A.D. 1616.] TRIAL OF SOMERSET. has been styled "the greatest wit, scholar, and scoundrel of his age," "that after he is come into the hall, so that he may perceive that he must go to trial, and shall be retired to the place appointed till the court call for him, then the lieutenant shall tell him roundly that, if in his speeches he shall tax the king, that the justice of England is that he shall be taken away, and the evidence go on without him; and then all the people will cry away with him, and then it shall not be in the king's power to save his life, the people will be so set on fire." The lieutenant had carefully acted on this plan, and had provided two servants, each with a cloak on his arm, to stand behind Somerset, so that if More's representations did not after all prevent Somerset speaking out to the discredit of 61 intolerable agony and suspense of the king, who, during the whole time, was in the most pitiable condition of terror. "But who had seen," says Sir Anthony Weldon, in a passage which is fully borne out by the letters of More, the lieutenant, "the king's restless motion all that day, sending to every boat landing at the bridge, cursing all that came without tidings, would have easily judged that all was not right, and that there had been some grounds for his fears of Somerset's boldness; but at last, one bringing him word that he was condemned, all was quiet." In the course of a few weeks James actually granted a pardon to the murder and adultery-stained countess, on the plea that she was not tried as a principal, but as an accessory before the fact; though all the facts of the case go to show that the king, they should throw the cloaks instantly over his head, and drag him from the bar, from all consequence of which proceeding he promised to protect them. These singular precautions, which betrayed an awful terror on the part of the king of some withering exposure from the exasperated favourite, so far prevailed, that Somerset stood upon his trial with apparent calmness, but refused steadfastly to plead guilty. Bacon, on his part, was careful in stating the charges against him, to do it so mildly that the prisoner should not be excited to any dangerous pitch. Somerset never mentioned the king, but he defended himself resolutely, and with consummate ability. He analysed the whole string of charges brought against him, explained away whatever appeared to tell most forcibly to his disadvantage, and for eleven hours prolonged the trial, and the she was the chief instrument and instigator of the murder of Overbury. He also offered the same grace to Somerset ; but the proud, though fallen favourite, haughtily refused it, saying that he was an innocent man, who, therefore, needed no pardon, but expected a reversal of his sentence. Time, however, showed him that the favour of the prince had passed on to others, and that his enemies were working for further injury to him; he therefore condescended in the autumn of 1624 to petition for the pardon formerly rejected. It was granted on the 24th of October, with a promise of the restoration of his property. James, meantime, allowed him an income of four thousand pounds a year, and protected him from the infamy attaching to his condemnation. He would not allow him to be expelled from the order of St. George, nor his arms to be reversed in the chapel of that saint at Windsor. The The guilty earl and countess are said to have retired | bench, roused James to a keen resentment, and this was contogether into the country, not to the felicity of innocent affection, but, as it was said, to mutual hatred and recrimination. The countess died in 1632; the earl, who never recovered his estates, lived on thirteen years longer. Their only child, Lady Ann Carr, who was born in the Tower, was married to William, the fifth earl, and afterwards duke of Bedford, and became the mother of the celebrated lord William Russell, who perished on the scaffold under Charles II. Out of such a soil can rise such plants; nay, even the daughter of this infamous couple is declared to have been a woman of the purest and noblest character; and so carefully was the horrible history of her parents kept from her, that it never reached her ears till a few years before her own death. The earl of Essex, so cruelly treated in this revolting affair, lived to lead with high distinction the army of the commonwealth. Fast on the fall of Somerset followed that of the chief justice Coke. He had rendered distinguished service to James in hunting out the evidence and bringing to punishment the favourite and his wife; but he had neutralised this benefit by his haughtiness and opposition to the royal authority in other respects. Coke and Bacon had pursued two opposite systems of policy in their courses towards the highest honours of the state. Bacon had affected liberalism, and a championship of popular rights, which the higher he rose the more he sacrificed to the pleasure of the monarch. There was a profound flattery in this, for it seemed to give an additional value to his growing attachment to the crown, that it was won from his original bias towards the people. On the other hand, Coke commenced as a thorough-going supporter of the prerogative, and as his abilities were preeminent, and his prosecution of state offenders unrestrained by any scruples of conscience, he did the work of that despotic prince with a gusto and a ruthlessness which highly delighted his employer. No lawyer, except Jefferies, in a later age, ever indulged in the same unsparing abuse of those against whom he was retained. His disposition was not merely unfeeling, it was truculent, and the insolence of his language was beyond all former experience. When let loose on a victim, he certainly was no respecter of persons; an Arabella Stuart or a Raleigh were abused in a style which would not now be tolerated towards the most abject criminals. But when Coke had reached the summit of his ambition, and thought the height to which he had climbed secure, he began to display the inherent pride of his nature, by assuming an independence of manner, and a haughtiness of opinion, exhibited even towards the throne, which astonished and irritated James. In the commons he openly opposed the claims of prerogative, came out in defence of popular rights, and ended where Bacon had begun. From abject servility he rapidly passed to daring opposition. On the subject of the late benevolences, he stood forward as a patriot in the commons; in the case of Peacham, that which was prosecuted as treason, Coke declared was only defamation; and in that of Owen he agreed with the prisoner that he had committed no treason by saying that the king, if excommunicated, might lawfully be killed, because the king not having been excommunicated, the opinion could not apply to him. These declarations, both in parliament and on the tinually augmented. He set his own court of the king's bench above every other, and threatened with the penalties of a præmunire the judges of the court of chancery, and all other judges who should grant relief in equity after judgment had been pronounced in the king's bench; and he extended the same menace to all suitors who sought for such relief. judges of the courts of admiralty, of high commission, of requests, of the duchy of Lancaster, and even the presidents of the councils of the north, and of Wales, felt their jurisdictions invaded and repressed by his pretensions. The court of star-chamber even, hitherto above all law, was called in question by him, and its power to levy fines in many cases denied. He went farther, and, as in the case of Owen and Peacham, dictated to the privy council, and con、 tradicted the very sovereign to his face. All this was beheld with infinite satisfaction by Bacon, whose eyes were steadily fixed on the chancellorship, which Ellesmere, lately created viscount Brackley, could not, from his age, long retain. Coke once out of it, it must fall to Bacon. It would seem as if at the very time when Coke was hunting down his former benefactor, Somerset, the secret decree had gone out from the king against himself. Somerset was condemned on the 25th of May, and on the 30th of June Coke received an order from the king to absent himself from the council chamber, and not to proceed on his circuit, but to employ himself in correcting the errors in his book of reports. He had outraged James's sense of his own supreme authority, by opposing him in the matter of commendams and bishoprics, and had, moreover, contended with Villiers, the new favourite, respecting a patent place at court. Long before he received this startling order for the suspension of his diplomatic and judicial functions, the archbishop, the chancellor, and Mr. Attorney-general Bacon, had been employed by royal command to collect charges against him, so that, as we have observed, his fall must have been decreed before or whilst he was working out that of Somerset. He was now charged with concealing a debt of twelve thousand pounds, due from the late chancellor Hatton to the crown; with contempt of the king's authority in declaring from the bench that the common law would be overthrown by proceedings in equity, or by claims of prerogative; and for disrespect to the crown in the affair of the commendams. The charge regarding the money Coke refuted when brought before the council, and confirmed his case by a decision at law; as to the second charge, he explained it as in no way reflecting on the king, and for the third, he humbly solicited his majesty's forgiveness. James professel to retain the highest regard for the lord chief justice, and intended, on his showing a proper humility, to continue to him his favour; but when Coke brought in his report on his book, and maintained that he could only find five trivial errors in it, James, in great anger for his "deceit, contempt, and slander of government," dismissed him from the bench, and made Montague, the recorder of London, chief justice in his place. Coke, with all his harshness and cutting style to others, felt for himself keenly, and is said to have wept A.D. 1617.] ATTEMPT TO RESTORE EPISCOPACY IN SCOTLAND. like a child on receiving his supercedeas. Bacon displayed anything but a philosophical magnanimity on the fall of his great rival. He not only joked with Villiers on the disgrace of the great man who had offended the favourite, but he wrote a most insulting letter to the fallen judge, which was particularly odious from being garnished with the cant of piety. Bacon now looked confidently towards the chancellorship, and in March of the following year Brackley resigning from age, the great seal was transferred to him, with the title of lord-keeper. Sir Francis had reached the elevation to which he had so long and so ardently aspired, by a slavish advocacy of the most unlimited claims of prerogative, and, as far as in him lay, the restriction of constitutional liberty, -a mortifying instance of how completely the most transcendent talents can be united in a nature ignoble and mercenary. Indeed, the conduct of Bacon on this occasion was vain and weak to a pitiable degree. Though be had now reached the mature age of fifty-four, and drew an enormous income from his grants and offices, he was so profuse of expenditure, that he was a needy man, pressed with difficulties, which he saw in the chancellorship an exhaustless means of dispersing. His vanity burst forth to such a surprising extent, that he assumed all the state of a Wolsey. He rode to Westminster Hall on horseback, in a gown of rich purple satin, and attended by a crowd of nobles, judges, great law officers, lawyers, and students, rivalling even the splendour of the king. 63 ceeding, immediately showed himself at a window of the palace, shouting to the people, "Praised be the Lord, now I am a king!" and the officers of the guard advanced through the streets with a preconcerted cry of "God save the king! The king is king!" Yet James of England, insulted, despised, and rejected by this assassinating king of France, who was too weak to do more than escape out of the hands of one favourite into those of another, and was very soon more completely enthralled than ever by the duke de Luynes, made all haste to congratulate Louis on his black act, and to pay a high compliment to Vitry, the murderer. This we have on the express authority of Winwood, the secretary of state. Writing to Sir Guy Carleton, the ambassador in Holland, he says:-" But what opinion private particular men, who aim at nothing else but the advancement of their own fortunes, have of this action, his majesty is pleased to approve of it, which doth appear not only by the outward demonstration of his exceeding joy and contentment when first he received the news thereof, but also by letters which, with his own hand, he hath written to the French king. And besides, Mr. Comptroller, who hath charge in all diligence to return into France, hath express orders to congratulate with the marshal de Vitry, for so he now is, that by his hands, the king, his master, was delivered out of captivity.” We must now trace the proceedings of James in Scotland and Ireland, where he was anxious to establish as thoroughly his principles of church and state supremacy as in England, and where the seed he sowed rapidly grew into the same harvest of bloodshed and revolution as in this country. The church of Scotland, as established by Knox and his contemporaries, was, like the country from which they brought the idea, a republic. It acknowledged no head but Christ; nor any concern which the state had with it, except to furnish the support of the ministers whose lives were devoted to the civilisation and religious improvement of the community. The minister and the lay elders of a parish constituted the parochial assembly, which governed all the spiritual affairs of that little circle: a certain number of these assemblies constituted a presbytery, which heard all appeals from the parochial assemblies, and sanctioned the appointment, suspension, or dismissal of their ministers. Beyond the presbytery extended the provincial synod, and the general assembly claimed the supreme management of the affairs of the church under God. Whilst these affairs were progressing at home, the credit of James abroad had sunk very low. At the conference for effecting a truce betwixt Holland and Spain, held at the Hague a conference which established the independence of the Low Countries—the English ministers had been made to feel the ignominy of their position, compared with the dignity of the ambassadors of Elizabeth. Prince Maurice told them openly that their master dare not open his mouth in contradiction to the king of Spain; and their allies, the French, in consequence, assumed a superiority throughout the negotiations which mortified deeply the English envoys. Nor was that the only slight which James's truckling policy brought upon him abroad. He was anxious to ally his son to the court of Spain, notwithstanding the intense aversion of his subjects to the idea of a catholic princess. But he was saved from incensing the nation by a Spanish marriage: Spain declined the offer. He next applied for the hand of Madame Christine, sister to Louis XIII. of France; but here again he was met with the contempt which his mean and insecure character merited : France preferred the suit of the duke of Savoy. It was never before the fortune of England to have to go begging to the continental states for wives for its princes: they had hitherto been only too officiously pressed on its acceptance. Yet James, as if incapable of feeling such insults, continued his assiduous and humble court to the Courts of France and Spain. Soon after the refusal of the hand of the French princess, the weak king of France, who had been retained in a state of pupilage by his mother, hatred of presbytery which he expressed at Hampton Court Catherine de Medici, and her favourite Concini, marshal led him to seek its utter overthrow in Scotland. He knew D'Ancre, had the Italian assassinated by Vitry, one of the the sturdy materials that he had to deal with in the Scotroyal guards. This took place in open day, on the draw-tish ministry and people, who had driven out his mother in bridge of the Louvre; and Louis, who was watching the pro- their hatred of catholicism; yet this did not deter him from This free form of the Scottish church had always been extremely repugnant to James's despotic notions. Even when he professed to admire its constitution as the purest and most perfect on earth, he was writhing under its authority; and no sooner did he ascend the English throne than he avowed his real opinion of its inconsistency with monarchy. The hierarchy of England delighted him; he regarded it as the surest bulwark of the throne, and bishops he seemed to regard as the guarantees of royal security. "No bishop no king," was his favourite motto; and the All schools and colleges were subjected, as well as the clergy, to their visitation. The despotism was complete; James thought he had crushed presbyterianism, and fixed episcopacy on a rock for ever. He was never more deceived: he had only closed down the safety valve, ere long to produce an explosion which should hurl his family to destruction. Yet these changes had not been effected without symptoms of resistance, which would have made a wiser monarch pause. At one time he had summoned to London five prelates and eight ministers, as it appeared, to convince them of the reasonableness of his proposed changes by his presumed invincible eloquence. The ministers refused their consent to any of his proposals, declaring that they were delegated to hear and report, not to decide. He demanded of them that they should ask pardon for praying for the banished endeavouring to plant episcopacy as firmly in Scotland as in England. He looked on the spirit and form of the Scotch church but as one remove from republicanism in the state; and his first step, taken in 1605, was a bold one, being no less than to assume the right to prorogue the general assembly at will. This was at once annihilating the theocratic constitution of the assembly, and placing the king at its head. This measure was carried out by Sir George Home, the lord treasurer of Scotland, afterwards earl of Dunbar. The ministers, though prorogued, met again in defiance of the royal fiat, but were dissolved again and again. The ministers from nine presbyteries still boldly met in assertion of the paramount right of the church, at Aberdeen, called themselves "an assembly," appointed a moderator, and before dissolving at the command of the council, adjourned their sitting to a fixed time that year. Thirteen of the most prominent clergymen were imme-ministers; and asked them whether he had not the right, diately arrested on the charge of having violated the act of 1584, "for maintenance of the royal power over all estates." The jury was packed by Dunbar, and six of the most refractory were condemned as guilty of high treason, and banished for life. They retired into Holland and France, and were followed thither by numbers of their admirers. Meantime, at home, undaunted by this lawless exercise of power, the clergy offered up prayers for their exiled brethren, whom they boldly proclaimed from their pulpits as martyrs to the freedom of the faith; and unsilenced by the menaces of the court, loudly warned the people of the impending danger to the church. But James, with the true blind hardihood of a Stuart, went on, and appointed thirteen clergymen to the ancient abolished bishoprics, and gave them precedency in the synods and assembly. The clergy refused to submit to their authority, and as they were unsupported by the ancient reverence, treated their assumed dignity with contempt. But James went on to repeal the act which had confiscated the episcopal estates, endowed the bishops, and made them moderators of both synods and presbyteries within their own districts. He erected two courts of high commission, and, indeed, gave them a power such as their predecessors had never possessed. In 1610 three of these bishops went to England, and received episcopal ordination from the English prelates, and on their return conferred it on their colleagues. And finally in 1612, it was enacted by parliament that all general assemblies should only be appointed by the crown; that the bishops only should present to livings; that they should admit no one who would not first take the oath of supremacy to the king, and of canonical obedience to the bishop; that they should possess the power of deprivation and the right of visitation, each in his own diocese. Thus James had suppressed the constitution of the church which he had formerly blessed God that he belonged to, declaring it "the sincerest kirk in the world," and placed over the groaning people that episcopacy which they abhorred, and had destroyed with so much blood and trouble; and as in all such cases, he carried the new rigour far beyond the old. He placed the archbishops of St. Andrews and Glasgow at the head of his tyrannical high commission courts, and either of these prelates, with four colleagues, were to constitute a quorum, from whose decisions there was no appeal. by his royal authority, to appoint, suspend, and prevent their meetings. Whether, in fact, he did not possess absolute power, as king, over their persons and proceedings, both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as the right to summon them at will and punish them. Andrew Melville, the successor of Knox, boldly though respectfully denied these propositions, asserting the freedom of conscience, and its immunity from the power of any earthly potentate. When pressed by some slavish Scottish lords to conform, he said, "My lords, I am a free subject of Scotland, a free kingdom, that has laws and privileges of its own. By these I stand. No legal citation has been issued against me; nor are you and I in our own country, where such an inquisition, so oppressive as the present, is condemned by parliament. I am bound by no law to criminate or to furnish accusations against myself. My lords, remember what you are; mean as I am, remember that I am a freeborn Scotsman, to be dealt with as you would be dealt with yourselves, according to the laws of the Scottish nation." This was noble and patriotic language; but Melville had to deal with a vain despot, who declared himself above all laws. He insisted on their attending the royal chapel to hear the preaching of his bishops. The plain presbyterian Scots were scandalised at both what they saw and heard there at the ceremonies, the gilded altar, the chalices, and tapers; but above all, at the slavish doctrines of those courtly preachers. The Scotch ministers did not hesitate to express their contempt and indignation at the whole spectacle, and Melville ridiculed the entire service in a Latin epigram. For this audacity James summoned Melville before his privy council; but the preacher's blood was now chafed beyond restraint, for he and his colleagues, though they were impatient to get away from what they considered this idolatrous scene, where the conduct of the bishops and clergy was by no means edifying, were compelled by him to stay. So far from expressing any regret for his satire on the royal mode of worship, he denounced in the strongest terms the whole system of the Anglican church, and in his excitement seized the surplice of the primate, and shook angrily what he called the Romish rags of the archbishop of Canterbury. James committed him to the Tower for his contumacy, where he kept him four years, and then banished him for A.D. 1617.] life. VISIT OF JAMES TO SCOTLAND. 65 He went to reside at Sedan, and died abroad in 1620. | view. He brought in a bill to enact that what the king His nephew, James Melville, was shut up at Berwick, and died six years before his uncle; the rest of the preachers were banished to remote districts of Scotland, wide apart from each other. Soon after the completion of this disgraceful suppression of religious liberty in Scotland, the earl of Dunbar, James's instrument in these proceedings, died, and his different offices were occupied by relatives of Carr, then the favourite, who ruled, so long as Carr was in power, with a rigour more infamous than that of Dunbar himself. Nor was the condition of the catholics one whit better than that of the presbyterians; indeed, the French ambassador, Broderic, declared that it was worse than that of the English catholics. In 1616 a Jesuit of the name of Ogilvie was put to death; the prisons were filled with recusants: every catholic nobleman was compelled to receive a protestant minister into his house, and was informed that unless he conformed to the Anglican church, he must suffer forfeiture of his estates. The persecutions of the earls of Huntley, Angus, Errol, and inany others, are related at length by Balfour. To put the finish to this great and daring change, James determined to make a journey to Scotland himself. On leaving that country he assured his Scottish subjects that he would visit his ancient capital at least once in three years fourteen years had now elapsed without his redeeming his word, his poverty having hitherto presented an insurmountable obstacle. But he had now consented to yield up the cautionary towns, Brill, Flushing, and Rammekens, for 2,728,000 florins instead of 8,000,000, which were due to him. He had been induced to this by his necessities and the persuasions of secretary Winwood, who was said to have received £29,000 from the Dutch for his services on the occasion. James now discharged some of his most pressing debts, and obtained a loan of £96,000, with which he set forward to Scotland in the spring of 1617. On the 7th of June parliament assembled, and James, by his sole authority, excluded such of the representatives as he knew were hostile to his great object of establishing the English church in all its forms and in all its authority, as the state church of Scotland for ever. But the peers, alarmed lest he should restore to his pet church all the lands of which they now were in possession, rejected the lords of the articles whom he recommended. To win over these nobles, James invited them to a secret conference, in which he assured them that no revocation of these lands should be made. Reassured on this head, the peers were ready to vote as he pleased, and he opened parliament in one of his vaunting speeches about his power, in which he told them that "he had nothing more at heart than to reduce their barbarity to the sweet civility of their neighbours; and if the Scots would be as docible to learn the goodness of the English as they were teachable to limp after their ill, then he should not doubt of success; for they had already learnt of the English to drink healths, to wear coaches and gay clothes, to take tobacco, and to speak a language which was neither English nor Scottish." In this insulting speech the king might have included himself both as to clothes and language; but these were small matters in comparison with those which he had in might determine upon regarding the church, with the concurrence of the bishops and a certain number of the clergy, should be good in law. At this proposition the clergy were instantly in arms, and presented so determined a remonstrance against it, that he became afraid, and gave it up, saying, it was unnecessary to give him that by statute which was already his by authority of the crown. He managed, however, to carry a bill adding chapters to the bishoprics, regulating the appointment of bishops, and also one for converting the hereditary offices of sheriffs into annual ones, which he would thus be able to influence. Never, surely, with a spirit so essentially cowardly, was there a monarch so ingrained with the bigotry of absolutism, or who so perseveringly laboured to annihilate every liberty of the subject, and leave the nation a base and soulless heritage of the crown. But the nation had a soul which was not thus to be satrapped and trodden into a horde of serfs; and though James escaped to a quiet tomb, it took a terrible vengeance on his children, whom he had inoculated with his incorrigible lust of absolutism. As nothing more was to be obtained from parliament, the uncouth tyrant wended his way to St. Andrews, where he had planned a severe retribution for the remonstrant clergy, from a more obsequious tribunal. There the clergy having assembled at his summons, he singled out Simpson, Ewart, and Calderwood, who had signed the remonstrance which baulked him of his full intentions, and brought them before the High Commission Court, and condemned Simpson and Ewart to suspension and imprisonment. Calderwood, who by his influence and ability excited most of all his dread and resentment, he banished for life. Having thus given the clergy a sharp lesson, he now announced to them that it was his will that the whole ritual of the English church should be adopted in Scotland in five articles, the name of which afterwards became famous, namely:—1st, That the eucharist should be received in a kneeling and not in a sitting posture, as had been hitherto the mode in Scotland. 2nd, That the sacrament should be given to the sick at their own houses when they were in danger of death. 3rd, That baptism should, in like cases, be administered in private houses. 4th, That the youth should be confirmed by the bishops. 5th, That the festivals of Christmas, Good Friday, Easter, Ascension Day, and Whit Sunday, should be observed in Scotland just as in England. These commands were received with unequivocal marks of displeasure by the clergy, but the fate of the three remonstrants availed to keep them silent for a time, and James regarded his plans as fully accomplished; but anon the clergy fell on their knees and implored him to refer the five articles to the general assembly of the kirk. James for some time refused to listen to them, but on Patrick Galloway assuring him that matters should be so managed that all should go right, he consented. He then kept his Whitsuntide in the English fashion, with all his crouching prelates and courtiers around him, and afterwards took his way homeward, in the full persuasion that he had succeeded in his object. Time told a very different tale; nor was he himself long in perceiving that though he had overawed, he had not subdued the sturdy Scottish clergy. Scarcely had he reached England when he |