extract money in her time from the Parliament; but she really does appear to have extracted all that she could without endangering the peace of the realm, and was to the last in great pecuniary difficulties from suffering herself, as well as her people, weakly to be robbed on all sides by the locusts and leeches of the court. There are also two facts which ought not to be overlooked, the moral condition of her court, and the condition of the country under her management. These are genuine and only tests of the genuine glory of a reign.

Old Harrison, a cotemporary, speaking in glowing terms of the accomplishments of the courtiers, male and female, and adding, that endeavours were not wanting to restrain vice and maintain decorum, says, "Would to God that the rest of their lives and conversations were correspondent to these gifts! for as our common courtiers, for the most part, are the best learned and endowed with excellent gifts, so are many of them the worst men, when they come abroad, that any man shall either hear or read of."* Other cotemporaries do not disguise the fact, that many of the females who formed the attendants of the virgin Queen, were as dissolute as their male associates. Warton, in his History of English Poetry, arrives at the same conclusion, namely, that their accomplishments appeared to have had no influence on their moral character. Roger Ascham gives a similar account. He says, indeed, "There were fair marks for youth to follow, but they were like marks out of a man's reach, too far off to shoot well at ;" and private letters of the time now published, describe the court as a place "where was little godliness and exercise of religion, but where all enormities reigned in the highest degree."+

The condition of the country at large was still worse. The whole energy of the government would seem to have been employed in its intrigues in Scotland for the destruction of Mary, and in wars in Ireland and the Netherlands; in persecuting Catholics and Puritans; in dividing the fruits of monopoly amongst hungry courtiers; and in putting down, not only all free opinion, but all learning and knowledge of religion. When the schools were closed, because, as Elizabeth declared, when the people got schooling they grew very stubborn, the funds engrossed by the courtiers, and one or two preachers were thought enough for a county, what was to be expected, but what actually took place. The whole land was covered by pauperism and beggary. From the moment that Henry VIII. had taken the property of the monasteries, the great stay and resource of the Ellis's Original Letters.

* Description of England,

poor, all that swarm of paupers, which the system of easy relief fostered by the Catholic church had raised, fell like hungry locusts on the country. There arose a struggle, which became perpetual through the whole dynasty of the Tudors, between the government and mendicity. The statute-book abounds with the most extraordinary accounts of the legions of idle and desperate people with which the land was covered, without any resource but beggary, or robbery, and with enactments for their suppression, ending in that famous one of 45th Elizabeth, which became the established poor-law of the kingdom; giving the poor, in fact, a legal claim for support on the country at large, in lieu of that third of the church property which had belonged to them, and out of which they had been ousted by Henry VIII. and the nobles. But previous to this last of the various bills passed, they were to be seized and set to work by any one who pleased. If they ran away, they might be seized again, and branded with the letter V on the breast, and adjudged as slaves for two years. If they ran away again, they should be chained, beaten, branded with S on the cheek, and made slaves for ever. All beggars' children might be seized and put apprentice without the consent of their parents. If they ran away, they should be likewise beaten, chained, &c., and made slaves till they were four and twenty years old. The enactment of 1547 ordered that, for once running away, they should be burned through the ear with a hole an inch wide; for the second offence, be adjudged felons; for the third, put to death. All these atrocities, however, did not succeed; paupers, beggars, and thieves grew and triumphed. Every part of the country was infested with strolling players, professors of phisiognomy, palmistry, &c.; jugglers, fortune-tellers, bearwards, fencers, mountebanks, minstrels, pedlars, linkers, and scholars of Oxford and Cambridge, as sturdy and importunate as any of them. The overwhelming extent of this torrent of disorder and crime, during the dynasty of the Tudors, may be learned from old Harrison. He tells us that Henry VIII. in the course of his reign hanged of robbers, thieves, and vagabonds, no fewer than seventy-two thousand; and that in the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth, a year seldom passed in which three or four hundred criminals were not sent to the gallows; and that this was a small part of the work of the law. Strype gives the statement of a justice of peace in Somersetshire that, in 1596, ninety persons were executed in that county alone; thirty-five burnt in the hand; thirtyseven whipped; one hundred and eighty-three others apprehended for robbery, theft, and other felonies; yet after all, the number of felonies committed in the county had been five times

the number of the persons brought to trial for them. This, by other statements, appears to have been the average condition of things. The magistrates, says the historian, were in fact overawed by the threats and confederate strength of these ruffians, and were deterred from putting the laws in force against them. Add to this, the legal murders, the persecutions, hangings, and fines for religion, and who will wish to have lived in the so much vaunted Elizabethan era? "Merry England," says Knight, in concluding the history of this reign, was then rather a terrible country to live in." The courtly and literary splendour which makes the merry pageant of the picture which it has spread before the imagination of us all, is set off, when the whole is uncovered, by no small force of contrast in the black barbaric gloom of the other parts.

66

CHAPTER XI.

WITH the reign of Elizabeth ends the first phasis of the second great era of the aristocracy of England. The nobles humbled on the one hand by the crown, but on the other not less than the crown itself, startled by the growing power of parliament and the middle classes, we shall now see creeping to the side of royalty against the people, and falling with it in the strife.

The change of dynasty which now took place, had the most auspicious effect on the progress of national liberty; not because the prince was more liberal, or the aristocracy more patriotic, but precisely because the family of the Stuarts had all the arbitrary disposition of the Tudors, without either their tact or their talent. The Tudors had been a bloody and iron-handed race; their dynasty had commenced in usurpation, and with the first of their line being, as he has been justly designated by a modern historian," a mean-souled Welshman. But with all their despotism and their crimes they had aimed at popularity. They were shrewd enough to know that the real sovereignty lay with the people, if they chose to exert it, and therefore, however much they sought to annihilate this sovereignty on certain and essential occasions, they paid a feigned homage to it. Lord Thomas Howard, in a letter to Sir John Harrington, soon after James came to the English throne, said, "Your Queen Elizabeth, did talk of her subjects' love and affection, and in truth she aimed

well; our king talketh of his subjects' fear and subjection, and herein I think he doth well too, so long as it holdeth good."

Elizabeth had always men of the highest abilities about her, however cold-blooded and unprincipled as ministers, and a glory was cast over her court and reign, spite of many horrible practices and transactions, by the names and presence of some of the most illustrious personages of our history, as Shakspeare, Sir Philip Sidney, Raleigh, Spenser, &c. But James, the first Stuart, was a ridiculous pedant, and a royal ass. He came into the kingdom such an object as had not for ages sate on our throne, and followed by a troop of hungry Scots, ready to tear him and the kingdom to pieces for wealth and honours. With the most inflated pretensions to absolutism and the divine right and supernatural glory of kings; he was in his own person as ludicrous and disgusting an object as his mother had been beautiful. He is described in no very attractive fashion by his countryman, Sir Walter Scott, in "The Fortunes of Nigel; " but his contemporaries represent themselves as overwhelmed with astonishment and disgust when they first saw him; "at the very unroyal person and behaviour of the new sovereign, whose legs were too weak to carry his body; whose tongue was too large for his mouth; whose eyes were goggle, rolling, and yet vacant; whose apparel was neglected and dirty; whose whole appearance and bearing was slovenly and ungainly, while his unmanly fears were betrayed by his wearing a thick wadded doublet, and by many other ridiculous precautions."

It was soon seen that he was at once a tyrant in principle, but luckily a coward in nature; a boaster and a sensualist, as poor as a rat, and without the slightest grace or tact to gild, as Elizabeth had done, arbitrary deeds with a sort of royal varnish of courtesy and good acting. He squandered money himself as fast as he got it; his favourites and followers seized on and squandered much more; he was a mighty hunter that hated the proper business of his government. He made the most reckless declarations of his unlimited power, in which he was encouraged and confirmed by base bishops and crown lawyers; and the Commons, who had now awoke, found him a famous subject to deal with. They stood and boldly bearded him to his face, while the aristocracy shrunk back in mean and slavish sequacity, and his reign became one of the most instructive periods to which we can revert in all our very instructive history, and prepared the way for the grand drama of the next reign. The profligacy of the king and the aristocracy stood up in impressive contrast with the

*Nuga Antiquæ.

dignity and patriotism of the people. Every step of the royal career was one of crime and shame; every attitude of the Commons assumed more and more the character of a grand consciousness of the national strength and right.

We will review the most prominent features of this reign separately; and first, for a slight glance at the style and language with which James entered England, and the courtly sycophancy with which he was received.

Cecil, son of the spider Burleigh, a son worthy of the father, who is said never to have loved or hated any one but with a selfish view, who spared no man in his malice if he could safely get him out of his way, and no meanness of adulation which could serve his purpose, had, aye before Elizabeth was dead, privately negotiated with James for his ascent to the throne; and all the other courtiers are described as looking solely to their own aggrandisement. These selfish ministers, therefore, sent off for James, and awaited his coming without taking or asking from him the slightest pledge for the liberties of the people, the privileges of Parliament, or for the many necessary reforms of abuses. James, on his part, could not move from Holyrood till they sent him money to put himself and family into decent clothes, and to pay the expenses of his journey. On his journey he advanced hunting and committing the strangest breaches of the constitution; amongst which, he hanged up without ceremony or trial, a cutpurse who was taken in the crowd at Newark assembled to see his entrance. When it was remarked to him that such acts were contrary to the laws, he exclaimed to the lords of his council-" Do I make the judges? Do I make the bishops? Then by God's wounds! I make what likes me, law and gospel!"

As he drew near London, the herds of greedy aspirants to his favour hurried out to meet him. One is nearly ready to weep tears of blood to see amongst the lowest stooping and grovelling of these grovellers, some of the finest intellects of the age and nation,—the gallant and accomplished Raleigh, and that great philosopher, but equally great and unprincipled time-server, Sir Francis Bacon. Raleigh, who had pretended to sigh under the dazzling glory of the charms of Elizabeth when she was a very hag of nearly seventy, now talked of her as a lady whom time had surprised," and made way for an able king.

James, on his part, went along showering titles on all that came near him, as if he had been fully sensible of the worthless things they were. Knighthood was a very weed which he plucked up from the way-sides and flung on almost every man's head that came to meet him on his journey. Before starting