to scrutinize. Nevertheless the sense of right and the spirit of inquiry were alive, though not in active exercise; and it is highly probable that had not the person and government of Elizabeth been endeared to the nation by the risks which both encountered, the commencement of the great drama which was afterwards acted out, might have been considerably antedated.

When the sceptre descended to the hands of James the case was greatly altered; and, as in the instance of Elizabeth, the personal qualities and character of the sovereign would probably have longer deferred the crisis, so there can be no doubt that the principles and characters of James and Charles the First did greatly accelerate its approach. Perhaps of all men living, James the First was the least adapted for the times on which he fell. With his high pretensions, his claims to divine right and unlimited prerogative, coupled with an imbecility of mind and body which rendered them, in him, not dreadful but contemptible; governing not by rectitude and wisdom, but by insincerity and craft; while his dread of war, amounting to personal cowardice, and the consequently pacific state of the kingdom in his reign, afforded ample leisure to the awakening people to scrutinize his pretensions, and to appreciate and put forth their own.

The Puritans were particularly obnoxious to James; not only his principles, if his predilections may deserve so good a name, but his very tastes and habits must have led him to detest and fear them. We have already spoken of his monarchical doctrines, and he considered the Puritans to be the enemies of monarchy. He had become Arminian in his creed, and of course the state bishops had become so too: the Puritans were almost to a man Calvinistic. The Arminians of the day were the friends of arbitrary power; the Puritans were anything but this. James was a profane swearer and a drunkard, to say nothing of other vices, which with some show of justice have been imputed to him, and he naturally hated men whose opinions, aye, and whose lives as well, were a constant condemnation of his own. At the same time it may safely be conceded, that the treatment which James had met with from the dominant and intolerant church party in Scotland had probably tended to increase his predilection for the form of church government established in England, over which, by means of his acknowledged supremacy, and through the medium of its supple hierarchy, he could exercise an almost unlimited control. That he should make common cause with those who so gratefully repaid his favors, was natural enough; nor did he care how high they carried their pretensions, provided only they were subservient to his own. The visible and apostolic church

-that is, Laud and Bancroft-might excommunicate, and fine, and mutilate, provided that the power so acquired was held in trust for him. Whatever tended to enervate or dismay the minds of men was useful to the sovereign who sought to govern by virtue of inherent right instead of delegated power, by prerogative and not by law.

It may be, too, that to a certain extent he was a self-deceiver; it is certain that he prided himself on his abilities for government, and at least as much upon his orthodoxy: and that more than one calamity of the most revolting kind was the direct result of his spiritual complacency.

In 1611, he signalized both his orthodoxy, and, what in all probability he valued quite as highly, his polemical skill, in the controversy which he set on foot against Conrad Vorstius, the celebrated Dutch divine, who had published a work on the nature and attributes of the Divinity, in which the king discovered a great number of what he chose to call 'damnable here'sies.' The Dutch declining at his request (made through his ambassador Winwood) to remove Vorstius from the professorship of divinity at Leyden, James transmitted to them an admonition in his own hand writing, in which he 'bade them ' remember that the King of England was defender of the faith, ' and that it would be in his competency, in union with other 'foreign churches, to extinguish and remand to hell those 'abominable heresies.' He told them that this wretched Vorstius deserved to be burned alive, as much as any heretic that had ever suffered. He left it to their Christian wisdom to burn him or not, but as to allowing him upon any defence or abnegation to teach and preach, it was a thing so abominable that he assured himself it would never enter into any of their 'thoughts.' To all this the Hollanders returned a very cool and evasive answer. Then James entered a public protest against the heresies of Vorstius, and informed the States that they must either give up their divinity professor, or forfeit the friendship of the King of England. Afterwards he published a work in French of his own composing, entitled a Declaration against Vorstius.' The result was, that the Gomarists (Calvinists) joining with him, Vorstius was deprived of his professorship, and expelled from Leyden. The Synod of Dort gave judgment against him, and he was sentenced to perpetual banishment. Seven hundred families who held his tenets shared his fate. After wandering for years in terror for his life, he and the other exiles were offered an asylum in the dominions of the Duke of Holstein, where he died in 1622. These were the triumphs in which James delighted. Not satisfied with this, however, he rekindled the fires of martyrdom in his own dominions, and was the last king of England who signed the writ

'de hæretico comburendo.' One Bartholomew Legate, who is described as an obstinate Arian heretic, was apprehended and examined by the king and some of the bishops, afterwards tried before the Consistory Court, condemned, and burned in Smithfield, March 18, 1612. On the 11th of April following, Edward Wightman, convicted of heresy, was burned at Litchfield-the poor creature was a lunatic, who fancied himself the Holy Spirit. Another victim was ready, but the lawyers began to question whether the proceedings were strictly legal, and the bishops to doubt' (not whether they were accordant with the spirit of Christianity but) whether they were useful to their Church!-Vol. iii. p. 48.

Henry the Eighth was at least impartial in his bigotry; if he hanged the Catholic, he also burned the Protestant who ventured to receive as truth what he denounced as falsehood. Not so James; in perfect consistency with his general character, he persecuted only in what he thought the safe direction. His clemency to the Catholics is supposed to have arisen from fear of provoking too far so powerful and unscrupulous a body, especially after he had experienced of what they were capable on the discovery of the powder plot. Whether he was still further inclined to please them on account of his Queen Anne of Denmark, who was a devoted and bigoted Catholic, must now be left to conjecture; that she had not much influence over him appears from a letter which she wrote to the Duke of Buckingham, requesting his interference with James in favor of Sir Walter Raleigh; which letter, as it is a curious composition, and does credit to her feelings, we shall insert.

ANNA R.

'My kind Dog,*

If I have any power or credit with you, I pray you let me have a trial of it at this time, in dealing sincerely and earnestly with the king, that Sir Walter Raleigh's life may not be called in question. If you do it so that ye success may answer my expectation, assure yourself that I will take it extraordinary kindly at your hands, and rest one that wisheth you well, and desires you to continue still, as you have been, a true servant to your master.

To y Marquiss of Buckingham.

The application was unsuccessful, but the writer of the letter is not, therefore, the less to be honored for making it. The history of the latter days of that great but somewhat unscrupu

The reader is probably aware that Buckingham in his letters to the king subscribes himself Your slave and dog.'

lous man, Sir Walter Raleigh, is a disgrace to the character and government of James.

The principal objects of the king appear to have been to unite the kingdoms of England and Scotland; to put down the liberty of the subject; to suppress the Puritans; to conciliate the Catholics; to make Ireland protestant and Scotland episcopal; and to ally his family with Spain. In each and all of which he failed.

During his reign the Catholics were sometimes treated with rigor, sometimes with indulgence; they complained loudly, but after all they were better used than the Puritans. The latter were unceasingly and progressively oppressed. Even the judges had been induced to sanction the proceedings of the High Commission Court against them, declaring that the king had the right of making orders and constitutions for the clergy, and of depriving them if they disobeyed; and that to petition against such proceedings was high treason: and the Puritan ministers were not only deprived, but were moreover forbidden to worship in their own way; so that at the death of James, 'contempt, disgust, and the bitter feelings engendered by the persecutions they underwent, converted the Puritans generally, 'before the close of his reign, into zealots for a reformation in 'the state as well as in the church.'-Vol. iii. p. 497.

It was fortunate for the nation that the grand attempt upon its liberties was made by such a man as Charles the First; had his mind been as powerful and acute, and his moral strength as great, as his will was arbitrary and his conscience supple, it might have gone ill with us; but fortunately, he often feared to carry out his own designs, and, when he was engaged too far, he sought to retrace his course by tortuous and discreditable ways, or to explain away his intentions by prevarications and double meanings; or to disguise them by solemn assertions and appeals to heaven, of the utter falsehood of which not only he, but all about him, were perfectly aware. Cold, proud, obstinate, and insincere by nature; indebted to his education under his father for his notions of kingcraft and high prerogative, and, as appears to us, to the lessons of his friend and tutor Buckingham, for a boldness and rashness in action, which were not quite his own, and in which, therefore, he did not always persevere, though his natural obstinacy sometimes came to his assistance or covered his retreat that these qualities when taken as a whole would make precisely the kind of man who would follow the course that was pursued by Charles the First, and much in the same manner, may perhaps in some degree be made apparent by the slight sketch of his proceedings which we are about to give.

It is not our wish to detract in any way from the estimable qualities of Charles; but we must just remark, that the

coldness of his disposition above alluded to, may account in some degree for the negative domestic virtues to which his eulogists attach so much importance. That he was faithful to his queen is not denied; that she did not repay his constancy we believe is equally certain. That he loved his children is not disputed; but it was for public not for private crimes that he was called to suffer and if every man who is susceptible of the private charities of life might violate his duty to the public with impunity, there is many a highwayman and housebreaker who might live at ease and flourish.

The prepossessions of Charles were early manifested. In a letter written by him, when Prince of Wales, to Buckingham, he states his opinion that the discontent of parliament is a small matter compared with the reputation of the crown abroad; and that he considers the court as competent to 'command' what that assembly should speak or not speak.

The marriage contract between Charles and Henrietta Maria of France contained some secret articles to which the nation was not privy; one of these was that the queen should have the education of her children till they were thirteen years of age-a stipulation to which the country was probably indebted for the disguised Romanism of Charles, and the rampant popery of James.

The mistrust of the people in Charles the First took its rise from the artifices of Buckingham in the treaty of marriage with the Infanta of Spain; to all of which Charles was a consenting party. In fact, such was his education and disposition, that could he have procured the necessary means for carrying on his government without the assistance of his parliament, he never would have summoned it at all; at least not after he had dissolved the first; unless he had found or made them sufficiently supple to have voted him the requisite supplies without entering on the subject of reforms and grievances, in which case he might have preferred their assistance as a less odious way of supplying his necessities, or one at least of which the representatives of the people would have shared the odium with himself. As this could not be done, the Star Chamber and High Commission Court were relied on, together with ship money and other arbitrary and illegal imposts to wring an uncertain and fluctuating income from the nation; and it was not till these proceedings had irritated and alarmed the people in general, and excited the personal resistance of Hampden and some other patriotic individuals, that as a last resort another parliament was summoned.

It was during the golden age of prerogative, and when the court was dreaming that parliaments were laid aside for ever, and consequently that responsibility, both as a word and as a