The king's pecuniary necessities at last compelled him to meet parliament in February 1610. His opening speech was on this occasion still more offensive than any which he had yet delivered. He asserted that kings were before laws, and that all laws were granted by them as matter of favour only to the people. He declared that he would not allow his power to be disputed upon; and ended by demanding a pecuniary supply. The commons voted a supply considerably inferior to the royal demand, and in the month of July, parliament was prorogued to the ensuing October. On reassembling, the commons continued as intractable as ever in money-matters, and would vote no supplies without an equivalent in privileges. It was in vain that James alternately flattered and threatened them; they continued inflexible, and James at last dissolved in anger this his first parliament, and had recourse to the meanest shifts to supply his pecuniary necessities. He revived an obsolete law, which compelled all persons possessed of £40 a year in land to compound for not receiving the order of knighthood; he created a new title, that of baronet, and exposed it for sale to any one who could give £1,000 for it. Even the peerage itself was offered to sale: the title of earl might be had for £20,000; of viscount for £10,000; and of baron for £5000.

The death of the king's promising son, Prince Henry, in 1612, diffused universal gloom over the nation, which was however somewhat lightened by the nuptials of James's only surviving daughter, the following year, to the elector-palatine. In 1614, the king had recourse to a benevolence which gained him only £50,000.

It had always been a favourite project of James's to bring the church of Scotland, in point of government and ceremonies, as near as possible to the model of the English church. Episcopacy had been already established in Scotland, but it was not yet what the king wished it to be; the ceremonies of the Anglican church were wanting; a high-commission court was likewise wanting to complete James's ideas of what a well-ordered ecclesiastical polity should be. Early in the summer of 1617, he undertook a journey to his native kingdom for this purpose, but concealing his real motives under an affectation of attachment to his dear Scotland, or, to use the elegant language of his own proclamation, a salmon-lyke instinct, a great and natural longing to see our native soyle and place of our birth and breeding." The earl of Buckingham, and a party of favourite courtiers, with three bishops, composed his train on this occasion. The royal progress was very magnificent and stately. James wished to impress his old subjects with profound ideas of his new grandeur as sovereign of England, and for that purpose spent a much greater sum than his impoverished finances could well afford in the equipment and accompaniments of his cortege. The Scots on their part prepared to receive his majesty with all honours, and especially with those scenes of pedantic trifling and fulsome adulation for which he had such a liking. One orator told him that his departure from Scotland, though to take possession of a crown, had overwhelmed his faithful Scottish subjects with affliction, "deepe sorrowe and fear possessing their herts, their places of solace only giving a new heate to the fever of the languishing remembrance of their former happiness; the verie hilles and groves, accustomed of before to be refreshed with the dewe of his majesty's presence, had ceased to put on their wonted ap

parell, and with pale looks represented their miserie for the departure of their royal king." The universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews held solemn disputations before his majesty, who testified his satisfaction of the entertainment by punning on the names of the exhibitors. After spending several weeks in this way, James retired to Falkland to enjoy the pleasures of the chace amid the scenes of his youth, while his ministers employed themselves in concocting the measures by which conformity might be secured in Scotland. The Scottish parliament met on the 17th of June, and an act was proposed as the basis of all further proceedings, declaring, "that in ecclesiastical affairs, whatever should be determined by the king, with the advice of the prelates, and a competent number of the clergy, should receive the operation and force of law." The clergy instantly protested against a measure which would have virtually annihilated their church, and James was constrained to yield to their remonstrance, but he avenged himself by establishing a court of high-commission, which instantly passed sentence of deprivation against several of the protesters. He, however, consented to submit his propositions to a general assembly of the Scottish church, which accordingly met soon after his return to England. The conces sions which the assembled clergy agreed to make proved unsatisfactory, and roused James to a high pitch of resentment, in the dread of which a second general assembly, held at Perth in August, 1618, sanctioned the five following articles: namely, that the eucharist should be received kneeling; that it should be administered in private to the sick; that baptism should be privately administered in cases of necessity; that episcopal confirmation should be given to youth; and that the great festivals of the church should be duly celebrated. Sir Walter Scott has been pleased to say, that these articles had at least decency to recommend them, and to express his surprise at the "headlong opposition" with which they were met by the presbyterians-for there was hardly a parish in Scotland which really observed them; and a very recent biographer of James thinks that Scotsmen of the present age must wonder at the abhorrence with which their ancestors regarded "these innocent and perhaps laudable innovations." Both the historian and the biographer evidently lose sight of the real merits of the case when they talk thus. If the observances in question were really so trifling in their nature, the pertinacity of the king in thrusting them upon a portion of his subjects, at the risk of driving them from their allegiance, was surely much more ridiculous and blame-worthy than the obstinacy of the presbyterians in rejecting them. But the people of Scotland did not regard the proposed measures as of trifling import; they beheld in them an approximation to a religion which they regarded as idolatrous, and, whether they were right or not in the opinion, they conscientiously held it, and acted just as men should act in such circumstances; they rejected the right of man to interfere between God and their consciences.

The death of Raleigh, and the condemnation of the lord-treasurer for corruption, and the death of the queen, were the principal incidents of the year 1618. Probably James himself would have added to this dry chronology of great events the important one of the publication, in this year, of a complete collection of his own prose works, both in the originai and in a Latin translation. This publication was edited by James

Montague, brother to the lord-treasurer. In 1611 James had displayed his zeal for orthodoxy by haughtily remonstrating with the Dutch States for permitting the Arminian, Vorstius, to hold a professorship in one of their universities. The same motives of state policy which induced the States to compliment the king of England by removing Vorstius from his chair, led them to invite James to send delegates to the famous synod of Dort, which met in November 1618. We shall have occasion to notice this celebrated meeting more fully in our sketches of Hall and Davenant, two of James's deputies. We may only remark here that James carried more than his usual prudence in the selection of his delegates, and the instructions which he tendered to them on this occasion.

The close of the life of James was signalized by violent contests with his parliament, which prepared dreadful consequences for his successor. He was also much disquieted by the misfortunes of his son-in-law, the elector-palatine, who had been stripped of all his dominions by the em peror. Urged by natural feelings for the protestant cause, James was at length, in 1624, induced to declare war against Spain and the emperor. It was not, however, without great reluctance that he consented to this step, nor would any considerations of national honour or interest have persuaded him to it, had not his son Charles and his favourite Buckingham, for once in the pursuit of their own private ends, supported the popular cause. The military expedition, however, to Holland proved a miserable failure. Spinola's generalship overmatched that of Maurice; the French court stood aloof from the struggle, and the Dutch received their English allies with coldness and inhumanity. Chagrined at the turn which affairs had taken towards his favourite ally, Spain,-distracted by the cabals of his courtiers,—and irritated by what appeared to him the arrogance of his parliament and the disloyalty of his people,-James's health, already shaken by the intemperate use of strong and sweet wines and repeated attacks of gout, began to give way; and early in the spring of 1625, he was seized with tertian ague, which carried him off on the 27th of March in the same year, but not without suspicions of foul play from Buckingham. This monarch has found an able biographer in Miss Lucy Aikin,' and an amusing one, at least, in Mr Robert Chambers.5 We shall avail ourselves of Miss Aikin's pen in summing up the general character of James. "It is agreed by all writers," says this instructive authoress, "that a monarch has seldom quitted the world less deplored by his subjects than James I.; his detractors ascribe this insensibility to his demerits, his panegyrists to the ingratitude of human nature; more impartial estimators may be inclined to compromise the difference, by saying that the intentions of this prince were better than his performance; and that the people, who suffered by his errors of judgment, were little inclined to accept, in so important a concern as the good government of the country, the will for the deed.

"The praise of wisdom so profusely lavished upon this sovereign during his lifetime, appears to those who study only the public history of his reign, peculiarly and eminently inapplicable. In England, he

• Memoirs of the Court of King James the First. London, 1832. 2 vol. 8vo. 2d ed. Life of King James the First in Constable's Miscellany. Edin. 1830.

never succeeded in a single favourite object of his policy; and both his objects themselves and his modes of pursuing them were so repugnant to the feelings and judgments of his subjects, that he lost in the vain pursuit of them that for which no success could have indemnified him, -the general esteem and attachment. Yet to speculative wisdom the monarch might advance some plausible pretensions: it is true that in his writings and speeches there is much bad logic, and that he sometimes avails himself of arguments which might with more effect be turned against him; they are also blemished by many levities, indiscretions and even indecorums of expression, and by the quaintness and pedantry which were the vices of the age; but they still exhibit marks of acuteness, of reflection, and of a kind of talent. No one was more skilful in starting objections and foreseeing dangers and difficulties; and the event gave, in some instances, a character of prophetic truth to his warnings which must have been the result of genuine sagacity. In the arguments which he loved to hold with the scholars and divines who attended him at his meals, he often excited unaffected admiration; for his learning on the favourite topics of the time was considerable, his memory ready, his expression fluent; his replies were often happy, and his doubts and questions pertinent and well urged.

"The apophthegms of King James, collected and published either during his life or soon after his death, are for the most part only of a moderate degree of merit; but some of his bon-mots are entitled to higher praise the most favourable specimen of them is perhaps his exhortation to some insignificant person on whom he was conferring the honour of knighthood, while his sheepish looks proclaimed his own sense of his unworthiness to sustain this dignity:- Hold up thy head, man, I have more cause to be ashamed than thou!'

"In his youth, the monarch paid homage to the muses; he ventured to indite a love-sonnet to Queen Elizabeth,-of which however she did not deign even to acknowledge the receipt,—and he published at Edinburgh a poem called the Furies, translated from Du Bartas,-a French writer of temporary celebrity;—a heroic, poem on the battle of Lepanto, and several other pieces. The style of the royal poet strongly resembles that of the noted Sternhold, nor was his imagination more brilliant than his diction.

"One of the offices which James was most fond of assuming, was that of an examiner of delinquents; and in this capacity, where his real skill and ingenuity were aided by the awe which royalty inspires, and by his contempt for the maxim of English law which protects suspected criminals from answering questions dangerous to themselves, his success was sometimes remarkable. In the affair of Overbury, he contrived to extract from Sir Gervase Elways confessions which cost him his life; he drove the sleeping preacher to a full avowal of his ridiculous imposture, and by his unwearied exertions detected several pretended demoniacs, and brought them to ask pardon on their knees. These counterfeits, whose appearance was frequent during the reign of James, were usually the puppets either of a catholic priest or a puritan minister, who sought by this means one of two ends,-to cast upon his opponents the imputation of having bewitched innocent persons,—or to acquire for himself the reputation of successful exorcism; a gift which all parties believed to be distinctive of professors of the true religion

That such impositions were in fact connected with the designs of religious parties, is the only circumstance capable of palliating the ridicule attached to a king of England gravely occupying himself, and sometimes his privy-council, in watching the contortions, and making minutes of the ravings, of a set of miserable wretches, either pure impostors or the real subjects of epilepsy, who might with so much less ceremony have been consigned to the remedial methods of an hospital or a bridewell.

"One advantage however accrued to the sovereign himself from these investigations; they disclosed to him such examples of knavery, delusion and imposture in these matters, that he is said to have heartily repented the support which he had lent to popular superstition by the publication of his 'Demonologia,' and, in his latter years, to have nearly renounced his faith in witchcraft.

"Vanity was a leading foible in the character of James, and one source of some of the principal mistakes of his reign. It was an overweening of his own eloquence and polemical skill which tempted him to hold the conference at Hampton court, where, under the notion of confuting the refractory puritans, he insulted them by menaces and revilings, and thus converted this formidable party from mere dissatisfied sectaries, into determined political enemies. The same principle, exalting his idea of the surpassing majesty of the kingly character, prompted him to indulge in those arrogant and even blasphemous representations of his own prerogative and dignity which filled all true Englishmen with indignation and disgust, and implanted in the bosoms of his parliaments jealousies which he found it impossible to eradicate. It was in a great measure also his vanity which prompted him to seek, on behalf of his heir, those alliances with the great catholic sovereigns which became the source of so much offence to his people, and finally of irreparable ruin to his posterity.

"On his propensity to favouritism it is needless to expatiate; every page in his history is an exemplification of his weakness, and of the endless mischiefs which it is calculated to produce. The only excuse for his blind indulgence to the objects of his affection, must be derived from his boundless good-nature; which overflowed upon all who approached him, and rendered it a moral impossibility for him to refuse any request urged with importunity. His profuse liberality, which sprung from the same source, was the chief if not the sole cause of his constant want of money; for his personal habits were simple and uniform in a remarkable degree; he cared for few objects of magnificence, and indulged in no expensive pleasures, unless the sports of the field deserve to be accounted such when pursued by a monarch. Of these sports, in which James consumed so large a portion of his time, it was the worst effect, that they contributed to foster that irascibility on small provocations which so frequently transported him beyond the bounds of dignity and even of common decency, and on some occasions exposed him to the contempt, of the meanest of his people. An anecdote to this effect, related by Sir Thomas Wentworth, afterwards earl of Strafford, belongs to the last year of James's life, and may here find a place.

“‹ I will . . . . write you news from the court at Rufford, where the loss of a stag, and the hounds hunting foxes instead of deer, put the