Arabella Stuart-Death of Salisbury-Robert Carr, king's favourite-Death of Prince HenryMarriage of the Princess Elizabeth-The addled Parliament-George Villiers, the new favourite-Murder of Overbury-Trials for the murder-Somerset and his countess convicted-Conduct of the King-Sir Edward Coke dismissed-Proclamation for Sports. Note on the Secret Communications between the King and Sir George More.

ONE of the overt acts of treason with which sir Walter Raleigh was charged upon his trial, was that he had conferred with lord Cobham for the support of Arabella Stuart's claim to the crown of England.* The lady herself was present at this trial. It is not at all clear that this design had been seriously entertained; and certainly Arabella herself had given no sanction to it. She was the cousin of king James; being the only child of Charles, earl of Lennox, the grandson of Margaret Tudor. Her parents died young; and she was brought up by her maternal grandmother, the

1612.]

ARABELLA STUART-DEATH OF SALISBURY.

359

countess of Shrewsbury. If James had died childless, Arabella Stuart would have been the lineal heir to the crown. During the reign of Elizabeth she was occasionally at court; and the queen pointed her out to the wife of the French ambassador, when she was about twelve years old, as a girl of talent, who would one day be a great lady. After the accession of James she appears to have been in much favour. In 1604 she received the grant of an annual pension for life of 10007. * In 1609 she had the profits of a monopoly, in the privilege of nominating the sellers of wines and spirits in Ireland. † In that year she appears to have given offence by listening to some overtures for marriage. In 1610 it was discovered that William Seymour, the second son of lord Beauchamp, was endeavouring to gain the lady Arabella as his wife. They were brought before the Council, and protested that they never intended marrying without the king's consent. In a few months they were privately married. The husband was sent to the Tower; the wife was placed in official custody. On the 3rd of June, 1611, she escaped from Highgate, disguised as a man; having drawn "a pair of great French fashioned hose over her petticoats, putting on a man's doublet, a manlike perruque with long locks over her hair, a black hat, black cloak, russet boots with red tips, and a rapier by her side." Seymour meanwhile had escaped from the Tower, also in disguise. Arabella rode to Blackwall; and then crossed to Lee. A French bark, hired for the occasion, was there lying at anchor, and when she went on board, the captain stood out to sea, without waiting for Seymour, who was expected to join his wife. They never saw each other again. Arabella was captured in the French bark by an English pinnace that had been sent in chase of the fugitives; and she was carried to the Tower. Seymour escaped to Ostend. The jealousy of king James would never permit him to show any mercy to his unhappy cousin. She died in the fourth year of her imprisonment, worn out with a grief which ended in mental derangement. Of the cruelty of the king to his kinswoman there can be no doubt. The illegality of her imprisonment is equally clear. It could not be justified by the very distant possibility that any issue of a marriage between two persons who each were of the blood royal might be dangerous to the succession.‡ Arabella was treated by James with far greater harshness than was used to Catherine Grey by Elizabeth; nor was there the apology in James's case, as in that of the queen, that the title of the reigning sovereign was open to dispute. Arabella was the victim of a causeless injustice, "through the oppression of a kinsman whose advocates are always vaunting his good nature." §

In May, 1612, died Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury. "He was a good statesman, and no ill member of the Commonwealth," says sir Simonds D'Ewes; but he died amidst " a general hate, almost of all sorts." || Bacon has described him as "a more fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no very fit man to reduce things to be much better." When he was gone, things did grow much worse. He had left an empty treasury, which he had vainly attempted to fill by his scheme for a permanent revenue. The constant manifestation of an arbitrary temper on the part of the king, "willing to

# "Calendar of State Papers," p. 173.

Ibid., p. 555.

Seymour was grandson of the earl of Hertford who married Catherine Grey. See ante, p. 163. "Autobiography," vol. i. p. 50.

§ Hallam, vol. i. p. 351.

360

ROBERT CARR, KING'S FAVOURITE.

[1612

wound, but yet afraid to strike," made the Commons cling with great tenacity to their undoubted power of refusing supplies. Robert Carr succeeded Cecil, not as prime minister; but he was all-powerful as prime favourite. Before the death of Cecil, the king's minions had not ostensibly influenced public affairs. James gormandised with Heliogabalus Hay; and when Carr, a raw Scotch lad, had broken his leg in the tilting-yard, the king watched over his recovery, placed him about his person, pinched his cheek, taught him Latin, * bestowed on him forfeited lands, created him baron Branspath and then viscount Rochester, and made him a knight of the garter. But neither Hay nor Carr appear to have meddled with the functions of a Treasurer or Secretary of State while Cecil lived. For four years after that minister's death Carr ruled supreme, till another favourite came to eject him. The history of this period is disgusting to trace in contemporary memoirs and documents, and much of it is unfit to be related in a modern narrative. Justly does Mr. Carlyle say, "Somerset Ker, king's favourite, son of the Laird of Fernieherst, he and his extremely unedifying affairs-except as they might transiently affect the nostrils of some Cromwell of importance-do not much belong to the History of England. Carrion ought at length to be buried." + Yet they cannot be wholly passed over. The "extremely unedifying affairs" of the court of James had a great deal to do with the momentous events of the next reign. The disgust of the sober and religious part of the community drove vast numbers into the opposite extreme of religious asceticism. In proportion as the Puritans were hated by the courtiers, denounced in the

66

was

high-church pulpits, ridiculed upon the stage, they grew in the real strength of their earnest principles; and they gained an enormous accession of strength in town and country, of those who, "out of mere morality and civil honesty, discountenanced the abominations of those days." Their religion fenced with the liberty of the people, and so linked together, that it was impossible to make them slaves till they were brought to be idolaters of royalty and glorious lust, and as impossible to make them adore these gods while they continued loyal to the government of Jesus Christ." So writes

"Nuga Antiquæ," vol. i. p. 390.

"Memoirs of Colonel Hutchinson," vol. i. p. 121, ed. 1822.

1612.]

DEATH OF PRINCE HENRY.

361

Lucy Hutchinson, one in whom the beauty of holiness is presented under its noblest aspects of manly courage and feminine tenderness.

The

In 1606, on Twelfth Night, a masque was performed at court, of which Jonson wrote the verses, and Inigo Jones superintended the decorations and machinery. This "Masque of Hymen" was to celebrate the marriage of the earl of Essex, a boy of fourteen years, with lady Frances Howard, a girl of thirteen. In 1613, there was another masque in honour of the marriage of this lady with Robert Carr, then created earl of Somerset. The young Essex had gone abroad after his marriage; and his child-bride had lived amongst the seductions of the court-" incomparably the most disgraceful scene of profligacy which this country has ever witnessed." The odious circumstances which attended the divorce of lady Essex, that she might be bestowed upon her paramour, Somerset, brought equal disgrace, in the eyes of the people, upon the king who urged the divorce in the most unkingly manner, and upon the Ecclesiastical Court which decreed it. The king, in pandering to an adulterous connexion, dared to tell archbishop Abbot, who opposed the disgraceful proceeding," the best thankfulness that you, that are so far my creature, can use towards me, is to reverence and follow my judgment, and not to contradict it." This profligate man was now freed from the observation of his two elder children, whose lives and opinions were not in exact agreement with his own. Prince Henry was in his nineteenth year, when, on the 6th of November, 1612, he died, after a short illness. prince, although there was no public difference between them, had probably as little respect for the king as the king had affection for the prince. Between Henry and Somerset there was decided enmity. The popularity of the prince, who was an especial hope of the strict religious section of the nation, was offensive to the king; so that when the son's court was frequented by a very different class of men from those who thronged round the court of the king, James was heard to exclaim, "will he bury me alive?" Henry was attached to Raleigh, whom he often visited in prison; and he loved to hear, as he might have heard from him, stories of the martial princes of our Plantagenet race, and of the later period when the support of the Protestantism of Europe was the great policy of England. He has been reported to have said, with regard to the imprisoned Raleigh, that only such a king as his father would keep such a bird in such a cage. When Henry died, there was an outcry that he had been poisoned. D'Ewes says, "It is not improbable but that he might overheat and distemper himself in some of those sports and recreations he used in his company; but the strength of his constitution, and the vigour of his youth, might have overcome that, had he not tasted of some grapes as he played at tennis, supposed to have been poisoned." Some circumstances Hallam, i. p. 342. Amos, "The great Oyer of Poisoning," p. 6. "Autobiography," vol. i. p. 47.

Abbot.

362

MARRIAGE OF THE PRINCESS ELIZABETH.

[1613.

But whatever

which were disclosed a few years later favoured this suspicion. might be the cause of prince Henry's death, his father exhibited some strange feelings which strongly contrast with the national grief, when "the lamentation made for him was so general as even women and children partook of it." There had been a negotiation for marrying Henry to a princess of France; and within three days of his death Rochester directed our ambassador, who had the decency not then to propound the matter, to make overtures for the marriage of the same princess to the king's remaining son, Charles. Henry was buried at Westminster on the 7th of December. There was no time lost in grief; for on the 14th of February following the princess Elizabeth was married at Whitehall to Frederick, the elector palatine. The king again demanded a feudal aid on this occasion, as he had demanded one when his eldest son was created prince of Wales. It defrayed only a portion of the enormous expenses of the marriage festivities. The union was a happy one in the mutual affection of the prince and princess. It was doomed to be unfortunate in the loss which the elector sustained of his hereditary dominions, when he consented to be chosen king of Bohemia. The demeanour of a light-hearted girl of sixteen at her bridal ceremony was held to be prophetic of evil :-"While the archbishop of Canterbury was solemnizing the marriage, some eruscations and lightnings of joy appeared in her countenance, that expressed more than an ordinary smile, being almost elated to a laughter, which could not clear the air of her fate, but was rather a forerunner of more sad and dire events."+ From the twelfth child of the princess Elizabeth the House of Brunswick inherits the crown of this kingdom.

+

+

Hume has said, with some truth, "except during sessions of parliament, the history of this reign may more properly be called the history of the court than that of the nation." But the exception is a very considerable one. During sessions of parliament we clearly trace how the nation was growing into a power truly formidable to the arbitrary disposition of the king and the selfish indulgences of the court. We see in these sessions of parliament of what materials the English nation was composed. When we open the parliamentary debates of this period, we find abundant evidence that such of the gentlemen of England as remained uncorrupted by court favours, and had not "learnt the court fashion," were not only a spirited race but were highly intelligent. They were perfectly acquainted .with the laws of their country and the history of its constitution. They had not only solid arguments, but carefully sought precedents, to shape their resistance to impositions and benevolences, to monopolies and purveyance, to proclamations which claimed to have the force of statutes, but which were only legal if they prescribed obedience to some established principle of constitutional government. They were practically familiar with the laws of property, and with the administration of justice in their several localities. A writer whose learning and industry, if his life had been longer spared, would have no doubt added many more able contributions to our history, says of the country gentlemen, "undoubtedly, in the earlier half of the seventeenth century a great amount of solid and polite learning distinguished them; and

"Autobiography," vol. i. p. 46.

Wilson, "Life of James I."

Mrs. Hutchinson.