A.D. 1613.] IMPRISONMENT AND DEATH OF OVERBURY. 51 with him at all, and he soon discovered that in his absence Jervis Elwes, was installed in his place. Under the care of her affections had been stolen away by the profligate Elwes, Sir Thomas Overbury was at once cut off from all favourite Rochester, who had won her even from another communication with the outer world. Neither servant nor and a royal suitor, prince Henry. In short, a criminal con- relative was permitted to see him; he was already dead to nection had long existed betwixt her and Rochester. the world, and the world was soon to be dead to him. This discovery, and the constant bickerings which took place betwixt the earl and countess, made Essex willing that a divorce should be obtained. There were others who were glad of this expedient: lady Howard's father, lord Suffolk, and the earl of Northampton, lord privy seal, saw in her marriage with Rochester a mode of putting an end to the rivalry which existed betwixt them, and the king was equally eager for this result. But to Overbury the scheme boded the destruction of his power, which would be at an end if his patron coalesced with his enemies. He therefore commenced a determined opposition to the match. He it was who had written the glowing and eloquent love-letters of Rochester, and had promoted the liaison to the utmost of his power; but he had never dreamt of its leading to a marriage, which must work his own ruin. He therefore represented to Rochester the odium of such a marriage; the base and abandoned character of the woman, who might do for his mistress, but was not to be thought of as a wife. When he found that his arguments did not produce the effect which he wished, he took the dangerous step of menacing, and declared that he could and would throw an insuperable bar in the way of the divorce from Essex, without which there could be no marriage. This bar was undoubtedly his knowledge of the adulterous connection which had existed betwixt the parties, and which must ruin the countess's demand of a separation. The master of deep policy could not see the rock upon which he was running, and which would have been very clear to him in another person's case. Rochester repeated to the countess all that he said, and the rage of a sinful woman, proverbially fierce as hell, seized upon her. She vowed that she would have his life. In her first fury she offered £1,000 to Sir John Wood to kill him in a duel, but her friends interposed, and suggested a less hazardous and less criminal way to get Overbury out of the way, which was to send him on an embassy to France or Russia. If he accepted the office, he would be detained abroad till the divorce was effected; if he refused, it were easy to construe his conduct into a contempt of the king's service, and get him confined. Overbury was sounded on the subject of a mission to Russia, and listened to it with apparent pleasure; but the young beauty could not thus satisfy her revenge, and at her instigation Rochester affected to feel his projected absence intolerable. He declared his presence and counsel were in lispensable to him, and he promised to satisfy the king, if he agreed to decline the offer. No sooner did Overbury consent than Rochester, so far from excusing him to the king, represented his conduct as not only disobedient to his majesty, but as insolent and intolerable to himself. James was only too glad to clear the court of the hated man; a warrant was immediately issued, and Overbury was committed to the Tower. By the arrangement of Rochester and the earl of Northampton, the lieutenant of the tower, Sir William Wade, was removed, and a creature of theirs, Sir The dangerous man secured, the measures for the divorce commenced. The countess petitioned for it, alleging serious grounds, and her father signed the petition. But no one was more forward and determined in carrying this disgraceful transaction through than the king. He appointed without delay a commission to try the cause. The commissioners were Abbot, the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishops of London, Winchester, Rochester, Ely, Lichfield, and Coventry; Sir Julius Cæsar, Sir John Barry, Sir Daniel Dunne, Sir John Bennet, Francis James and Thomas Edwards, doctors of civil law. The earl of Essex was only too glad to be rid of his virago, and consented to anything, even to the most humiliating imputations on his manhood. The real causes of the vile business were sufficiently notorious; and the primate, though at the head of the commission, revolting at being made a tool for the accommodation of aristocratic licentiousness, strongly opposed the divorce. But James took him sharply to task, telling him, in so many words, that it was his duty to resign his own judgment and follow that of his sovereign. "If,” he writes, in a most imperative letter, "a judge should have a prejudice in respect of persons, it should become you rather to have a kind of implicit faith in my judgment, as well in respect of some skill I have in divinity, as also that I hope no honest man doubts the uprightness of my conscience; and 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, except where you may demonstrate unto me that I am mistaken or wrong informed." But James did not content himself with recommending implicit obedience, he influenced and controlled the proceedings, and intimidated the judges by all means in his power. His zeal was quickened by the receipt of twenty-five thousand pounds from Rochester, at a moment when his officers were at their wit's end for money. But do what he would, he could not bend the integrity of the primate, who to the last resisted the divorce, and three of the doctors of law supported him. The bishop of London also voted with him, but the rest of the bishops and civil lawyers voted for the divorce, which was carried by seven voices against five. The bishop of Winchester showed himself so servile on the occasion, that the king knighted his son, who was ever afterwards dubbed by the people Sir Nullity Bilson. The other judges and bishops who voted according to his wish were also rewarded by James, and the sentence of divorce was pronounced on the 25th of September. The public at large, to whom the facts of the case were no secret, condemned the whole proceeding in no measured terms, and this reprobation rose into actual horror when the news oozed out, that the very day before the verdict for the divorce, Sir Thomas Overbury was found dead in his cell. He was buried in all haste, and with profound secrecy, the officials diligently propagating a report that he died of a loathsome and contagious disease: the public entertained no doubt of his perishing of poison. carry on by any illegal and unconstitutional means that the people would submit to. But the Dutch did not keep their engagement to pay off their debt of upwards of eight hundred thousand pounds by annual instalments of sixty thousand pounds, and James was too pusillanimous to adopt the means which a Cromwell would have done. He threatened war, and threatened only; and therefore became despised by his debtors, who thenceforth made no movement towards paying. Disappointed here, the only alternative was to fleece his own subjects. He resorted to the scandalous measure of selling all the places of honour and trust, and all kind of dignities for money. He sold several peerages for high prices. Every place under government was to be had only for cash; nor did the proceeds of this infamous traffic always reach the king's hands, but fell into those of his minion Somerset, and the Howards, the relatives of Somerset's wife. The wicked countess of Somerset and lady Suffolk, her mother, got four thousand pounds as a bribe from Sir Fulke Greville, for the chancellorship of the exchequer. The example thus set at court, ran In the face of all this, James proceeded immediately to raise Rochester to the dignity of earl of Somerset, that he might equal in rank, if not in iniquity, the murder-breathing countess. The marriage, moreover, was celebrated on the 26th of December, at the royal chapel in Whitehall, the king making it his own affair, being himself present, with prince Charles, and a great crowd of bishops and noblemen. The queen kept herself commendably apart from the whole infamous business. The blood-stained bride, with a shamelessness unparalleled, appeared with her hair hanging loose on her shoulders, in the character of a virgin! Montague, bishop of Bath and Wells, married the guilty couple, and Mountain, dean of Westminster, pronounced a blessing upon them. Then the king gave a series of banquets and masques at Whitehall in honour of them, which continued till the 4th of January, 1614; and, as if all classes of public men were eager to disgrace themselves by sanctioning this court wickedness, the lord mayor and aldermen invited the adulterous couple to a splendid banquet, given at Merchant Tailors' Hall, on the same 4th of January, whither they were accom-through all departments, and the whole management of the panied by the duke of Lennox, the earl of Northampton, lord privy seal, the lord chamberlain, and the earls of Worcester, Pembroke, and Montgomery. As it was to do honour to the king's especial favourite, the whole civic body were arrayed in their robes of office, and the dinner was served by citizens selected out of the twelve companies, in the costumes of those companies. There was, moreover, a masque, a ball, dancing, and a play, and then the guilty and fêted pair returned to Whitehall. This city ovation was followed by another at Gray's Inn, on Twelfth Night, which the lord chancellor Bacon had forced, in a manner, on the reluctant lawyers. The marriage of the princess Elizabeth, the king's own daughter, had been a most simple and tame affair to this, and the public, of every class and denomination, regarded with horror and indignation this deification of lust and murder. Puritans, churchmen, catholics, people of every and of no religion were equally loud in venting their anathemas on the foolish king, the sycophantic prelates, and compliant ministers. James gave such indulgence to debauch in the midst of these atrocious festivities, that he grew into a most cumbersome and disgusting spectacle. "This year," says Roger Coke, "as it was the meridian of the king's reign in England, so it was of his pleasures. He was excessively addicted to hunting and drinking, not ordinary French and Spanish wines, but strong Greek wines; and though he would divide his hunting from drinking these wines, yet he would compound his hunting with drinking; and to that purpose he was attended with a special officer, who was, as much as could be, always at hand to fill the king's cup in his hunting, when he called for it. Whether.it were the drinking these wines, or from some other cause, the king became so lazy and unwieldy, that he was trussed on horseback, and as he was set, so he would ride, without otherwise poising himself in his saddle; nay, when his hat was set on his head, he would not take the pains to alter it, but it sate as it was put on." From his gaieties James was called, by his eternal want of money, to face his parliament. Since 1611, when he dissolved his last house of commons, he had endeavoured to country was given up to corruption and venality. So little of these proceeds of iniquity reached the king, and that little was so foolishly and recklessly given away amongst his hangers-on, that the salaries of all who were not in a situation to be bribed, and thus pay themselves, remained unpaid. In this difficulty, James hit upon a notable scheme, and originated a new order of aristocracy; namely, baronets, or little barons, a link betwixt the barons, or lowest peers, and knights. These new titles he sold at one thousand pounds apiece. Sir Nicholas Bacon was the first created for England, and Sir Francis Blundell for Ireland, in 1619. Baronets for Nova Scotia were added, to extend this source of income, in 1625, of whom Sir Robert Gordon was the first. "Some of these new honourable men," says Arthur Wilson, in his life of James, "whose wives' pride and their own prodigalities had pumpt up to it, were so drained, that they had not moisture to maintain the radical humour, but withered to nothing. This money thus raised is pretended for the planting of Ireland, but it found many other channels before it came to that sea. And though, at our king's first access to the crown, there was a glut of knights made, yet after some time he held his hand, lest the kingdom should be cloyed with them; and the world thrived so well with some, that the price was afterwards brought up to three hundred pounds apiece. But now again, the poor courtiers were so indigent, that sixty pounds would purchase a knighthood." Lord Northampton died at this crisis, and the iniquitous countess's kith and kin got the benefit. Suffolk, her father, succeeded as lord treasurer; Somerset, her husband, as lord chamberlain; and their dependents rushed in in a stream, all the other offices being sold by them for all they could get. Amongst others lord Knollys was made master of the court of wards, because he had married a sister of the infamous countess. The attempts upon the constitution at this period were in strict keeping with the base practices just detailed; and in these lord Bacon, as pitiable a time-server as he was a great philosopher, and as base a traitor to liberty as he was a deep lawyer, stood foremost. He had concocted a notable scheme for managing parliaments, and it was the broaching A.D. 1614. j DISSOLUTION OF THE "ADDLE" PARLIAMENT. of this scheme which alone induced James to venture on calling one. Bacon's plan was this, and he had regularly weighed it, and drawn it up for the king's consideration: That, according to a principle afterwards made a maxim by Sir Robert Walpole, every one had his price. That the leaders of the late opposition, Neville, Yelverton, Hyde, Crew, and Sir Dudley Digges, were chiefly lawyers, and there were plenty of means, by prospects of promotion skilfully applied, to bring them zealously to the king's side. That they being once brought over, he had the talking, persuasive power of the house; and that much might be done beforehand also with the city men and country gentlemen each in their own way, and where any obstinate man appeared, means might be used to keep him out. At the same time Bacon assured James that it was necessary to make a show of some concession. That as he had promised to abolish abuses, he should, at least, give up some of the lesser ones; and on his accepting this plan, he and his friends were ready to undertake to manage parliament, and to guarantee his majesty plenty of money and little trouble, provided James would only avoid irritating speeches. James's necessities were such that there was little use in objecting to the scheme; it was agreed upon, and Bacon, the favourite Somerset, and Neville, an unscrupulous and ambitious man, were made the managers, and very soon, with their coadjutors, acquired the name of undertakers, because they undertook to manage parliament; "a generation," says Wilson, "about the court, that, to please and humour greatness, undertook a parliament, as men presuming to have friends in every county and borough, who by their power amongst the people, would combine to return such members as should comply solely to the king's desires." This base scheme, we shall find, did not succeed well at first, but it was too well suited to arbitrary power to be forgotten; and in after years, and almost to our own time, was in extensive practice by the ministers of the crown. James's parliament met on the 5th of April, 1614, and he endeavoured to put in practice the Machiavellian instructions of Bacon by delivering a very popular speech, popular because it promised plentiful persecution for religion, which was the spirit of the day, and a liberal removal of grievances; but, as usual, first of all, he placed the supply of his necessities. But the undertakers had not succeeded in their first out-of-door efforts; there was a sturdy assemblage of popular members, and such faces appeared amongst them, according to a writer of the time, as made the court to droop. The house of commons at once reversed the topics of the king's speech, placing the grievances in the front, and making the supplies conditional on their abolition. The royal party which the undertakers had got together, found their pleas for slavish obedience drowned in a storm of angry demand for justice; and the house demanded a conference with the lords on the subject. The lords asked the opinion of the judges on the question, and especially that of Coke, the lord chief justice. Coke, who remembered the endeavours of Bacon to supplant him in the good graces of the king, and who hoped for no higher preferment, took the opportunity to throw cold water on the eonference, asserting that the judges, after consultation among themselves, felt that they were bound by their office to decide betwixt the 53 king and his subjects, and were, therefore, equally bound not to appear as disputants or partisans on either side. The lords, on hearing this, declined the conference, and Neale, who had recently been transferred from the see of Lichfield to the wealthier one of Lincoln, for his services in procuring the countess of Essex's divorce, rose and uttered a most unbecoming tirade against the commons, charging them with striking at the root of the royal prerogative, and anticipating that if admitted to a conference, they might use very disloyal and seditious language. This roused the indignation of the commons: they did not understand the etiquette of our time, which supposes what passes in one house unknown in the other; but they immediately demanded of the lords the punishment of the man who had thus dared to slander their loyalty. On this the bishop, who was as cowardly as he was insolent, and who was hated by the puritans as a merciless persecutor, instantly recanted in his place; and with many tears, and fervent declarations of his high respect for the commons, denied many of the offensive expressions attributed to him. But the house was not thus to be appeased. The members were greatly exasperated at the plan of managing them, which had become public, and fell on Bacon as the author of the scheme. The facile lord chancellor pretended to ridicule the very idea of any such scheme being in existence, as the king had done in his opening speech, but the house gave him no credit; they proceeded to question even his right to sit in their house, on his accepting the office of attorney-general, and only permitted it as a special indulgence, which was not to be drawn into a precedent. The king, who saw no chance of supplies in the present temper of the house, sent them a sharp message, desiring them to proceed to the business of the supplies, attended with a threat of immediate dissolution in case of non-compliance. This produced no effect, and the house was dissolved on the 7th of June. Having thus broken the immediate power of retaliation in the house, he, the next morning, arrested the most refractory members, and committed five of them to the Tower, amongst whom was Wentworth, a lawyer, destined to act a very prominent part in the next reign. These members were not discharged till they had, by their admissions, occasioned the king to arrest others, who were committed in their turn. This parliament obtained the name of the Addle parliament, because it had not passed a single bill, but it had displayed a spirit which was pregnant with the most momentous consequences. It had laid the foundation of the rights of the commons, and at the same time had displayed its rigid temperament, by issuing an order which excluded all catholics, by making it necessary for every member, before taking his seat, to receive the sacrament according to the form of the church of England. James had indeed received a fright from the determined tone of the house which lasted him nearly seven years. He returned to his usual unconstitutional modes of extorting revenue. Besides the sale of monopolies and privileges, he compelled the payment of benevolences, an odious tax, not only because raised without sanction of parliament, but because its name implied a free gift. Those who resisted these modes of royal robbery were dragged into the starchamber, and there sentenced to enormous fines. Mr. Oliver St. John, a gentleman who had not only refused such payment, but had vindicated his conduct in an able letter, in which he commented freely on the king's violation of magna charta, was fined by the tyrannic star-chamber five thousand pounds, and ordered to be imprisoned during the king's pleasure. would not let him escape, but repeated the question to him, and said that he would admit of no evasion; whereupon Andrews said, "Why, then, I think your majesty may lawfully take my brother Neale's money, for he offers it." With such advisers as Neale, we need not so much wonder at James's perpetration of acts like the following:-Edmund But the tyranny of the government went far beyond this. Peacham, a puritan minister in Somersetshire, attracted the It adopted the worst practices of the Spanish inquisition-attention of the king's officers by the boldness of his preachviolation of private houses and desks, the torture of sus- ing, in which he did not spare the follies and tyrannies of pected persons, and their punishment without any trial by a the court. Nothing, however, seems to have been suffijury. James has been described by historians and romancers ciently prominent in his sermons delivered from the pulpit, as an uncouth and ludicrous creature, a sort of learned and to bring him within the clutches of the pursuivants; but pedantic biped to be laughed at; but he was something probably the old man-he was upwards of sixty-had read worse than that, as the whole course of his history shows; to some of his friends more stinging matters, for his house a most cruel and arbitrary monarch, who had no belief in was suddenly entered, his desk broken open, and a manu the rights of any living thing but himself, and who, with | script sermon was found and carried off, criticising severely the same licence, seized the property and crushed the consciences of his subjects. He wanted only the martial rashness of his son Charles, to take arms for the enforcement of his will, and he would have reaped the reward of popular vengeance which fell upon his son. Such a king naturally was surrounded by base sycophants, one of the most crawling of whom was that bishop Neale, just mentioned. Waller the poet relates that when a youth he went to James's court, and stood in the circle to see the king dine. At the table with James were bishops Andrews and Neale. James asked them whether it was not lawful for him to take his subjects' money without all this formality of parliaments. Neale replied, "God forbid that you should not, for you are the breath of our nostrils." Andrews was silent, but James the king's extravagance in keeping separate courts for himself, his queen, and his son, in gifts for dances and banquets, in the costliness of his dress, the frauds of his officers, &c. Peacham was dragged up to London and committed to the Tower. There he was examined by the archbishop of Canterbury, the lord chancellor Ellesmere, the earls of Suffolk and Worcester, Sir Ralph Winwood, the lord chief justice Coke, and others, who endeavoured to draw out of him what advisers and instigators he had had in the matter. Now the sermon was a private paper, had never been preached or published, and, as the old man declared, never was intended to be. It had, therefore, in point of law, no more public existence than the thoughts in his bosom, and the law had no more right to take cognisance of it. Peacham |