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EMBASSY OF SIR THOMAS ROE.

[1616.

all the rivers of the world. The fourth is this, to entreat your majesty that you would vouchsafe to grant me your gracious pass, that I may travel into the country of Tartaria, to visit the blessed sepulchre of the Lord of the Corners; whose fame by reason of his wars and victories is published over the whole world: perhaps he is not altogether so famous in his own country of Tartaria as in England." We give this part of the oration of the eccentric traveller to indicate the vague impression which then prevailed in England of the grandeur of the Mogul rulers of India. † "The Lord of the Corners" had become popularly known by Marlowe's famous tragedy of Tamburlaine the Great." The successors of the shepherd-king had achieved a more permanent conquest of Hindostan than the remorseless warrior, who, having destroyed Delhi, and carried the terror of his name to the Ganges, was content to recross the Indus in the same year in which he had set out upon his march over the Ghur mountains from Samarkand. In another century, his descendant, Baber, having lost his own inherited dominion, founded a new empire in India. The fourth of that dynasty sat upon the Mogul throne when James granted his charter to the East India Company. In 1615 an English ambassador, sir Thomas Roe, was sent to the court of Agra; and there he was resident till 1619, a favourite with the emperor Jehangir, moving about with the jovial ruler, partaking his pleasures, and marvelling at the

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wealth that presented itself in so many tangible shapes, in the palaces where the disciples of Mohammed ruled as gods over the crouching tribes who lived under the Brahminical law. The ambassador of James came back, to tell the story

The Persian title of Tamerlane-Lord of the Corners of the world.

+ Coryat's "Commendations to his friends in England," dated from Agra, 1616, in "The Works of John Taylor, the Water-Poet," 1630, p. 81.

1616.]

THE MOGUL RULERS OF HINDOSTAN.

349

which others had less authoritatively told, of the riches that industry might win in that region of gold and pearls, of silk and ivory. Any project for conquering that region would then have appeared as wild as the scheme of Tamerlane, to cut a channel to unite the Mediterranean and the Red Sea,

"That men might quickly sail to India." *

Sir Thomas Roe had looked upon Jehangir riding upon an elephant in the streets of Agra, with a train of "twenty royal elephants for his own ascending, so rich that in precious stones and furniture they braved the sun;" and had marvelled, when "his greatest elephants were brought before him, some of which, being lord elephants, had their chains, bells, and furniture of gold and silver," how "they all bowed down before the king." He had beheld how the emperor's wives, "on their elephants, were carried like parakitoes half a mile behind him ;" and he had seen the closed palanquins of the female slaves, borne on men's shoulders, amidst crowds of mutes and eunuchs. He had been at the great huntings, where sport assumed the pomp of war-very different from the hunting-exercise of James at Royston and Theobalds. He had gazed at the vast cavalcades of armed horsemen, the long files of camels and mules, the thousands of servants, the "numbers numberless" of campfollowers, when the emperor went forth on a progress from one of the imperial cities. More than these barbaric splendours, he had looked upon the old gorgeous palaces of the earlier race of Pathan kings, of whose works it is said, "they built like giants, and finished like goldsmiths." The palace and mosque of Akbar, near Agra; the mosques and tombs of Delhi; the public buildings in every city where the characteristics of Saracenic and Hindoo architecture were often combined; the tasteful groups of domes and minarets; the open colonnades, the lofty gateways, the terraces, these were works of art rising up amidst the rich eastern vegetation, which would cause Whitehall and Nonsuch, St. Paul's and the abbey of Westminster, the old wooden houses of Cheapside and the brick mansions of the Strand, to be remembered as comparatively mean and tasteless. But the contrast must have been almost painful to those who beheld the power and wealth of England represented by a paltry factory at Surat, for the quiet possession even of which her sailors had to fight with the Portuguese. The wildest dream could not have pictured the palaces of the Moguls turned into English arsenals, and their polished marbles and flowered arabesques hidden beneath the whitewash characteristic of English taste. By no prophetic power could it have been imagined by one who, at the beginning of the seventeenth century had looked upon the glories of the Tartaric emperors, that, before the middle of the eighteenth century, the sovereignty which was to be carried forward under one magnificent ruler to an unequalled height of splendour and prosperity, should then fall to pieces by its own weight, and that many princes of the divided empire should become tributaries to "a Company of Christian merchants of a remote island of the Northern sea." § Even if a partial conquest of the Mogul tyrant and the Hindu slave had been thought possible by

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850

THE MOGUL RULERS OF HINDOSTAN.

[1616. those who had seen how the Spaniard had subdued and exterminated the descendants of the Incas, what enthusiast could have believed that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the race of the humble settlers of Surat would have obtained a far wider dominion than the greatest of these Moguls ; -that not only in their proudest seats, amidst the ruined palaces and the deserted mosques of Shah Jehan and Aurungzebe, the native races would have been disciplined in the military arts of Europe, but that they would become the instruments of bringing under one foreign dominion the Afghans and the Sikhs, the Rajpoots and the Mahrattas, who had shaken the foundations of the ancient empire. Who that then had seen how the victim of tyranny had his life trampled out when the despot nodded to his elephant ;-how the rulers sat under golden canopies and were clothed with jewelled silks, because they had an unlimited command over the property of all the industrious,-could have anticipated that a stern justice and a confiding toleration would extinguish the old dominion of robbery and fraud, throughout a region twelve times more extensive than that which the lawgivers inhabited, and six times more populous? If such a dream could have shown how the energy of our race might triumph over disunited barbarism, would not the dreamer wake

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to ask, will such a triumph be permanent,-will not the Moslem some day re-appear in the sanguinary pride of his oppression, and the Hindoo in the blind treachery of his superstition, to proclaim the dangers of an overweening confidence in the might of civilisation ?

1610.]

DISSOLUTION OF PARLIAMENT.

351

The strong remonstrance of the House of Commons, in 1610, against impositions upon merchandise, was not a solitary act of public spirit. They had stood up, session after session, to protest against the theories of the king that he was absolute; and to make him comprehend that there was a power superior to his arbitrary will. He had issued proclamations which assumed the character of laws; and they told him it was "the indubitable right of the people of this kingdom, not to be made subject to any punishment that shall extend to their lives, lands, bodies, or goods, other than such as are ordained by the common laws of this land, or the statutes made by their common consent in parliament." Whenever the king wanted a subsidy, the Commons immediately preferred a petition for redress of grievances. Cecil had a scheme for making the Crown to a great extent independent of parliament, by proposing that a fixed annual revenue of 200,000l. should be granted, on condition that the king should give up the right of purveyance, and the various profits derived from wardships and other branches of ancient prerogative. The session of 1610 was chiefly employed in negotiations for this object, which was termed," the great contract with his majesty ;" but nothing had been settled when parliament was prorogued in July. The courtiers thought that the adroitness of Cecil had prevailed over the doubts and suspicions of the Commons. "The little beagle," writes one, "hath run about, and brought the rest of the great hounds to a perfect tune." * When parliament met again in October, the Commons were out of humour. Not a grievance had been redressed, although a temporary subsidy had been granted in the expectation that some of the evils of which they had complained would have been removed or mitigated. In November, James had become tired of the word grievance. He would dissolve parliament. He had been patient, but "he cannot have asinine patience." He was for punishing those members who had uttered offensive speeches, some of which he thought amounted nearly to treason. The parliament was dissolved on the 9th of February, 1611, after having sat nearly seven years.

In the first session of 1610, the Treasurer communicated to the Lords the intelligence of the murder of Henry IV. of France. Cecil said that this king was an assured friend to their sovereign and to this realm; and an especial defence and wall between the reformed religion and its opponents in Christendom. The English minister also told the parliament that Henry, at his death, had a great army in readiness; but Cecil did not divulge what was the intent for which this army was levied. James was not likely to have joined in any martial project against the Spanish power; or even to have seconded Henry's "grand scheme," as it was called, for a great European confederacy that would have put an end to warfare. If money had been wanting for accomplishing that, or any other elevated project, James would have stood aloof. England had now no foreign policy, but that of an almost ignominious neutrality. The cause of Protestantism in Europe, which was at the same time the cause of civil liberty, had lost its great leader when Elizabeth died. The son of Mary Stuart had no opinions but those which resulted from his cowardice or his selfishness. When the Reforming ministers lectured him in Scotland, he favoured the Papists. Whilst the terrors of the Gunpowder

* "Calendar of State Papers.". Letter of Sir Roger Aston, p. 625.

+ Ibid., p. 646.

352

AUTHORISED TRANSLATION OF THE BIBLE.

[1611

plot were uppermost in his mind, he was as staunch a Protestant as the sternest Puritan in his parliament. He naturally leaned upon that party in the Church of England which supported his doctrine of absolute power. In his contempt for the opinions of his subjects he thrust episcopacy upon the kirk of Scotland. For the rights of conscience he had not the slightest regard. He exhorted the States of Holland to persecute Vorstius, an Arminian professor at Leyden. In 1612 he signed a writ for the burning in Smithfield of Bartholomew Legate, an Arian, whose errors he had vainly attempted to remove by argument. This writ was not a mere formal instrument, but expressed that, the Church having delivered the offender to the secular power, as a blasphemous heretic, the king, "as a zealot of justice, and a defender of the Catholic faith, and willing to maintain and defend the Holy Church and the rights and liberties of the same," holds that the said Bartholomew Legate "ought to be burned with fire." One other atrocity of the same kind was committed-the last of such barbarities which England witnessed. To the "religious" king James is our present translation of the Bible dedicated. That translation was an excellent work, and it was right to dedicate it to the sovereign who had encouraged the undertaking. But it was in the spirit of that dangerous adulation which hid realities from James, as they were hidden from his successor, that he was told in this dedication that his conduct in going forward "with the confidence and resolution of a man in maintaining the truth of Christ, and propagating it far and near, is that which hath so bound and firmly knit the hearts of all your majesty's loyal and religious people unto you, that your very name is precious amongst them; their eye doth behold you with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts as that sanctified person, who, under God, is the immediate author of their true happiness." It might be supposed, the king being herein called "the mover and author of this work," that the Bible had not been previously known in England. The translation of 1611 was founded upon the Bishops' Bible of 1568; and that was founded upon Cranmer's Bible; which was founded upon the translations of the Old and New Testament of the earlier reformers-the Tyndal who was burnt, and the Wycliffe whose ashes were cast into the Avon. In such a work it was the part of true wisdom to deviate as little as possible from the text with which the people had become familiar, and which their forefathers had devoured when it was dangerous to possess the sacred volume. It does not appear to us an objection to this translation that, "in consequence of the principle of adherence to the original versions which had been kept up ever since the time of Henry VIII., it is not the language of the reign of James I."* Nor is it wholly to be deplored that it abounds "with obsolete phraseology, and with single words long since abandoned, or retained only in familiar use." + It will be a national misfortune if, to get rid of some archaisms in this translation which have ceased to be difficult, the noble simplicity of our AngloSaxon tongue" the tongue which Shakspere spake"-should yield to the refined Gallicisms of a later period; and if the "obsolete phraseology" of the days of Hooker should be driven out by German idioms and American vulgarities. In this translation, as in every species of contemporary literature,

* Hallam, "Literature of Europe," vol. III., p. 134.

+ Ibid.

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