seen. plaudits of a grateful and pitying posterity. Her wide and weary eyes are aware of nothing but remembrances. They wander after the shadow of Dudley, and about the scaffolds of Devereux and the Scotch Mary. In the earlier months of 1603, she had still been capable of forgetting herself in her wonted business and pleasures, in the transactions of Italy and Ireland, in music, which throughout her life was her most customary and best beloved relaxation. But when the Carnival drew on with its annual uproar of festivities, the Queen was nowhere to be There had fallen upon her sudden wretchedness and disgust. The second Ash Wednesday approached, arrived, since the dreary day of the execution of the Earl of Essex. Hour by hour through the dismal Lenten season his Royal Mistress slowly died. 'The Queen grew worse and worse because she would be so.' 'Elle dit de vouloir mourir.' would not hear the Archbishop speak of hope of her longer life. She might have lived if she would have used means, but she would not be persuaded, and princes must not be forced. Her physicians said, she had a body of firm and perfect constitution, likely to have lived many years. . . . She departed this life mildly .. like a ripe apple from the tree; cum leni quadam febre absque gemitu.' Would it have comforted at all her vexed and parting spirit could she have foreseen Marston Moor and the Battle of the Boyne, and the fates of Buckingham and Strafford, and known, as a certainty, that for a true Stewart the block was in England the inevitable destination, and that the Commons of England would prove altogether as envious of the encroachments of favourites as their virgin Queen! 'She What were the anticipations of English statesmen at the new .accession? We see no better way of setting forth these anticipations than by quoting two or three passages from an author, renowned in other walks, and as active and sagacious a politician as this country had at that epoch bred-Lord Bacon. We can give but a few specimens: a careful collection of the famous Chancellor's remarks on this subject, might form a valuable introduction and key to the reign of James I. The colours, which the sun of Elizabeth, as it went down, left in the sky, require, if they are to be fitly revived, a touch from the pen of one who saw felt the times and their changes. and 'In the consideration of the times,' writes Bacon, which have passed since King Henry the Eighth, I find the strangest variety that in like number of successions hath ever been known. The reign of a child; the offer of an usurpation (though it were but as a Diary Ague); the reign of a lady married to a foreign Prince, and the reign of a lady lady solitary and unmarried. So that as it cometh to pass in massive bodies, that they have certain trepidations and waverings before they fix and settle, so it seemeth that by the providence of God this monarchy before it was to settle in his Majesty and his generations (in which I hope it is now established for ever) it had these prelusive changes in these barren princes.'-Bacon's Letters and Life, vol. iii. p. 250. Thus had the preparation been made for the coming in of James I. 'It seemed as if the Divine Providence, to extinguish and take away all note of a stranger, had doubled upon his person within the circle of one age the royal blood of England by both parents. This succession drew towards it the eyes of all men, being one of the most memorable accidents that had happened a long time in the Christian world. For the kingdom of France having been re-united in the age before in all the provinces thereof formerly dismembered; and the kingdom of Spain being of more fresh memory united and made entire by the annexing of Portugal in the person of Philip the Second, there remained but this third and last union, for the counterpoising of the power of these three great monarchies, and the disposing of the affairs of Europe thereby to a more assured and universal peace and concord. The Island of Great Britain, divided from the rest of the world, was never before united in itself under one king. A King in the strength of his years, supported with great alliances abroad, established with royal issue at home, at peace with all the world, practised in the regiment of such a kingdom as mought rather enable a king by variety of accidents than corrupt him with affluence or vain glory; and one that besides his universal capacity and judgment was notably exercised and practised in matters of religion and the church; which in these times, by the confused use of both swords, are become so intermixed with considerations of estate, as most of the counsels of sovereign-princes or republic depend upon them. It rejoiceth* all men to see so fair a morning of a kingdom, and to be thoroughly secured of former apprehensions as a man that awaketh out of a fearful dream.'-Bacon's Works, vol. vi. pp. 275-6. 'Now,' exclaims Bacon, in a letter to his new Sovereign, 'the corner-stone is laid of the mightiest monarchy in Europe.'-Bacon's Letters and Life, vol. iii. p. 63. * One illustration of this joy from another hand, out of the number that might be cited, will serve as sample. Thus Sir John Harington, Queen Elizabeth's godson, welcomes James: 'Joy Protestant, Papist be now reclaimed, Leave Puritan your supercilious frown, Join voice, heart, hand, all discord be disclaimed; Nugæ Antiquæ, i. 334. The The memoranda and instructions supplied by Bacon for the king's private study are full of suggestive remarks in regard to the coalescence of the two kingdoms. Dealing with the practical difficulties to be encountered, he writes: 'It sufficeth that there be an uniformity in the principal and fundamental laws both ecclesiastical and civil. For in this point the rule holds, which was pronounced by an ancient father touching the diversity of rites in the Church, for finding the vesture of the Queen (in the Psalm), which did prefigure the Church, was of divers colours, and finding again, that Christ's coat was without a seam, he concludeth well: In veste varietas sit, scissura non sit.'-Bacon's Letters and Life, vol. iii. pp. 97-8. Bacon's personal judgment upon the real differences between England and Scotland as to church matters is thus expressed : For matters of religion, the union is perfect in points of doctrine; but in matters of discipline and government it is imperfect.'-Bacon's Letters and Life, vol. iii. p. 223. But he is not sanguine of speedy effects, he knows how late in their season the fruits of policy ripen : 'It must be left to Nature and Time to make that continuum, which was at first but contiguum. . Those mixtures, which are at the first troubled, grow after clear and settled by the benefit of rest and time.'-Bacon's Letters and Life, vol. iii. p. 98. And yet there have arisen further responsibilities which may not be shirked :— 'God hath reserved to your Majesty's times two works, which amongst the acts of kings have the supreme pre-eminence, the union and the plantation of kingdoms the one in the union of the island of Britain, the other in the plantation of great and noble parts of the island of Ireland.'-Bacon's Letters and Life, vol. iv. p. 116. Some years later he could venture so far in self-congratulation as to say: 'Ireland is the last 'ex filiis Europae' which hath been reclaimed from desolation.'-Bacon's Letters and Life, vol. vi. p. 205. And indeed all through the reign Bacon never lost sight of the brighter face of things. Video solem orientem in occidente,' he cries in his 'Discourse on the greatness of the Kingdom of Britain;' and in James's very last year he wrote to the Prince of Wales : 'Your Highness hath an Imperial Name. It was a Charles that brought the empire first into France, a Charles that brought it first into Spain, why should not Great Britain have his turn ?'-Bacon's Letters and Life, vol. vii. p. 469. e; This language of Bacon concerning James, his purposes and achievements, is not at all the language adopted later on by English historians, and to which we have grown accustomed. Since Bacon had thoughts of being to James what Burleigh was to Elizabeth, what Strafford was to be to Charles I., Clarendon to Charles II., a more or less imaginary personage has employed politician after politician, novelist after novelist, historian after historian. The novelist has too often taken his cue from the politician, and the historian his plot from the novelist. From Professor von Ranke's pen we have at last, we believe (if it be at all possible, without presumption, to make at this distance of station and observation such an assertion), an authentic and faithful portraiture, and one which will not soon be superseded in the accredited gallery of the likenesses of our Sovereigns. In the contemporary pictures and frontispieces there is commonly written in the background over the head of King James I. his own selected Scriptural sentence, 'Beati Pacifici.' It was a favourite motto of the seventeenth century; it was ever on the tongues of the foremost men of that century in Church and State but it was along their slippery and unsafe roads the hardest device for them to be invariably true to. It was an altogether new style for a Stewart, and, in particular, it was a strange symbol for a man called to be king over a divided and turbulent island, in every border and in every harbour of which swarmed the moss-trooper and the privateer, 'knowing no measure of law but the length of their swords.' It was a text which had, however, been meditated and commentated upon by James from his earliest boyhood; he was faithful to it throughout his life; it explained his advent to power and his whole confirmation in power to his conscience; by it he had interpreted the history of his parents and of Queen Elizabeth, and his own marvellous and singular escapes from destruction, first in his mother's womb, then in the Northern Castle, and the third time in the Westminster Parliament. He read in it the cause of his preservation as a youth in Scotland through unceasing treason and discontent. Even at the very last, when he could not but be aware of the ever-widening ravages of a great European war, in which the prospects of some of his children must be, those of all of them might be involved, he still drew a personal promise from it. After all his dangers, alone or nearly so of his race, and in his generation nearly alone of his rank, after having seen, to look for examples not further than the two nearest states, the assassin's assassin's knife reach the champion of French royalty, the headsman's sword the guardian of the Dutch republic; James the Peace-maker, the first King of Great Britain, could 'go away hence satisfied,' having met death tranquilly in his bed, his crown safe, his son by his side. James, all along, was thoroughly awake to his own disadvantages, though he might be thought to make little, or to have never caught sight, of them. He had no beauty of presence; the glow of natural courage which had distinguished both his house and the house which had preceded it in England, had died in him from the terrible shock of the murder of Rizzio. He had not the inestimable faculty to a king, of winning or of inspiring enthusiasm, of even, in the case of ordinary lookers-on, securing habitual respect. Affection would not be bestowed on him, but would have to be bought by him. He would never gain that kind of friendship which sits lightly and pleasantly, except by creating favourites. And yet just such facile friendships were indispensable to a ruler so active and inquisitive. All this he knew, and he had early considered how he should make the best bargains. Sometimes, though rarely, the thought of the drawbacks in himself roused his jealousy of others and warped his judgment. He was very sharp at the discovery, whenever there was an alteration in his surroundings, how reverence had to be forced into growing about him. Such experience was bitter enough to him, impressed as he was with the importance of the authority he wore and meant to exercise, and with the grandeur and dignity of what he took to be his own place among kings. James found out quite as soon as, probably sooner than, the English courtiers, how far he came short of the stature of the Tudors, and where would be the weak side of his reputation in England. He felt the difficulty of his situation, and he took his own means of overcoming it, so far as that could be done. At the very beginning of the reign he may have foreseen the satires and scurrilities which would assail him before its close. He would notice how the English country-gentleman fell with him involuntarily into an unacceptable intimacy, and at a very first interview was easily to be led on so as not to refrain from a scurvy jest.** His own appreciation of his predicament may be excused for taking at times a tetchy and petulant air, though there is generally a laugh at himself, as when to a noble who, regardless of the King's anxiety to please, repeatedly and overvehemently urges his suit, he cries, roughly rejecting the petition : Shall a King give heed to a dirty paper when a beggar |