James the Great

“ Lonely and helpless as he seemed, James was still king, and he was a king who believed in his kingship. The implicit faith in his own divine right to rule the greatest in the land gave him a strength as great as that of the regents. At seventeen he was strong enough to break the yoke of the Douglases and to drive them over the English border. At eighteen he could bring the most powerful of the Protestant nobles, the Earl of Gowrie, to the block. A year later indeed the lords were back again ”

“ But we cannot longer dwell on the lives of eminent individuals (p. 143) during the reign of James. However interesting may be the details of their fortunes, their history dwindles into insignificance when compared with the great public injuries which an infatuated monarch inflicted. Not cruel in his temper, not stained by personal crimes, quite learned in Greek and Latin, but weak and ignorant of his duties as a king, Encroachments of James. ”

“ James taught him that no power on earth had any right to find fault with the king, that the king’s power was given to him by God, and that it was a great sin to say that anything the king did was wrong. Thus he taught him to think that the people were made for nothing but to obey kings, and to labour and get money for kings to spend as they pleased, and that even the nobles were nothing but servants for kings ”

“ Fifth to manhood at last secured rest for the land. James had all the varied ability of his race, and he carried out with vigour its traditional policy. The Highland chieftains, the great lords of the Lowlands, were brought more under the royal sway; the Church was strengthened to serve as a check on the feudal baronage; the alliance with France was strictly preserved, as the one security against English aggression. Nephew as he was indeed of the English king, James from the outset of his reign took up an attitude hostile to England. ”

“ She lived to be that most odious and miserable of human beings, an ancient crone at war with her whole kind, at war with her own children and grandchildren, great indeed and rich, but valuing greatness and riches chiefly because they enabled her to brave public opinion and to indulge without restraint her hatred to the living and the dead. In the reign of James she was regarded as nothing worse than a fine highspirited young woman, who could now and then be cross and arbitrary, but whose flaws of temper might well be pardoned in consideration of her charms. ”

“ James was a very different person, His English education, his life and experience at the English court in the midst of very stirring times, and men of great talents, had operated on a mind naturally vigorous to such advantage, so that he was not only a very accomplished man, but, as he showed, endowed with all the qualities of a great and active monarch. ”

“ James seems to have thought that the strongest proof of kindness which he could give to heretics who had resigned wealth, country, family, for his sake, was to suffer them to be beset, on their dying beds, by his priests. If some sick man, helpless in body and in mind, and deafened by the din of bad logic and bad rhetoric, suffered a wafer to be thrust into his mouth, a great work of grace was triumphantly announced to the Court; and the neophyte was buried with all the pomp of religion. ”

“ It is natural for a proud man not to love those before whom he has abased himself. James, of frugal habits and master of a great revenue, soon became more indifferent to a French pension. Nor was he insensible to the reproach of Europe, that he was grown the vassal of France and had tarnished the lustre of the English Crown. ”

“ Or should any reproach remain upon him for violating the duties of private life, the glory of delivering oppressed nations would, he hoped, be able, in the eyes of reasonable men, to make ample compensation. He could not well expect, on the commencement of his enterprise, that it would lead him to mount the throne of England: but he undoubtedly foresaw, that its success would establish his authority in that kingdom. And so egregious was James’s temerity, that there was no advantage so great or obvious, which that prince’s indiscretion might not afford his enemies. ”

“ The poet-king and his noble queen were very kindly received in Scotland, and lived for some time very happily and peacefully, always dearly loving one another. But James found the kingdom in great confusion from misgovernment, and the common people very much oppressed. He bravely set himself to reform matters, trying to relieve and protect the poor, and restrain and humble the rich and powerful. ”

“ James, harassed with his turbulent and factious subjects, cast a wishful eye to the succession of England; and in proportion as the queen advanced in years, his desire increased of mounting that throne, on which, besides acquiring a great addition of power and splendor, he hoped to govern a people so much more tractable and submissive. He negotiated with all the courts of Europe, in order to insure himself friends and partisans: he even neglected not the court of Rome and that of Spain ”

“ Besides being upon the worst terms with Halifax, in whom alone, of all his ministers, James was likely to find any bias in favour of popular principles, he was, both from prejudice of education, and from interest, inasmuch as he had aspired to be the head of the Tories, a great favourer of those servile principles of the Church of England which had been lately so highly extolled from the throne. ”

“ As James grew up he became well-nigh the most eminent of royal and noble authors, and that strange mixture of erudition, folly, wisdom, and simplicity which marks him as one of the oddest characters in history. He was great in nicknames and phrases, and the nicknames stuck and the phrases are remembered. “Tam o’ the Coogate” for the powerful Earl of Haddington; “Jock o’ the Sclates” for the Earl of Mar, because he, when James’s fellow-pupil, had been entrusted by George Buchanan with a slate thereon to note James’s little peccadilloes in his tutor’s absence ”

“ King James the First gave all manner of liberty and encouragement to the exercise of buffoonery, and he took great delight in it himself. Happening once to bear somewhat hard on one of his Scotch courtiers, “By my soul,” retorted the peer, “he that made your majesty a king, spoiled the best fool in Christendom!” ”

“ Yet, now that the whole conduct of James is before us, this inconsistency seems to admit of a simple explanation.
At the moment of his accession he was in doubt whether the kingdom would peaceably submit to his authority. The Exclusionists, lately so powerful, might rise in arms against him. He might be in great need of French money and French troops. He was therefore, during some days, content to be a sycophant and a mendicant. He humbly apologised for daring to call his Parliament together without the consent of the French government. He begged hard for a French subsidy. ”

“ In his eye, therefore, the revolution which drove the unfortunate James from his throne, was a great national sin, which could only be atoned for by restoring to him his crown, an object, in the accomplishment of which, he conceived all good men were bound to lend a helping hand. ”

“ From the time that he became king of England, James was delivered from the bondage which from his infancy the kirk had strenuously endeavoured to impose on him, and he now resolved to make the most of his liberty. His chief aim now was to assimilate the church of Scotland to that of England, and especially to annihilate the pretensions of the ministers to dictate to the nation in regard to civil matters. In carrying out this policy the king, when dealing with the kirk, mainly made use of Spottiswood, and Spottiswood performed his difficult duties with great discretion. ”

“ Whatever wisdom and energy could do William did. Those obstacles which no wisdom or energy could have overcome his enemies themselves studiously removed.
On the great day on which the Bishops were acquitted, and on which the invitation was despatched to the Hague, James returned from Hounslow to Westminster in a gloomy and agitated mood. He made an effort that afternoon to appear cheerful: 428 but the bonfires, the rockets, and above all the waxen Popes who were blazing in every quarter of London, were not likely to soothe him. ”

“ It is evident that, in such circumstances, the greatest service which an English Roman Catholic could render to his brethren in the faith was to convince the public that, whatever some rash men might, in times of violent excitement, have written or done, his Church did not hold that any end could sanctify means inconsistent with morality. And this great service it was in the power of James to render. He was King. He was more powerful than any English King had been within the memory of the oldest man. ”

“ Almost the whole of this short reign consists of attempts, always imprudent, often illegal, sometimes both, against whatever was most loved and revered by the nation: even such schemes of the king’s as might be laudable in themselves were so disgraced by his intentions, that they serve only to aggravate the charge against him. James was become a great patron of toleration, and an enemy to all those persecuting laws which, from the influence of the church, had been enacted both against the dissenters and Catholics. ”

“ The Pretender is advised if ever he should reign in England, to make a partition of offices, and carefully to reserve for the members of the Church of Rome a portion which might have sufficed for them if they had been one half instead of one fiftieth part of the nation. One Secretary of State, one Commissioner of the Treasury, the Secretary at War, the majority of the great dignitaries of the household, the majority of the officers of the army, are always to be Catholics. Such were the designs of James after his perverse bigotry had drawn on him a punishment which had appalled the whole world. ”

“ James's dealing with the man Slingsby had shocked all his notions of an Englishman's rights and privileges; and he was resolved that he would not willingly bring another under the rod of a monarch who seemed inclined to make such an arbitrary use of his power. His account seemed to give the King great satisfaction, however; for there are many men whose minds, like the body of a ferret, are so constituted as to find themselves most at ease when twisting in and out, through long and intricate holes ”

“ The dismission of the two brothers is a great epoch in the reign of James. From that time it was clear that what he really wanted was not liberty of conscience for the members of his own church, but liberty to persecute the members of other churches. Pretending to abhor tests, he had himself imposed a test. He thought it hard, he thought it monstrous, that able and loyal men should be excluded from the public service solely for being Roman Catholics. Yet he had himself turned out of office a Treasurer, whom he admitted to be both loyal and able, solely for being a Protestant. ”

“ James the less was a person of great prudence and discretion, and was highly esteemed by the Apostles and other Christians. Such, indeed, was his general reputation for piety and virtue, that, as we learn, from Origen, Eusebius, and Jerom, Josephus thought, and declared it to be the common opinion, that the sufferings of the Jews, and the destruction of their city and temple, were owing to the anger of God, excited by the murder of James. ”

“ It is not easy for any person who, in our time, undertakes to treat of the revolution which overthrew the Stuarts, to preserve with steadiness the happy mean between these two extremes. The question whether members of the Roman Catholic Church could be safely admitted to Parliament and to office convulsed our country during the reign of James the Second, was set at rest by his downfall, and, having slept during more than a century, was revived by that great stirring of the human mind which followed, the meeting of the National Assembly of France. ”

“ Both England and Scotland recognised in him the principle of hereditary right, for there was little in his character or antecedents to recommend him as a national sovereign. In his own country he had become unpopular, and in England he was chiefly known as one who had basely betrayed his mother, who had intrigued with Elizabeth to obtain her throne, and who had no sympathy with the great alliance with France and the United Provinces in the war with Spain. James, however, encountered no opposition in assuming the sceptre of these realms ”

“ In the preceding spring, when every messenger from Ireland brought evil tidings, and when the authority of James was acknowledged in every part of that kingdom, except behind the ramparts of Londonderry and on the banks of Lough Erne, it was natural that Englishmen should remember with how terrible an energy the great Puritan warriors of the preceding generation had crushed the insurrection of the Celtic race. ”

“ James recommended an immediate descent on England. That kingdom, he said, had been drained of troops by the demands of Ireland. The seven or eight thousand regular soldiers who were left would be unable to withstand a great French army. The people were ashamed of their error and impatient to repair it. As soon as their rightful King showed himself, they would rally round him in multitudes. ”