, as we have seen, was made Lord Purbeck; another brother was created Earl of Anglesea. Fielding, who married Buckingham's sister, was made Earl of Denbigh, and his brother Earl of Desmond. Cranfield, who married a female relative, was made Earl of Middlesex. But the most shameful case of all, perhaps, was that of Williams, Dean of Westminster, a paramour of the countess's, who was made Bishop of Lincoln, and allowed to retain not only the deanery of Westminster, but the rectories of Dinam, Waldgrave, Grafton, and Peterborough; the prebends of Asgarbie and Nonnington, besides other dignities; so that, says Heylin, he was a perfect diocese in himself, being bishop, dean, prebendary, residentiary, and parson, and these all at once. Other livings and bishoprics were sold as highly as these were freely given. Fotherby of Salisbury paid three thousand five hundred pounds for his see, and all other dignities and benefices in the Church were equally at the disposal of this upstart and his venal, lascivious mother. "There were books of rates," says Weldon, "on all offices, bishoprics, and deaneries in England, that could tell you what fines and pensions were to pay." He adds, "that Buckingham's female relatives were numerous enough to have peopled any plantation. So that King James, that naturally in former times hated women, had his lodgings replenished with them, and all of the kindred, and little children did run up and down the king's lodgings like rabbits startled out of their burrows. Here was a strange change, that the king, who formerly would not endure his queen and children in his lodgings, now you would have judged that none but women frequented them. Nay, this was not all; but the kindred had all the houses about Whitehall, as if bulwarks and flankers to that citadel."

Buckingham himself, in time, seemed to clothe himself with half the offices in the country. He became Warden of the Cinque Ports, chief justice in eyre of all the parks and forests south of the Trent, Master of the King's Bench Office, High Steward of Westminster, and Constable of Windsor Castle. In his person he was lavish and showy even to tawdriness. He was skilled in dancing, and therefore kept the Court one scene of balls and masques. He had his clothes trimmed at even an ordinary dance with great buttons of diamond, with diamond hatbands, cockades, and earrings; "he was yoked with manifold ropes and knots of pearl; in short, he was accustomed to be manacled, fettered, and imprisoned in jewels."

But one of the most interesting and painful events of the reign of James, and one which does him little credit, now occurred. Sir Walter Raleigh, deprived (as we have seen, to gratify the favourite Carr) of his beautiful estate of Sherborne in Dorsetshire--"which he had beautified with orchards, gardens, and groves, of much variety and delight"--had remained in the Tower from the time of his trial in 1603, that is, thirteen years. His captivity was rendered less severe by the presence in the Tower of other prisoners of intelligence, and, more than all the rest, of the Earl of Northumberland, who gathered around him in his prison men of science and literature, and thus was instrumental in converting his cell into a palace of knowledge and refined delight. Northumberland was another of those men who revelled in learning, whom a king really wise and learned would have rejoiced to honour. But James's love was not a love of learning or literature on its own account, it was a love of himself. It was the vanity of passing for a sagacious and learned king which he possessed, and not the sagacity and the learning themselves. Therefore, so far from cherishing science and learning, and loving the possessor of them, James was too shallow to comprehend the one, and so egotistical that he hated the other. Northumberland had been in prison ever since the year of the Gunpowder Plot, 1605, eleven years, a victim to the suspicions of the king and the tyranny of the Star Chamber, for no participation in the plot was ever proved against him. Amongst his visitants and pensioners were the most profound mathematicians of the age, Allen, Hariot, Warner--"the Atlantes of the mathematical world," Burchill--the celebrated Greek and Hebrew scholar, and other noted characters. Amongst them Sir Walter found the pleasure of cultivating inquiries which his busy public and Court life had before kept unknown to him. He commenced a series of chemical experiments, and the celebrated Lucy Hutchinson, who was the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the Tower, in the preface to her interesting life of her husband, Colonel Hutchinson, says:--"Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. Ruthin, being prisoners in the Tower, and addicting themselves to chemistry, my mother suffered them to make their rare experiments at her cost, partly to comfort and divert the poor prisoners, and partly to gain the knowledge of their experiments and the medicines, to help such poor people as were not able to seek physicians."

In these chemical inquiries, Sir Walter imagined that he had discovered a universal panacea. The queen in an illness had taken it, and appeared cured by it, and afterwards, as we have seen, tried it in the case of Prince Henry, but without effect.

Sir Walter next turned his attention to history, and commenced a History of the World, a gigantic undertaking, but no doubt one that offered great consolation to the mind of a prisoner for life, from the very fact of its immensity, thus promising to him a constant forgetfulness of his captivity, and a busy discursiveness amid the peoples of the whole globe. Such men as Burchill, who was not only a great classical scholar but a distinguished Latin poet, could furnish him with books and translations, by which means he has displayed so vast an acquaintance with Greek and Rabbinical writers. Raleigh commenced his History for the instruction of Prince Henry, who had a high regard for the author, but the death of that prince in 1612, gave a check to the undertaking, and all that Raleigh has completed extends from the Creation to about a century and a half before the Christian era.

The fall of Somerset and the rise of Buckingham awoke new hopes of liberty in Raleigh. His friends made zealous applications to the favourite, which for a time produced little effect because the true persuasive with the greedy Villiers family was not applied. In the meantime, however, Raleigh managed to interest Secretary Winwood in a grand scheme which he had for discovering and working gold mines in Guiana. Raleigh, as our readers are aware, was of a romantic and adventurous turn. The Admirals Drake, Hawkins, and Frobisher, with whom he had had the honour of defeating the Grand Armada, had brought home immense treasures from the Spanish and Portuguese territories of South America. Raleigh himself had been engaged in the scheme of settling Virginia in North America, in the year 1584, when he procured a patent from Elizabeth--a copy of one granted still earlier to his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert--with full power to discover and settle any heathen lands not already in the possession of any Christian prince. In consequence, he had equipped various expeditions to the coast of Virginia, which, however, had all proved failures, and Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who conducted one of them, lost his life at sea. Sir Walter's enterprises, which had cost him much money, were immediate failures--failures to himself and his associates, but ultimate successes to the country, for they led to the settlement of that great Federated Republic of Northern America.

But still earlier, in 1595, he had made a voyage to Guiana. The glories of Drake and the other piratical admirals, and the wondrous legend of the golden empire of Guiana, with its inconceivable affluence, and the reported splendours of its capital, Manoa, called by the Spaniards El Dorado, or the golden city, inflamed his imagination. He sailed thither, touching at Trinidad, as if on his way to Virginia; and the Spaniards, deluded by this belief, entered into friendly relations and bartered various commodities with him. But suddenly Raleigh, watching his opportunity, fell on the garrison, killed the guard, and secured the person of Berrio the governor, whom he carried away as guide to Guiana, Berrio having already settled a colony there. This transaction, which was in the true spirit of Drake and the rest, who acted in those regions as if the Spaniards were at war, though they were at entire peace with England, was one of the charges afterwards brought against him. To this Raleigh replied that Berrio, at Trinidad, had formerly made prisoners of eight Englishmen, and that to leave him at his back when he was about to ascend the Orinoco, was to have been an ass. Whether the story of the eight Englishmen was true or not, it was clearly no business of Raleigh's, and the real motive was partly the last assigned--to secure so dangerous a person as Berrio, and at the same time so valuable a guide. In fact, Raleigh, with all his genius, was never renowned for very scrupulous ideas of right and wrong, and shared in all the loose maritime notions of the age.

Thus provided, he sailed for the Orinoco and advanced up it three hundred miles in boats. He seemed to have heard many wonderful rumours of gold mines, and cities built of gold and silver and embossed with precious stones; but he discovered no magnificent Manoa, with pinnacles blazing with diamonds and rubies, nor any gold mines, only signs of gold in the mountains beyond the Spanish town of St. Thomas. He gave out to the natives that he was come to relieve them of the Spaniards, and by their assistance explored the country for a month, when the waters of the mighty Orinoco rose so suddenly and with such impetuosity, that they were carried down at the peril of their lives to their ships.

On his return, Raleigh, although he brought no riches, brought marvellous descriptions of them. Though he had seen nothing but a pleasant country and friendly natives, he did not hesitate to publish the most amazing stories to draw fresh colleagues to the enterprise. He described the country and the climate in colours of heaven, and as for its riches, "the common soldier," he said--detailing the discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful empire of Guiana, with relations of the great and golden city, Manoa--"shall here fight for gold, and pay himself, instead of pence, with plates of half a foot broad, whereas he breaks his bones in other wars for provant and penury. Those commanders and chieftains that shoot at honour and abundance, shall find here more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with treasure, than either Cortez found in Mexico, or Pizarro in Peru."

Probably Raleigh believed all this himself, on the faith of the natives; but though several expeditions went out nothing of the kind was discovered. Yet these failures in no degree abated the enthusiasm of Raleigh. He represented to objectors that the adventurers sent out were ignorant alike of the locality and of the art of conciliating the natives. Were _he_ permitted to go, he would make Guiana to England what Peru was to Spain.