Samuel Rawson Gardiner

“ The combination of Buckingham with the two houses and the heir-apparent was irresistible. Buckingham was not content with getting his way. He must signalise in the eye of the world the hopelessness of resistance. With this object he, supported by Charles, fixed on the lord treasurer, the Earl of Middlesex, who had all along been opposed to a war with Spain. They stirred up the commons to impeach him on charges of peculation, and, though James told them that they were preparing a rod for themselves, rejoiced when the lords sentenced him to dismissal from office and to a heavy fine. ”

“ In the course of 1646 Henrietta Maria recovered her youngest daughter, Henrietta, who was brought from England by Lady Morton in the disguise of a beggar. Her joy did not cause her to forget her anxiety for her husband. Money was before all things needful if the queen's many schemes were to come to anything, and one of her first objects now was to obtain a rich wife for her son. The Dutch marriage treaty having broken down, she urged the young Charles, a boy of fifteen, to make love to ‘La Grande Mademoiselle,’ the daughter and heiress of her brother Gaston. ”

“ In reality puritanism was master of the field, and by no means inclined to tolerate those who assailed it. Laud, knowing that his opinions were those of a minority among the clergy, and of a still smaller minority among the laity, looked to the royal power to redress the balance. Circumstances thus combined with his own sense of the value of external discipline and with his own unsympathetic nature to blind him to the danger of using the king as an instrument for the reform of the church. ”

“ Frederick continued to lay claim to the crown of Bohemia, and refused to go to the Palatinate to defend his hereditary dominions; while Charles IV of Denmark thought scornfully of James's proposal to negotiate first, and to prepare for war only after the negotiation had reached its inevitable stage of failure.
The commons, having no longer to think of preparations for war, fell on the abuses of the court and government. James's indolence and favouritism had made his court a hotbed of corruption, and the attendant evils were popularly believed to be even worse than they were in reality. ”

“ Because he was not himself a cutter of new paths, he was all the more a representative man, and he stands forth as the central figure of a special phase of progress. In his large wisdom, his gentle tolerance, his sweet reasonableness, even in his very impetuosity, there was more of ‘human nature's daily food’ than was to be found in men intellectually so superior to him as Chillingworth and Hales.
During the years of retirement at Great Tew, Falkland gave but little attention to questions of state. ”

“ On the whole the scanty records of Essex's life thus far proclaim him a man with a punctilious sense of duty and a retiring disposition, which was in remarkable contrast with the popularity-hunting disposition of his father. The time was now coming when every man of position must of necessity declare himself.
The opportunity came on 24 April 1640, when Charles appealed to the House of Lords in the Short parliament to support him against the commons. Essex gave his vote in the minority, which wished to refuse the king's request. ”

“ Independent as he imagined himself to be, he fell too readily under the sway of an intimate companion, and those who wanted to gain the king to their ends had learnt by this time that the easiest way was to approach him through the favourite. Bacon, in tendering advice to Villiers on the policy which appeared to him desirable to pursue, and in his general expectation that Villiers would be an instrument for establishing better relations between the king and the nation, probably only did that which scores of less thoughtful persons were doing in the interests of their own advancement. ”

“ The carnage after battle was enormous, and on one occasion, after the battle of Aberdeen, he was so enraged by the murder of a drummer as to make no effort to restrain his men from outrage and slaughter when the town was entered. It is true that Argyll had burned and pillaged before Montrose entered Scotland, but Argyll's violence had been mostly confined to the highlands, and it is in the nature of civilised nations to think much more of injuries done to themselves by a ruder people than they do of the injuries which they themselves inflict on those whom they account to be barbarous. ”

“ O'Neill's position in Irish history is clearly marked. He is not, like his uncle, Hugh O'Neill, the Irish chieftain of a sept; he is the trained soldier who fights for the independence of his country. Whether he was a great commander there is not sufficient evidence to show. To keep an army together under the circumstances in which he fought was in itself a marvel of skill, and he succeeded in winning with it the one victory obtained by the Irish in the course of the war in which he fought. ”

“ James, however, took up his favourite's part, and Buckingham treated the lord-keeper with the utmost coolness, only according his forgiveness after receiving a humble apology. On 28 Sept. Coke was reintroduced to his seat at the council table. ‘I am neither a god nor an angel,’ said James on the occasion, but ‘a man like any other, and confess to loving those dear to me more than other men. You may be sure that I love the Earl of Buckingham more than any one else. ”

“ In the winter which followed, Eliot was witness of the miserable condition of the men who had returned from the Cadiz voyage, and who, ill-clothed and half-starved, crowded the streets of Plymouth. Accordingly, when he was elected to the new parliament which met in 1626, this time as member for St. Germans, he came to it entirely estranged from the man whom he had for many years regarded with affection. Eliot was not one whose feelings were ever at a moderate heat. He had the Eliot oratorical temperament, and as soon as he distrusted Buckingham he believed him capable of the worst crimes. ”

“ The keystone of Buckingham's vast enterprises lay in the alliance with France, and Richelieu, now the true ruler of the country, was the last man to follow Charles's meteoric favourite. Richelieu, indeed, while James was still alive, had through Buckingham's influence obtained the loan of an English warship, and permission to hire seven English merchantmen to help him to crush the Huguenots of Rochelle ”

“ His claim to our reverence lies in the fact that his mind was as thoroughly saturated as Milton's was with the love of freedom as the nurse of high thought and high morality, while his gentle nature made him incapable of the harsh austerities of Milton's combative career. As an efficient statesman Falkland has little claim to notice. He knew what he did not want, but he had no clear conception of what he did want; no constructive imagination to become a founder of institutions in which his noble conceptions should be embodied. ”

“ The king was now in Scotland, looking forward to the re-establishment of his power in England with the help of a Scottish army. She knew well how difficult it was to carry out any such scheme without more money than Charles had at his command, and before the end of August she again pleaded with the pope for a supply. As the hopes of Scottish intervention grew dim, the prospects of forming an episcopalian party in England increased, and in October the queen's court at Oatlands was the rallying-point of such of the lords as were discontented with the progress of puritanism. ”

“ Buckingham was for a war against Spain and all the catholic powers of the continent. James was for a war limited to an effort to recover the Palatinate by land. Whatever shape the war was to take, it would be advisable to be on good terms with France, and overtures were therefore made to the French court for a marriage between Charles and the sister of Louis XIII, Henrietta Maria. Both James and Charles, however, promised the House of Commons that in this case there should be no toleration for any catholics in England, excepting for the bride and her household. ”

“ James seems to have thought that a young man with no special political principles would not only be a cheerful companion, but a useful instrument as well, and would gradually learn to model himself upon his master's ideas of statesmanship. He forgot that conduct is often determined by other motives than political principles. The new favourite was already in love with the Countess of Essex, a daughter of the influential Earl of Suffolk, and a great-niece of the still more influential Earl of Northampton, the leader of the political catholics. ”

“ At last, on 24 March 1603, Elizabeth died, and James was at once proclaimed in England by the title of James I, king of England, though he subsequently styled himself, without parliamentary authority, king of Great Britain. He left Edinburgh for his new kingdom on 5 April. Coming from a poor country, he fancied that the wealth and power of an English king was far greater than it really was, and before long he scattered titles and grants of money and land with unjustifiable profusion. ”

“ That system claimed as strongly as the bishops had done to exist by divine right. Presbyterianism would, if once admitted, lay claim to an unlimited and independent authority. ‘If it be said,’ Falkland continued, ‘that this unlimitedness and independence is only in spiritual things, I answer, first, that arbitrary government being the worst of governments, and our bodies being worse than our souls, it will be strange to set up that over the second of which we were so impatient over the first. ”

“ As this petty trick did not succeed, and Loudoun was not to be frightened into taking the king's part, Hamilton then asked Charles to send to Edinburgh all the Scottish lords of his party to counteract Argyll, and to keep Scotland from interfering in England, by outvoting Argyll in the Scottish parliament. This advice at once aroused the indignation of Montrose, who was with the queen at York, and who, believing that the Scots would certainly send an army across the border, wished to anticipate the blow by a military rather than by a political operation. ”

“ Before the end of 1613 increasing financial difficulties turned James's thoughts in the direction of summoning another parliament. In vain Bacon reminded him of the necessity of having a popular policy if he was to conciliate popular feeling. When the new parliament met in 1614, James offered merely to repeat on a smaller scale the policy of bargaining with the House of Commons which had been at the bottom of the failure of the Great Contract in 1610. ”

“ Nothing imported the allowance of any spiritual jurisdiction to the prelates, though a wish was expressed in the act that the king should treat with the assembly on the office to be exercised by them ‘in their spiritual policy and government of the church.’ James had therefore to choose between throwing in his lot with the old nobility, who wanted posts and dignities for their younger sons, and the new clerical democracy, which he had discovered to be, after all, less liable than he had once feared to be led away by the extreme zealots. ”