evening Bow-bell rang, and then the gates were locked and barred, and armed men watched by them till morning. The shops in the streets were open, like booths, and at every shop there hung a picture or an image, by way of sign. Old London Bridge was the only bridge over the river; it had shops and houses on each side of it, and there was always a ghastly sight to be seen there,-the heads and skulls of men executed for treason. For during hundreds of years it was the custom to expose the heads of traitors on London Bridge, and leave them there to moulder and decay.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, new mines of copper and other minerals were discovered; and the first brass manufactory was set up in England. The first paper-mill also was erected, at Dartford, in Kent.

The books written by the men who lived in Queen Elizabeth's time are still the instruction and delight of Englishmen. Not to burden our pages with too many names, three only of these great writers shall be mentioned here,-Hooker, Shakspeare, and Francis Bacon.

Bacon was the son of the wise statesman, Sir Nicholas Bacon; he was even wiser than his father, but not good, like him; and in the next reign, after he had been made Lord Chancellor, he fell into sad disgrace, for taking bribes to pervert the course of justice.

The great East India Company was founded in the reign of Elizabeth. It was, at first, only for trade to India and China, but it has long ruled all India, and was by far the most wealthy and powerful body of merchants in the world. Elizabeth held in great

DESPOTIC POWER OF ELIZABETH.

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esteem the chief of her London merchants, Sir Thomas Gresham; she called him "my merchant," and visited him like a friend. And when Gresham built his great Exchange, and made a present of it to his fellowcitizens, the queen went in state to open it, and gave it the name of the Royal Exchange.

With all the wisdom and the good qualities of this great sovereign, she had some great follies. One was that she liked her courtiers always to address her as if she were young and beautiful, even after she had become quite an old woman. And she was very fond of amusing herself with the offers of marriage made to her by foreign princes, and would go on exchanging letters and presents with her suitors, when she had not the least intention of marrying any of them. "I will have here but one mistress, and no master,” she said to Leicester, one day, when he spoke to her of marriage: and she was indeed the one mistress of her kingdom.

We have already heard that in the reign of Henry the Seventh, the kings of England began to be more powerful than they had ever been before, because neither house of parliament opposed them. Elizabeth was the last sovereign who possessed this great power; the parliament was already wishing for more authority, but the queen governed so wisely that neither Lords nor Commons thought fit to resist her will. She exacted strict obedience in matters of religion as well as in the affairs of the state, and established a tribunal, called the Court of High Commission, to inquire into offences against the laws of the church. In time, this court became as oppressive and created as much discontent as that of the

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Star Chamber, but not in the reign of Elizabeth, She was the last of the Tudor sovereigns, who had governed England since the accession of Henry the Seventh, in 1485, a period of one hundred and eighteen years.

CHAPTER XLIX.

REIGN OF JAMES I.-JAMES, FIRST KING OF GREAT BRITAIN, 1603.STATE OF SCOTLAND. THE PRESBYTERIANS. THE ENGLISH PURITANS AND ROMAN CATHOLICS. THE GUNPOWDER PLOT, 1605.

(From 1603 to 1606.)

AT the death of Queen Elizabeth, the crown of England passed to the Scottish royal family of Stuart. James Stuart (who was James the Sixth of Scotland), the son of Mary Queen of Scots, and greatgrandson of Henry the Seventh's eldest daughter, Margaret, now became King James the First of England. And from this time our sovereigns have been the rulers of Great Britain, and not only of England and Wales.

After the accession of James the First, England and Scotland made no more war upon one another, but it was long before the people of the two countries learned to be as friendly as natives of the same island ought to have been. Scotland was then a poor and wild country, where the nobles were constantly quarrelling among themselves. If one Scottish gentleman received an affront from another, he summoned all his

The Court of the Star Chamber (see Chap. XXXI.) dealt with offences against the king, and the laws of the land. Since the time of Henry the Seventh, its powers had been gradually increasing It was permitted to inflict any punishment short of death.

friends and tenants, and made a little war of his own upon the offender, besieging his house, wasting his lands, and killing him if he could find an opportunity.

The farmers were called away from tilling the ground, to fight in the quarrels of their lords; and so Scotland remained barren and ill cultivated. Rich, fertile England looked down scornfully upon its sister kingdom; and Englishmen, who were proud of the good order of their country, and of the high place they had won for themselves among the nations of Europe, were angry at the thought of the Scots claiming to be equal with them. The Scots were proud of their country too; and they were very much afraid that they would lose their consequence as a nation now that their king had a richer and more powerful kingdom.

They were jealous, also, lest their laws or their church should be interfered with. The Scottish reformers had abolished the government of the church by bishops, and had cast away other practices which have descended to us from the first ages of Christianity. They called their church Presbyterian, and esteemed it the very best and purest in the world; and they spoke against our beautiful English liturgy almost as if it had been a service of idolaters. And the Scots were very much afraid that when they became one people with the English, England would try to make them have bishops and a liturgy.

King James had been used to talk as if he despised the Church of England; but the Scottish preachers had so often opposed his wishes, and even insulted him, that he had come to think it would be a good thing if they were governed by loyal, peaceable men,

like the English bishops. A great many of the puritans in England, who were like the Scottish Presbyterians in their notions of what a church ought to be, had been hoping that James would show them some favour. The Roman Catholics also looked for kindness at the hands of the new king, for he had treated the Scottish papists very mildly.

It would have been impossible to please both puritans and papists; for the puritans were of all men the most inclined to deal hardly with their popish fellowsubjects. James soon showed that he was not inclined to favour either party. He held a conference, at Hampton Court palace, with some of the leading puritans, and some of the bishops and clergy; and when he found that the puritans wished to alter the prayer-book to their liking, or not to use it at all, he entirely refused to allow them any such liberty. They objected to be governed by bishops; he told them what they really meant was,-" No Bishop, no King."

This conference had one good consequence; all parties were agreed that the English translations of the Bible needed to be corrected; and the king appointed fifty of the most learned divines in the kingdom to make a new version from the original languages. This work employed them during several years; and the result was our present English Bible, the most faithful and beautiful translation that has ever been made.

The laws against the Roman Catholics James allowed to remain in full force; and some of them, in their disappointment, made plots against the king. The first plot was hard to understand, for there were papists, puritans, and men of no religion in it. They