His Sowship would pretty willingly,
I think, have blown the House of Commons into the
air himself; for, his dread and jealousy of it knew
no bounds all through his reign. When he was
hard pressed for money he was obliged to order it
to meet, as he could get no money without it; and
when it asked him first to abolish some of the monopolies
in necessaries of life which were a great grievance
to the people, and to redress other public wrongs,
he flew into a rage and got rid of it again.
At one time he wanted it to consent to the Union of
England with Scotland, and quarrelled about that.
At another time it wanted him to put down a most
infamous Church abuse, called the High Commission Court,
and he quarrelled with it about that. At another
time it entreated him not to be quite so fond of his
archbishops and bishops who made speeches in his praise
too awful to be related, but to have some little consideration
for the poor Puritan clergy who were persecuted for
preaching in their own way, and not according to the
archbishops and bishops; and they quarrelled about
that. In short, what with hating the House of
Commons, and pretending not to hate it; and what with
now sending some of its members who opposed him, to
Newgate or to the Tower, and now telling the rest
that they must not presume to make speeches about the
public affairs which could not possibly concern them;
and what with cajoling, and bullying, and fighting,
and being frightened; the House of Commons was the
plague of his Sowship’s existence. It was
pretty firm, however, in maintaining its rights, and
insisting that the Parliament should make the laws,
and not the King by his own single proclamations (which
he tried hard to do); and his Sowship was so often
distressed for money, in consequence, that he sold
every sort of title and public office as if they were
merchandise, and even invented a new dignity called
a Baronetcy, which anybody could buy for a thousand
pounds.
These disputes with his Parliaments,
and his hunting, and his drinking, and his lying in
bed for he was a great sluggard occupied
his Sowship pretty well. The rest of his time
he chiefly passed in hugging and slobbering his favourites.
The first of these was SIR PHILIP HERBERT, who had
no knowledge whatever, except of dogs, and horses,
and hunting, but whom he soon made EARL OF MONTGOMERY.
The next, and a much more famous one, was ROBERT
CARR, or KER (for it is not certain which was his
right name), who came from the Border country, and
whom he soon made VISCOUNT ROCHESTER, and afterwards,
EARL OF SOMERSET. The way in which his Sowship
doted on this handsome young man, is even more odious
to think of, than the way in which the really great
men of England condescended to bow down before him.
The favourite’s great friend was a certain
SIR THOMAS OVERBURY, who wrote his love-letters for
him, and assisted him in the duties of his many high
places, which his own ignorance prevented him from
discharging. But this same Sir Thomas having
just manhood enough to dissuade the favourite from
a wicked marriage with the beautiful Countess of Essex,
who was to get a divorce from her husband for the
purpose, the said Countess, in her rage, got Sir Thomas
put into the Tower, and there poisoned him. Then
the favourite and this bad woman were publicly married
by the King’s pet bishop, with as much to-do
and rejoicing, as if he had been the best man, and
she the best woman, upon the face of the earth.
But, after a longer sunshine than
might have been expected of seven years
or so, that is to say another handsome young
man started up and eclipsed the EARL OF SOMERSET.
This was GEORGE VILLIERS, the youngest son of a Leicestershire
gentleman: who came to Court with all the Paris
fashions on him, and could dance as well as the best
mountebank that ever was seen. He soon danced
himself into the good graces of his Sowship, and danced
the other favourite out of favour. Then, it was
all at once discovered that the Earl and Countess
of Somerset had not deserved all those great promotions
and mighty rejoicings, and they were separately tried
for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and for other
crimes. But, the King was so afraid of his late
favourite’s publicly telling some disgraceful
things he knew of him which he darkly threatened
to do that he was even examined with two
men standing, one on either side of him, each with
a cloak in his hand, ready to throw it over his head
and stop his mouth if he should break out with what
he had it in his power to tell. So, a very lame
affair was purposely made of the trial, and his punishment
was an allowance of four thousand pounds a year in
retirement, while the Countess was pardoned, and allowed
to pass into retirement too. They hated one another
by this time, and lived to revile and torment each
other some years.
While these events were in progress,
and while his Sowship was making such an exhibition
of himself, from day to day and from year to year,
as is not often seen in any sty, three remarkable
deaths took place in England. The first was
that of the Minister, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury,
who was past sixty, and had never been strong, being
deformed from his birth. He said at last that
he had no wish to live; and no Minister need have
had, with his experience of the meanness and wickedness
of those disgraceful times. The second was that
of the Lady Arabella Stuart, who alarmed his Sowship
mightily, by privately marrying WILLIAM SEYMOUR, son
of LORD BEAUCHAMP, who was a descendant of King Henry
the Seventh, and who, his Sowship thought, might consequently
increase and strengthen any claim she might one day
set up to the throne. She was separated from
her husband (who was put in the Tower) and thrust
into a boat to be confined at Durham. She escaped
in a man’s dress to get away in a French ship
from Gravesend to France, but unhappily missed her
husband, who had escaped too, and was soon taken.
She went raving mad in the miserable Tower, and died
there after four years. The last, and the most
important of these three deaths, was that of Prince
Henry, the heir to the throne, in the nineteenth year
of his age. He was a promising young prince,
and greatly liked; a quiet, well-conducted youth,
of whom two very good things are known: first,
that his father was jealous of him; secondly, that
he was the friend of Sir Walter Raleigh, languishing
through all those years in the Tower, and often said
that no man but his father would keep such a bird
in such a cage. On the occasion of the preparations
for the marriage of his sister the Princess Elizabeth
with a foreign prince (and an unhappy marriage it turned
out), he came from Richmond, where he had been very
ill, to greet his new brother-in-law, at the palace
at Whitehall. There he played a great game at
tennis, in his shirt, though it was very cold weather,
and was seized with an alarming illness, and died
within a fortnight of a putrid fever. For this
young prince Sir Walter Raleigh wrote, in his prison
in the Tower, the beginning of a History of the World:
a wonderful instance how little his Sowship could
do to confine a great man’s mind, however long
he might imprison his body.
And this mention of Sir Walter Raleigh,
who had many faults, but who never showed so many
merits as in trouble and adversity, may bring me at
once to the end of his sad story. After an imprisonment
in the Tower of twelve long years, he proposed to
resume those old sea voyages of his, and to go to
South America in search of gold. His Sowship,
divided between his wish to be on good terms with
the Spaniards through whose territory Sir Walter must
pass (he had long had an idea of marrying Prince Henry
to a Spanish Princess), and his avaricious eagerness
to get hold of the gold, did not know what to do.
But, in the end, he set Sir Walter free, taking securities
for his return; and Sir Walter fitted out an expedition
at his own coast and, on the twenty-eighth of March,
one thousand six hundred and seventeen, sailed away
in command of one of its ships, which he ominously
called the Destiny. The expedition failed; the
common men, not finding the gold they had expected,
mutinied; a quarrel broke out between Sir Walter and
the Spaniards, who hated him for old successes of
his against them; and he took and burnt a little town
called SAINT THOMAS. For this he was denounced
to his Sowship by the Spanish Ambassador as a pirate;
and returning almost broken-hearted, with his hopes
and fortunes shattered, his company of friends dispersed,
and his brave son (who had been one of them) killed,
he was taken through the treachery of SIR
LEWIS STUKELY, his near relation, a scoundrel and a
Vice-Admiral and was once again immured
in his prison-home of so many years.
His Sowship being mightily disappointed
in not getting any gold, Sir Walter Raleigh was tried
as unfairly, and with as many lies and evasions as
the judges and law officers and every other authority
in Church and State habitually practised under such
a King. After a great deal of prevarication
on all parts but his own, it was declared that he must
die under his former sentence, now fifteen years old.
So, on the twenty-eighth of October, one thousand
six hundred and eighteen, he was shut up in the Gate
House at Westminster to pass his late night on earth,
and there he took leave of his good and faithful lady
who was worthy to have lived in better days.
At eight o’clock next morning, after a cheerful
breakfast, and a pipe, and a cup of good wine, he was
taken to Old Palace Yard in Westminster, where the
scaffold was set up, and where so many people of high
degree were assembled to see him die, that it was
a matter of some difficulty to get him through the
crowd. He behaved most nobly, but if anything
lay heavy on his mind, it was that Earl of Essex,
whose head he had seen roll off; and he solemnly said
that he had had no hand in bringing him to the block,
and that he had shed tears for him when he died.
As the morning was very cold, the Sheriff said, would
he come down to a fire for a little space, and warm
himself? But Sir Walter thanked him, and said
no, he would rather it were done at once, for he was
ill of fever and ague, and in another quarter of an
hour his shaking fit would come upon him if he were
still alive, and his enemies might then suppose that
he trembled for fear. With that, he kneeled and
made a very beautiful and Christian prayer. Before
he laid his head upon the block he felt the edge of
the axe, and said, with a smile upon his face, that
it was a sharp medicine, but would cure the worst disease.
When he was bent down ready for death, he said to the
executioner, finding that he hesitated, ‘What
dost thou fear? Strike, man!’ So, the
axe came down and struck his head off, in the sixty-sixth
year of his age.
The new favourite got on fast.
He was made a viscount, he was made Duke of Buckingham,
he was made a marquis, he was made Master of the Horse,
he was made Lord High Admiral and the Chief
Commander of the gallant English forces that had dispersed
the Spanish Armada, was displaced to make room for
him. He had the whole kingdom at his disposal,
and his mother sold all the profits and honours of
the State, as if she had kept a shop. He blazed
all over with diamonds and other precious stones, from
his hatband and his earrings to his shoes. Yet
he was an ignorant presumptuous, swaggering compound
of knave and fool, with nothing but his beauty and
his dancing to recommend him. This is the gentleman
who called himself his Majesty’s dog and slave,
and called his Majesty Your Sowship. His Sowship
called him STEENIE; it is supposed, because that was
a nickname for Stephen, and because St. Stephen was
generally represented in pictures as a handsome saint.
His Sowship was driven sometimes to
his wits’-end by his trimming between the general
dislike of the Catholic religion at home, and his desire
to wheedle and flatter it abroad, as his only means
of getting a rich princess for his son’s wife:
a part of whose fortune he might cram into his greasy
pockets. Prince Charles or as his
Sowship called him, Baby Charles being
now PRINCE OF WALES, the old project of a marriage
with the Spanish King’s daughter had been revived
for him; and as she could not marry a Protestant without
leave from the Pope, his Sowship himself secretly
and meanly wrote to his Infallibility, asking for it.
The negotiation for this Spanish marriage takes up
a larger space in great books, than you can imagine,
but the upshot of it all is, that when it had been
held off by the Spanish Court for a long time, Baby
Charles and Steenie set off in disguise as Mr. Thomas
Smith and Mr. John Smith, to see the Spanish Princess;
that Baby Charles pretended to be desperately in love
with her, and jumped off walls to look at her, and
made a considerable fool of himself in a good many
ways; that she was called Princess of Wales and that
the whole Spanish Court believed Baby Charles to be
all but dying for her sake, as he expressly told them
he was; that Baby Charles and Steenie came back to
England, and were received with as much rapture as
if they had been a blessing to it; that Baby Charles
had actually fallen in love with HENRIETTA MARIA,
the French King’s sister, whom he had seen in
Paris; that he thought it a wonderfully fine and princely
thing to have deceived the Spaniards, all through;
and that he openly said, with a chuckle, as soon as
he was safe and sound at home again, that the Spaniards
were great fools to have believed him.
Like most dishonest men, the Prince
and the favourite complained that the people whom
they had deluded were dishonest. They made such
misrepresentations of the treachery of the Spaniards
in this business of the Spanish match, that the English
nation became eager for a war with them. Although
the gravest Spaniards laughed at the idea of his Sowship
in a warlike attitude, the Parliament granted money
for the beginning of hostilities, and the treaties
with Spain were publicly declared to be at an end.
The Spanish ambassador in London probably
with the help of the fallen favourite, the Earl of
Somerset being unable to obtain speech
with his Sowship, slipped a paper into his hand, declaring
that he was a prisoner in his own house, and was entirely
governed by Buckingham and his creatures. The
first effect of this letter was that his Sowship began
to cry and whine, and took Baby Charles away from Steenie,
and went down to Windsor, gabbling all sorts of nonsense.
The end of it was that his Sowship hugged his dog
and slave, and said he was quite satisfied.
He had given the Prince and the favourite
almost unlimited power to settle anything with the
Pope as to the Spanish marriage; and he now, with
a view to the French one, signed a treaty that all
Roman Catholics in England should exercise their religion
freely, and should never be required to take any oath
contrary thereto. In return for this, and for
other concessions much less to be defended, Henrietta
Maria was to become the Prince’s wife, and was
to bring him a fortune of eight hundred thousand crowns.
His Sowship’s eyes were getting
red with eagerly looking for the money, when the end
of a gluttonous life came upon him; and, after a fortnight’s
illness, on Sunday the twenty-seventh of March, one
thousand six hundred and twenty-five, he died.
He had reigned twenty-two years, and was fifty-nine
years old. I know of nothing more abominable
in history than the adulation that was lavished on
this King, and the vice and corruption that such a
barefaced habit of lying produced in his court.
It is much to be doubted whether one man of honour,
and not utterly self-disgraced, kept his place near
James the First. Lord Bacon, that able and wise
philosopher, as the First Judge in the Kingdom in this
reign, became a public spectacle of dishonesty and
corruption; and in his base flattery of his Sowship,
and in his crawling servility to his dog and slave,
disgraced himself even more. But, a creature
like his Sowship set upon a throne is like the Plague,
and everybody receives infection from him.