A D. 1603.] PERSONAL VANITY OF ELIZABETH. 501 courted had become her second nature, and the same person who as queen could withstand a coalition of all Europe against her throne, was wretched if she had not a handsome, designing cozener at her side, to tell her her brow was not wrinkled with seventy-two years of toil and care, and that her locks were as rich and auburn as when her earlier adorers had assured her they were sunbeams woven into ringlets, and clustered round the forehead of the chaste Diana. Virginia, which was so called in honour of his virgin mistress, Elizabeth. 1585. Naval operations of the gallant Sir Francis Drake. 1586. Babington and others convicted of conspiring against the queen, and executed with great barbarity. 1587. The Queen of Scots tried on a charge of conspiracy against Elizabeth, and executed. Naval operations of the brave Admiral Blake against the Spaniards. 1588. Preparations of the Spaniards for invading England. Their great armada, and its utter destruction. 1590-96. Naval operations against the Spaniards carried on with great success by Sir Francis Drake, Sir John Hawkins, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others. 1598. The Earl of Tyrone's rebellion in Ireland, which continued for eight years. 1599-1601. The Earl of Essex appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to put down the rebellion. Tried for conspiracy, convicted, and executed. 1601. The Queen abolishes trade monopolies and patents, which had been subjected to gross abuses. 1603. Death of Queen Elizabeth. FRANCE.-Henry IV.; Louis XIII. SPAIN.-Philip III.; Philip IV. EMPERORS OF GERMANY.-Rodolph II.; Matthias; Ferdi- POPES.-Clement VIII.; Leo XI.; Paul V.; Gregory XV.; § 1. Political condition of England in the preceding reigns. Degradation of the House of Commons under the House of Tudor. -§ 2. Accession of James I. of Scotland. His conduct and traits of character. His government and different measures. § 3. State of religious parties. Sectarian contentions, and rebellious spirit attending them. § 4. Conspiracy in favour of Arabella Stuart. Condemnation of Lord Cobham and Sir Walter Raleigh. -§ 5. The Puritan party. Conference at Hampton Court. Alterations in the Church services demanded. Declaration of the king in favour of Church conformity. -$6. Religious persecutions. Contentions with Parliament.87. The gunpowder plot. Sanguinary laws passed against the supposed abettors. Trial and execution of Garnet, the Jesuit.§ 8. The king displays a spirit of conciliation, and re-establishes order. § 9. State of the population and the country. Disappearance of the feudal system, and the introduction of fresh manners and customs. § 10. State of the Church.-§ 11. Natural jollity of the population of England, and their rustic amusements. Advantages thence derived.- 12. Archbishop Abbot, the Calvinistic divine. A.D. 1603.] POLITICAL CONDITION OF ENGLAND. 503 Authorized translation of the Bible.-§ 13. The king's favoritism. Carr and Buckingham. Cruel treatment and death of Arabella Stuart.-14. Henry, Prince of Wales. His noble qualities and death. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Charles.-§ 15. Carr, Viscount Rochester, and afterwards Earl of Somerset. His infamous character. Marries the divorced wife of the Earl of Essex. Murder of Overbury. -§ 16. Infamy of the court, and religious outrages.-§ 17. Misery of Earl of Somerset and his wife.-§ 18. Rise of George Villiers.§ 19. Trial and disgrace of Somerset and his wife.- 20. Villiers created Marquis of Buckingham, and rewarded with numerous offices. Chief Justice Coke and Lord Bacon.—§ 21. Buckingham's increasing influence. Trial and execution of Sir Walter Raleigh.$22. James's interference with the kingdom of Bohemia.-§ 23. The king's violent proceedings, and popular discontent. Rupture between him and the Commons.-§ 24. Prince Charles and the Marquis of Buckingham proceed on a secret expedition to Madrid to negotiate a marriage with the Infanta. The match broken off. War declared against Spain.-§ 25. Affairs of the Continent, and state of Protestantism Count Mansfeldt's expedition in aid of Bohemia. Prince Charles affianced to Henrietta Maria of France. Death and character of James. § 1. ENGLAND appeared as despotic a country at the death of Elizabeth as any in Europe, and it was only by the concurrence of two circumstances that it did not lose its liberties altogether. The first of these was that the wiliest and most ambitious of our kings had no standing army. When a monarch has the interest of a superstitious priesthood, and the ignorance of the multitude in his favour, he needs only a military force to strike out the last spark of freedom. When Henry VII., therefore, had broken the nobility and gained the Church, and quieted the people, there would have been no power able to oppose him if he had had a soldiery in his pay; as it was, he had to trust to the national force-the archers of the different parishes, and men raised for a limited time. The English army was a militia, officered by the gentry of the land so Henry VII. and his imperious son had not the means of consolidating the tyrannic power which circuinstances enabled them to exercise for a time. The other circumstance was the very strange one that the degradation of the House of Commons tempted the first Tudors to use it as an ostensible instrument of their authority, till the people, who were not aware of the personal baseness and subserviency of their representatives, seeing every great event attributed to Parliament, began to believe that it was mightier than the king. They saw a Church overthrown, and another Church established; a queen divorced, and another executed; Mary declared illegitimate, and the kingdom left to the disposal of the sovereign, all by Act of Parliament; and there was no limit to their confidence in these magic words. The crawling sycophants who sat on the packed benches of the Commons began to be invested with a part of the majesty which the policy of the kings had thrown over the assembly to cloak their own designs; and towards the end of Elizabeth's reign the belief in the dignity of Parliament had seized even on some of the members, and they reasoned, remonstrated, accused, and finally made terms, as if they had in reality some of the influence which had belonged to them in the times of the Plantagenets. Nothing, however, would persuade the new race of kings that Parliament was anything but a collection of their clerks and servants; and all through the next two reigns the point in dispute was the usurped, but constantly exerted, supremacy of the crown, and the theoretical, but long disused, supremacy of Parliament. Fortunately for the Parliament the representative of absolute monarchy, who now presented himself in the person of James, was not rendered very dangerous by his vigour of mind or body. Even the country he came from detracted from his popularity; for the long wars between the realms. had made Scotland a disagreeable sound in English ears. The people were considered barbarous, and their land a desert. A flight of locusts was looked upon as a similar infliction to an incursion of the hungry Scots, whether as friends or foes. The behaviour of James, since his accession to his native throne, had not raised his reputation for courage or plain dealing; and reports must have been already widely spread of his garrulity, selfishness, pedantry, and awkwardness, which A.D. 1603.] ACCESSION OF JAMES I. 505 made him a very unfit president of the most accomplished, learned, and high-spirited court in Christendom. A courtier like Sir Walter Raleigh, hearing an argument of Bacon in the morning and a play of Shakspeare in the afternoon, could have had little appetite for the laborious and jocular platitudes of the Solomon of the north. § 2. Yet with all the advantages of an undisputed right, and bearing with him the prospect not only of peace but union between the two peoples who inhabited the island, the great-grandson of Margaret of England took peaceable possession of the throne of the Plantagenets and Tudors. It was taking the people back to the olden time, of which every new generation entertains such a fond recollection, when they saw in the son of the beauteous Mary-representative in the third degree of Henry VII. and Elizabeth of York—a blending once more of the white and red roses, and never were king and nation more pleased at the parts they were to play. His journey from the north was a perpetual triumph. Arches covered the streets, and orations exhausted the eloquence of mayors; and his speeches in reply transcended their understanding. He ate, and drank, and spouted Latin, and made poems in a manner never heard of before; he also made knights on all occasions, adding to the catalogue of chivalry upwards of a hundred and fifty persons who had no farther claim to the honour than the good luck of having approached him while he was under the pleasurable excitement of success. But the habits and temper of the new king came out in more disagreeable colours in the course of the same journey. Gentlemen, accustomed to the stately cavalcades of Elizabeth, and even her affected and grandiose style of walking, were at first astonished to see a little fat personage, with large and wandering eyes; a bonnet cast by chance upon his head, and sticking on as it best could; his legs too thin for his weight; his clothes so thickly padded out to resist a dagger-stroke, of which he was in continual dread, that he |