in with Digby's matured policy. He moved, and attempted in vain to procure, the adjournment of the discussion. Two days later, in committee, Mr. John Pym, putting aside altogether, or carrying into an entirely new atmosphere, the question under consideration, and yet, in his abstract and statuesque Puritan eloquence, securing the rapt attention of his audience, proposed: 'That an oath of association for the defence of His Majesty's person, and for the execution of the laws made for the establishing of religion, should be taken by all loyal subjects; and that the King should be asked to issue a special commission for the suppression of recusancy.”

The House soon turned right away from a matter, which certainly required immediate attention. It had got gradually, but totally and most unmanageably, upon the engrossing topics of the state of religion, of the fear of the Pope, and of the progress of the Jesuits in Great Britain. It petitioned against Papists and Recusants. Day by day during its later sittings the Puritan fires grew warmer and warmer. Digges, when the king was obstinate, would say, 'let us rise not as in discontent, rather let us resort to our prayers.' And at last every other question disappeared before that of liberty of parliamentary speech. The King gave up hopes of the subsidy, tore out a protestation of the Commons from the Journals of the House, and was for days before and after he had dissolved Parliament in a passion of vexation.

'God knows,' said the King, 'we never meant to deny them any lawful privileges that ever that House enjoyed in our predecessors' times.' If we had known sooner,' said Phelips, four days before the last sitting, 'how far His Majesty had proceeded in the match of Spain, we should not, I think, have touched that string.' It is always a striking trait in James how, in spite of the manner in which he stood, and set himself often to stand, out of feeling with so much of the very soul and breath of England, he, nevertheless, contrived to retain, through all, as much, if not more, of such personal favour with the masses as he had at starting possessed. And throughout James's lifetime the Royal Family, on which rather than on himself the national love in appearance was bestowed, was extraordinarily popular; the scene, for example, at the return of the Prince of Wales out of Spain has seldom had a parallel.

It is quite impossible for us to enter into details concerning the Government of James at home. Had we space to dwell on it, it would be with a sense of wonder that we should see the

wary, slow-paced but sure-footed old King wend his way through the mazes of Council and Parliament. He is never out of the toils, he is never brought to a standstill, he never lets go that thread of his own. We can only give one glimpse at him near the end. The strenuous efforts made by Britain and Spain to prevent the general outbreak of hostilities have, it is plain, failed. The War Spectre is closer than ever. James comes before Parliament prematurely aged and broken. He is to die next year. His address, true to his character and policy, has a special note of pathos.

'I shall entreat your good and sound advice, for the glory of God. the peace of the kingdom, and the weal of my children (there were left Elizabeth and Charles). I pray you judge me charitably as you will have me judge you; for I never made public nor private treaties, but I always made a direct reservation for the weal public and cause of religion, for the glory of God and the good of my subjects. I only thought good sometimes to wink and connive at the execution of some penal statutes, and not to go on so rigorously as at other times; but to dispense with any, to forbid or alter any, that concern religion, I neither promised nor yielded. I never did think it with my heart, nor speak it with my mouth. A king that governs evenly is not bound to carry a rigorous hand over his subjects upon all occasions, but may sometimes slacken the bridle, yet so as his hands be not off the reins.'

6

Again the project, the only seasonable one, to form a Protestant confederation in Germany was in Parliament disregarded; again the proposal of a renewed war with Spain was rapturously hailed. Even Eliot could press a suggestion, which, indeed, in Mr. Gardiner's words, 'if it had been translated into figures would have organized a tyranny too monstrous to be contemplated,' that for a war with Spain the necessary ships might be furnished by the help of those penalties the Papists have already incurred. A petition embodying the sense of the House went up to the King. But, though Buckingham was foremost amongst those who supported it, James was never less disposed to assume the character of a Protestant crusader. He said he had a bad cold, and declined to receive the petition. His reply to it a couple of days later was: As Moses saw the Land of Promise from a high mountain, so would it be a great comfort for me that God would but so prolong my days as if I might not see the restitution, yet at least to be assured that it would be.' He did not want one furrow of land in England, Scotland, or Ireland, without restitution of the Palatinate.' And let them consider how serious was the emergency. 'I must not only deal,' from another Royal address, with my own people, but

6

with my neighbours and allies to assist me in so great a business as the recovery of the Palatinate.' On the other hand, in the Commons, Seymour exclaimed: The Palatinate was the place intended by His Majesty. This we never thought of.' 'Are we poor,' cried Eliot, Spain is rich.' James's comment was: his plans 'must not be ordered by a multitude. For advice about the conduct of the future war he must be dependent not upon Parliament, but upon military men who would form a Council of War.' A little subsequently he writes to Conway—and surely this steadfastness of the King has its own nobility and courage'Ye know my firm resolution not to make this a war of religion.' Never, in fact, in James's time was there a final breach with Spain made. And even Gondomar's re-appearance in London was hinted at to the end. But his practical measures in view of the complete rupture with Spain were admirable. He saw the Dutch Commissioners. He sent even now, however, a last message to Madrid, urging on Philip once more the wisdom of joint action for the restitution of the Palatinate. If all hopes of peace with Spain must go, it would not do to embark in the European war without a French alliance. The King is resolved not to break with Spain, nor to give them any occasion to break with him, until he be secure that France will join very close with him and other Catholic Princes and States which have the same interest,' otherwise it would be understood to be a war of religion.' If there must be war let England and France march together again, as in the 'Henri-Quatre' time. If there is no help for it but that this scoundrel Mansfeld must have a great command, let it be over a joint French and English army, 'for the recovery and recuperation of the Palatinate and the Valtelline.' And the fury of war is all the while moving the North. Gustavus Adolphus lays his and Roe's* grand plan before the Stewart. I am not so great and rich a Prince as to be able," said James, to do so much, I am only the King of two poor little islands,' and he may have heaved a sigh because of Parliaments. But Denmark, France, Savoy, would do to begin with; others like the Swede might fall in farther on.

Mr. Gardiner with great truth remarks that the plan and policy of King James with reference to the Thirty Years' War, should he have to take action, are in effect the very same with those developed afterwards with such marvellous fortune by the rising French statesman with whom, in these his own last operations, James was joining hands, Cardinal Richelieu. The two

* One cannot be quite sure, perhaps, of the co-operation of Roe, but cp. Droysen's 'Gustav Adolf,' ii. 67, 68.

understood

understood each other thoroughly. With reference to the French marriage for Prince Charles, they came to an agreement that the Pope, who had in reality wrecked the Spanish match, should have no such power here. If, declared the Cardinal, demands from Rome offensive to James were not withdrawn in a month, the nuptials would take place without any dispensation at all of the Holy Father's.

Immersed, thus, in preliminaries for battles and for a wedding, James fell sick and expired, misliking much the military, slightly, it may be, even the festive, appointments of his latter days. But in the rule of his life and the realm, he had never weighed anchor, nor launched out upon the high flood further than he could fathom. He passed away from the world with something of the same weariness of it that Elizabeth had felt so strongly, yet, as a statesman with a family, with more of curiosity and care for what was to come after. He held to his last breath his policy in balance and his mind in suspense. In England he had tired of Buckingham, and he was meditating, probably with an experiment growing fast towards trial in his thoughts, on the rivalry between Buckingham and Bristol. In France he was watching with a newly roused sympathy the early difficulties of the famous Cardinal, who there, between Jesuits and Huguenots, was to have much the same struggle as his had been between Romanists and Puritans. James may, besides, have had his peculiar views and guesses as to who was destined to be the great captain in the enlarging war. His own Buckingham, never so boastful and blustering as now, nor so certain of a wide and brilliant future, and whom James would not have been sorry to have seen fully employed at a distance? Or the Dane? Or the Swede? Doubtless his contemplations were never disturbed by the deeds which were to be soon done in his island-sanctuary and oasis, and which would make the whole world ring. He never dreamt of his mother's fate as that which would befall his son, or that, though in the most different setting, his own policy was to be carried out, with the highest of hands, by a Puritan and a man of war, who was to succeed, as he, James Stewart, had never, never could have, succeeded, in subduing and uniting the three kingdoms, in dictating to and dissolving Parliaments, in reprimanding and in awing Europe; strangest of all, in the personal preaching and practising and enforcing of his (James's) own particular creed of Coalition and of Toleration among that potent little congregation of European nations, which, laid to the West and apart from, yet in sight of, the main continent, dwells together within the narrow seas.

The great events which were to take place in Britain and its

sister island were beyond James, beyond the previsions and the alternatives he had harboured; though some dangers he did, it appears, anticipate. Take him to you,' he had said, when Laud was promoted to St. David's, but, on my soul, you will repent it.' You are a fool,' he a few months before his death said to Buckingham, who was pestering for the impeachment of Middlesex; 'you are making a rod with which you will be scourged yourself.' The next moment the King turned to the Prince You,' he exclaimed, will live to have your bellyful of impeachments.' His personal religious convictions remained as steady as his political maxims. As he had written, and as he had governed, so he died. He wished much to have Bishop Andrewes with him in his last hours, but that prelate was himself too ill to comply with the King's desire.

There will, we imagine, always be a twofold aspect in every attempted characterisation of James I. But that ungainly figure was, we repeat, the mask of a very considerable personality. Behind those rough and lazy features worked a big and a versatile brain, and a most observant and discriminating intellect. One has, on the one hand, to take into account the irony of Nature toward him, the pedantic externals of his manners and character, his habit of making small slips to save himself from grave falls. Here he reminds us of the lines of one of his own statesmen and poets. They were written in Elizabeth's time, or James might have suggested to Sir John Davies the quaint idea and phrasing with which his 'nosce te ipsum' begins :

'Why did my parents send me to the Schooles,
That I with knowledge might enrich my mind?
Since the desire to know first made men fools
And did corrupt the root of all mankind;

So that themselves were first to do the ill,
Ere they thereof the knowledge could attain;
Like him that knew not poison's power to kill
Until (by tasting it) himself was slain.'

One has, on the other hand, to regard the originality, the sagacity, the large-mindedness above all, the permanence of the comprehensive and pacific policy he proclaimed and exemplified. And here the King might address, at large and to our own and later times, a claim for some such consideration as that for which the great philosopher, his Chancellor, on his own private behoof, had to plead : For my name and memory I leave it to men's charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and to the next ages.'

For ourselves and for our readers we hold it to be of some