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CHAPTER V.

CHURCH AND STATE AFTER THE ACCESSION OF JAMES I.— AUTHORISED VERSION OF THE BIBLE.

King James I.

JAMES THE FIRST came to the English throne a man of thirty-seven, more gifted by education than by nature, though he had much natural shrewdness in dealing with the surfaces of things, to make up for the want of any power to look far below the surface. It was not his fault that the weak flattery of courts had taught him from childhood to over-estimate his own considerable attainments, and to mistake his goodhumoured shrewdness for the statesman's grasp of thought. He meant well, and sought to deal wisely with the pressing questions of his day, but he had no aspirations strong enough to lift him up out of himself. He had no motive of action so continuous as a complacent wish to maintain his personal position as a phoenix of intelligence, and the supremacy in Church and State of his own office of king. He did not regard the supremacy of the Crown in England as means to an end, but as in itself the end towards which he should shape his policy. He had no wish to oppress subjects who did not thwart him.

Though he was bred a Protestant, the Roman Catholics might reasonably expect from the son of Mary Queen of Scots a relief from a tyranny under which they all incurred the punishment of death for hearing mass, and priests of theirs who led pure and exemplary lives, as well as those

who plotted the overthrow of the Protestant rule in England, were sent to the gallows.

A Jesuit under Elizabeth: Robert Southwell.

Law under Elizabeth condemned the pure-souled Robert Southwell to be drawn on a hurdle to Tyburn, there hanged, and taken down alive from the gallows, that his heart might be cut out of him and burnt. He was executed, at the age of thirtythree, on the twenty-second of February, 1595, dying so firm in faith and love, that Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who was present, exclaimed, "May my soul be with this man's!" Mountjoy assisted the people in preventing the barbarity of cutting the body down before life had departed. Southwell was a loyal subject who died as a traitor, "because," as he said, "I am a Catholic priest, elected into the Society of Jesus in my youth; nor has any other thing during the last three years in which I have been imprisoned been charged against me." His tortures in imprisonment, when brought into the hands of the fanatical Richard Topclyffe, who boasted of his delight in such work and his desire to burn all Jesuits to powder, was so borne that the Lord Treasurer Cecil wrote of him: "Let antiquity boast of its Roman heroes and the patience of captives. in torments our own age is not inferior to it, nor do the minds of the English cede to the Romans. There is at present confined one Southwell, a Jesuit, who, thirteen. times most cruelly tortured, cannot be induced to confess anything, not even the colour of the horse whereon on a certain day he rode, lest from such indication his adversaries might conjecture in what house, or in company of what Catholics, he that day was."

Robert Southwell, born in 1562, third son of Richard Southwell, of Horsham St. Faith's in Norfolk, had been sent, at the age of fifteen, to be educated at Paris. He went on to Rome, and was then received into the Society of Jesus before he had completed his seventeenth year. He

went to Tournay for a short time, but was recalled to complete his studies in Rome, where he was made Prefect of the English College. In 1585 he was ordained priest, and he was sent in July of the following year with Henry Garnet into England. Here he lived as domestic chaplain and confessor to the Countess of Arundel, and sought peacefully for six years to bring back into the spiritual fold of his own church many of those who had feared to remain in it. From 1592 he was a prisoner until his death upon the gallows in 1595, and it was only after his execution that men learnt what music had been in the soul they sent to heaven.

In 1595 Southwell's first little book appeared, "Saint Peter's Complaint, with other Poems," printed by J. Wolfe, and again in the same year by Gabriel Cawood. It was followed, still in the same year, by "Mæoniæ; or, certain excellent Poems and spirituall Hymnes, omitted in the last impression of 'Peter's Complaint'; being needful thereunto to be annexed, as being both divine and wittie. All composed by R. S. Imprinted by Valentine Sims, for J. Busbie." Valentine Sims issued also in the same year, "The Triumph over Death; or, a Consolatorie Epistle for Afflicted Minds in the Affects of dying Friends. First written for the Consolation of one, but now published for the General Good of all." A few more pieces were added later; "Marie Magdalene's Funeral Teares" were printed for W. Leake in 1609.

Southwell's poems express the spirit of religion rather than the form. "Saint Peter's Complaint" is the pious soul's lament for an hour of weakness in which Christ was denied; "The Magdalene's Tears" are of repentance for the stain of a false love in one who now looks only to the true. There is a collection of love poems, in which Southwell dwells upon the love to God that has its chief fruition after death. God's Love is to the Soul of man, and at the close

of a short poem-"At Home in Heaven "-enforcing this, Southwell exclaims—

"O Soul! out of thyself seek God alone:

Grace more than thine, but God's, the world hath none."

Such grace in Southwell shines through all his verse. But he was drawn on a hurdle through the mud to Tyburn, and at the foot of the gallows wiped the mud from his face with a handkerchief that his friends laid by as a sacred relic.

James was treated with, before his accession to the throne, and gave good hope to the Roman Catholics. The Change No quiet subject, he said, should be persecuted of Reign. for his religion. That also was his private purpose, though it implied only toleration to the laity. The Roman Catholic priests being, as he felt, natural enemies to the supremacy of the Crown in Church matters, he meant to send them all abroad if possible. Desire for the subversion of Protestant rule in England had been intensified by penalties of death for celebrating mass, and fines on recusants.

There were two under-currents of Roman Catholic plotting when James came to England: one was set in movement by those Jesuits who looked for help from Spain in setting a Roman Catholic upon the throne; the other was a wild scheme of a secular priest, William Watson, who hated the Jesuits, and had a plan of his own for carrying the king off to the Tower, and there converting him. Discovery of Watson's plot implicated other men in suspicions. Lord Cobham was arrested, and from him accusation passed on to Sir Walter Raleigh, whom James had promptly begun to strip of honours and possessions. trial, in November, 1603 (at which Raleigh, of all men in England the one least open to such a charge, had been denounced by the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, as "a monster with an English face, but a Spanish heart"

G-VOL. XI.

Raleigh sent to the Tower.

After a

Raleigh! whose ruling passion might almost be said to be animosity to Spain, and whom James eventually caused to be executed at the wish of Spain), Sir Walter Raleigh was condemned to death as guilty of high treason by sharing in a plot to depose James and make Arabella Stuart queen. Raleigh was respited, but detained during the next twelve years as a prisoner in the Tower of London.

King James and the Roman Catholics.

On the twenty-second of February the king issued a proclamation ordering all Jesuits and seminary priests to leave the realm before the nineteenth of March. But he forgave the Roman Catholic laity their fines. as recusants; he had placed a Roman Catholic upon his Privy Council; and he was making peace with Spain. The proclamation for expulsion of the priests immediately produced another plot. The day of issue of the proclamation was the day after Ash Wednesday, 1604, and in the beginning of Lent Robert Catesby called Thomas Winter to London to join with himself and John Wright in a plot for blowing up the Parliament House. At the end of April an Englishman of known audacity, Guido Fawkes, was brought from Flanders. Thomas Percy, who was related to the Earl of Northumberland, completed the number of five, who were first bound by an oath of secrecy to united effort for attainment of their purpose. On the twenty-fourth of May, 1604, Percy took a house adjoining the Parliament House, and Guido Fawkes, under the name of John Johnson, lived with him as a servant. The house at Lambeth in which Catesby lodged was taken for use in storing materials. At the end of the year, Parliament being expected to meet in February, 1605, underground boring was begun at the wall of the Parliament House, which was nine feet thick. When Parliament was prorogued until October, the work was relaxed; it was then resumed again under difficulties, till the conspirators heard that there ran under the Parliament House a cellar from which a stock of coals was being sold