James Tait

“ But neither his dislike of the French connection nor his relations with the Douglasses could reconcile him to the marriage of the Scots queen with the heir of the English crown, which Henry made a condition of peace. He frankly told Sadler, the English ambassador, that the treaty, which had been accepted in the first moment of helplessness, would never be performed. 'If,' said he, 'your lad was a lass and our lass a lad, would you then be so earnest in this matter? Our nation, being a stout nation, will never agree to have an Englishman to be king of Scotland. ”

“ Paston had succeeded to an inheritance, the best part of which continued to be disputed by the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk in the face of a royal decision in his favour. He was hardly the man to pilot the family interests without loss through such troubled waters. Easy-going and lacking in judgment, he left the struggle, which included a formal siege of Caistor, to his mother and brother, and involved himself in money difficulties, ending in alienations and mortgages, which almost drove his mother to despair. ”

“ With the rise of protestantism in the next century the tables were turned, and Bale, followed by Foxe, surpassed Elmham himself in their invectives upon the enemies of the 'blessed martyr of Christ, the good Lord Cobham.' But on the Elizabethan stage the old contempt of the heretic knight still lingered, and, on the strength of his friendship with Henry in his wild youth, he was pictured in Fuller's words as' a boon companion, a jovial royster, and yet a coward to boot. ”

“ It has been Whittington's singular fate to become the hero of a popular tale which has found an ultimate lodgment in the nursery. The Whittington of the old ballads, chap-books, and puppet play started life as a poor ill-treated orphan in the west of England, and made his way to London on hearing that its streets were paved with gold. ”

“ Turn again, Whittington,
Lord Mayor of London.
Whereupon he returned to his pots and spits, and, the Unicorn soon coming in, married Mrs. Alice, and rose to be thrice lord mayor of London and entertain Henry V, after his conquest of France, at a great feast, in the course of which he threw into the fire the king's bonds for thirty-seven thousand marks. The story of the venture of a cat leading to fortune is in one form or another very widely diffused. ”

“ March restrained Hotspur's eagerness to charge, and the English archers riddled the exposed ranks of the Scots. Within an hour the battle was won, the English men-at-arms having never come into action. Five earls, including Douglas and Fife, and many scores of gentlemen of name laid down their arms ”

“ But when James threw off the tutelage of Angus in the summer of 1528, and drove him into England, Magnus complained that the advocate sought to win 'other far foreign friends than England' (Letters and Papers, iv. 5004) . There is some reason to believe that he would have preferred an imperial alliance as the best guarantee of the independence of Scotland, long as James cultivated friendly relations with England, Angus was powerless, and Otterburne stood high in his young sovereign's confidence, and was employed in all his negotiations with England. ”

“ WHITTLESEY or WITTLESEY, WILLIAM (d. 1374) , archbishop of Canterbury, though doubtless a native of the Cambridgeshire village whose name he bore, studied at Oxford, where he took his doctor's degree in canon and civil law (Wood, i. 183; Godwin) . His choice of university must have been decided for him by his maternal uncle, Simon Islip (afterwards archbishop of Canterbury) [q. v.] , to whom Whittlesey owed his education and much ecclesiastical promotion. ”

“ Gladstanes was in practice as an advocate early in 1534. At a sitting of the lords of session on 2 March that year, it was decided, in compliance with a royal letter, to appoint a new official, to be called ‘Advocatus Pauperum.’ He was to swear that he would act for the king's lieges who should prove that they were too poor to afford a lawsuit. This advocate was to have 10l. yearly from the king's treasurer. The court thereupon chose Master Thomas Marjoribanks and Master John Gladstanes conjunctly and severally to be advocates for all the poor. ”

“ After the coronation of Robert Bruce and the accession of Edward II to the English throne, certain Scottish noblemen continued ‘deeply engaged in the English interest,’ among whom Abercrombie mentions with sorrow ‘the formerly brave and honest Sir Adam Gordon.’ And till 1314 Gordon was well disposed toward the English king, from whom he received various marks of favour. ”

“ Lee devoted his whole energies to the rooting out of Welsh disorder. It was rarely that he could 'steal home' to Lichfield, and his visits to London were rarer still. His presence was constantly required at different points in the marches, while he held his courts in all the adjoining English counties. He was constantly moving between the head-quarters of the council at Ludlow, and Shrewsbury, near which at Shotton he had a manor, to which the tradition of 'Bishop Rowland's' summary justice long clung (Owen and Blakeway, Hist. of Shrewsbury, i. 311) . ”

“ They fought desperately all night by the light of the moon (Froissart; the moon was full on 20 Aug.) , until Douglas fell, whether by unknown hands or, as the English doubtfully boasted, by the sword of Hotspur, and Hotspur himself was surrounded and captured with his brother Ralph. ”

“ The darkness, which caused several bodies of lollards to take the royal force for their friends, and the absence of the London contingent, which no doubt would have been the largest of all, made the task of dispersing a force which was never allowed to consolidate itself an easy and almost a bloodless one (Walsingham, ii. 298) . The greater part, perhaps, heard of what was happening in time to turn and hasten homewards. Many, however, were taken prisoners, and at once brought to trial, but Oldcastle was not among them. ”

“ The personal friendship between Oldcastle and the Prince of Wales doubtless dated from the years in which Henry was his father's lieutenant in Wales; and in the quieter times which followed the subsidence of Glendower's revolt the fortunes of the Herefordshire knight continued to rise. He was now, for the second time, a widower, and by October 1409 he had secured the hand of a Kentish heiress, Joan, lady Cobham, granddaughter of John, third lord Cobham of Kent, a prominent figure under Richard U, who died at an extreme old age on 10 Jan. ”

“ But when Hotspur had been joined by his uncle Thomas Percy, earl of Worcester, and was moving southwards with a view to a junction on the Severn with Glendower, the pretence that Richard still lived was dropped, Edmund of March was declared the rightful king, and letters of defiance were sent forth, in which, as ‘Protectors of the Commonwealth,’ they accused ‘Henry of Lancaster’ of breaking an oath made to them at Doncaster in 1399 that he came not to claim the kingdom but only his inheritance, of starving King Richard to death, and of tyrannical government (Hardyng, p. 352) . ”

“ Oldcastle, however, refused to add anything to what he had said in his schedule on these sacraments, although warned by the archbishop that by refusal he ran the risk of being pronounced a heretic. Informed by the court of what the 'holy Roman Church had laid down on these points in accordance with the teaching of the fathers, he professed perfect willingness to believe and observe what 'holy church' had decreed and God wished him to believe and observe, but denied that the pope, cardinals, and prelates had any power of determining such things. ”

“ But greater honours awaited the fortunate youth. Envoys arrived in the autumn from the English colony in Ireland, riven by dissensions and in danger of extinction at the hands of Irish, Spanish, and Scottish enemies, to urge Richard to come over in person, or, if that were impossible, to send one of the highest and most powerful of his nobles to protect his Irish dominions from the impending catastrophe (Gilbert, p. 252) . They can hardly have expected that his choice would fall upon the untried Oxford, who in full parliament on 1 Dec. ”

“ Jardine was transferred in October 1760 from the parish school to Glasgow College, and after passing with distinction through the arts and divinity courses, was licensed to preach by the presbytery of Linlithgow. In 1770 he went to Paris as tutor to the sons of Baron Mure of Caldwell, who obtained for him from David Hume introductions to Helvetius and D'Alembert. Soon after his return from France in July 1773, he failed to secure election to the chair of humanity at Glasgow by a single vote, but in June 1774 was appointed professor of Greek and assistant professor in logic. ”

“ Richard Radcliffe's letters to his father, the correspondence which passed between his father and himself while he was in residence at Oxford, the letters of both father and son addressed to Jonathan Boucher [q. v.] , the son's Latin poem on Columbus, and his Greek translation of an extract from Gay's ‘Fan,’ were printed in 1888 for the Oxford Historical Society in ‘Letters of Richard Radcliffe and John James.’ Both father and son are shown in a very amiable light.
The youngest son, Hugh James (1771–1817) , after studying in London and Edinburgh, practised as a surgeon at Whitehaven (1796–8) ”

“ LITSTER or LE LITESTER, JOHN (d. 1381) , ‘king of the commons,’ was a dyer (litster, see Stratmann, Middle Engl. Dict. s.v.) of Norwich, in all probability a native of Norfolk. Froissart describes him as of Staffordshire (ix. 406, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove) , and calls him ‘Guillaume’ Listier. Capgrave, who was born (1393) and wrote at Lynn, mentions that Litster had a house at Felmingham, near North Walsham. He may possibly be connected (Rye, Hist. of Norfolk, p. 52) with the Ralph le Litester rated on a subsidy roll for the neighbouring parish of Worstead in 1315. ”

“ After he had taken up his residence there in the summer of the next year, Paston transacted much legal business in London for his kinsman, who frequently thanked him for the zeal he showed in his ‘chargeable matters.’ Fastolf was childless, and had set his heart on disappointing the Duke of Norfolk and other great lords who turned covetous eyes on Caistor by founding in it a college for ‘seven priests and seven poor folk.’ But such a prohibitive sum was demanded for the mortmain license that he died (5 Nov. 1459) before any arrangement had been arrived at. ”

“ Oxford has by some writers been reckoned a judge of the royal court, on the strength of a solitary record of fines levied before him in 1220, and as a younger son he might have been brought up to the law. ”

“ When, in 1756, it was suggested to Newcastle that he should strengthen his position by securing the co-operation of Fox, Dupplin strongly opposed the step. In 1757 he declined an offer of the chancellorship of the exchequer in the Duke of Newcastle's second administration, but later in the year there was much talk of his replacing Lord Halifax as first lord of trade. In 1758 he entered Newcastle's second ministry as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and a privy councillor, and succeeded his father in the same year as Earl of Kinnoull. ”

“ There is no reason to suppose that they did him much injustice. In his Irish commission he had a chance of showing his mettle, but, whether the fault was his own or Richard's, the opportunity was let slip. His treatment of his wife cannot be justified, and he seems to have made no attempt to restrain the king's naturally headstrong and violent temper. The case would have to be put much more strongly if it were safe to attribute the change in Richard's tactics from 1388 in any measure to Oxford's removal from the scene. ”

“ But of this there is certainly no proof, least of all in the fact, if fact it be, that he was known among the Welsh as 'Sion Hendy o Went Iscoed,' which is a mere translation of John Oldcastle of Herefordshire. On the other hand, it is quite likely that a family living so close to the marches, even if originally of purely English extraction, would have Welsh blood in its veins, and some might fancy that they could detect Celtic traits in his career. ”

“ The facts before us hardly justify Sir James Ramsay (ii. 345) in assuming without question that Paston was guilty of ‘forgery and breach of trust.’ The reopening of the civil war in the autumn of 1459 may very well have convinced Fastolf that unless he gave some one a strong personal interest in the foundation of his college his intentions were very likely to be defeated (Paston Letters, i. 491) . For the rest of his life Paston's whole energies were devoted to retaining his hold upon the Fastolf estates against the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk and the recalcitrant executors. ”

“ While in England he had been knighted, and was henceforth known as Sir Adam Otterburne of Reidhall (Redhall) , on the water of Leith, a mile or two south of Edinburgh (ib. vii. 194; Diurnal, p. 18) .
In March 1536, when Henry was seeking an interview at York with his nephew, in the hope of persuading him to imitate his ecclesiastical policy, Otterburne was once more despatched to London (Letters and Papers, x. 421) . James had made up his mind not to yield to his uncle's wishes, and in the autumn went to France to bring back a wife. ”

“ In 1561, when there was danger of a Spanish alliance to cover a union between the queen and Dudley, he supported the counter-proposal of alliance with the French Calvinists, but seven years later he deprecated any such championship of protestantism abroad as might lead to a breach with Spain, and recommended that the Duke of Alva should be allowed to procure clothes and food for his soldiers in England, ‘that he might be ready for her grace when he might do her any service’ (ib. vi. 461, viii. 445) . ”

“ In 1438 Ogle was sheriff of Northumberland, and in diarge of the east march of Scotland until a warden was appointed (ib. v. 100; Dugddale, ii. 262) . Little is then heard of him until 1452, when he was bailiff and lieutenant of Tyndale (Ord. Privy Council, v. 126) . Three years later Ogle sided with the Yorkists when they took up arms, and brought six hundred men from the marches to the first battle of St. Albans. ”