Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/28

14 them, according to Sir Dudley Carlton, "how much he had been troubled to resolve in this business; for to execute Grey, who was a noble, young, spirited fellow, and save Cobham, who was as base and unworthy, were a matter of injustice; to save Grey, who was of a proud, insolent nature, and execute Cobham, who showed great tokens of humility and repentance, were as great a solecism; and so went on with Plutarch's comparisons in the rest, still travelling in contrarieties, but holding the conclusion in so indifferent balance, that the lords knew not what to look for, till the end came out—'and, therefore, I have saved them all!'"

The fortune of James, however, with all his cunning and kingcraft, was to be suspected, and to leave the knots which he undertook to unravel still knots, and enveloped in confusion. Doubts have always been cast on his version of the Gowry conspiracy; and the exact objects of the present plot, so far as Raleigh was concerned, and the precise guilt of most of the prisoners, remain still obscure. James took possession of the fortunes of the conspirators, and retained them for a considerable time, in spite of the eager desire of the greedy courtiers to get hold of them. The fate of the prisoners was various. Though they were pardoned, they were not liberated. Grey lived in the Tower eleven years and died there. Cobham after a few years was discharged, but he was an object of general contempt, and endured an existence of poverty in a wretched house in the Minories, where, in a loft, to which he climbed by a ladder, he is supposed to have perished by starvation. Markham, Copley, and Brookesby were banished for life. Sir Walter Raleigh, who, though reprieved, was not pardoned, remained a prisoner for twelve years, when he came abroad only to return to the Tower and the axe.

The effect of this conspiracy was to deepen James' suspicion of the catholics and his dislike of the puritans. The catholics, since his coming to the English throne, had conducted themselves with more policy than their robustious rivals, the puritans. They had claimed, indeed, the fulfilment of his promises whilst merely king of Scotland, to favour them, as the stanch friends of his mother, and serious sufferers on her account; but they had preferred their claims with a degree of courtesy and moderation to which the brusque reformers were strangers. The pope, Clement VIII., probably led by the same expectations, had by two breves addressed to the archpriest and provincial of the Jesuits, strictly enjoined the missionaries to confine themselves to their spiritual duties, and on no account to mix themselves up with the agitators for political change. He condemned unequivocally the conduct of Watson and Clarke, and sent a secret envoy to the English court, expressing his abhorrence of all acts of disloyalty, and offering to withdraw any missionary from the kingdom that was in any way obnoxious to the king and council. James appeared so far influenced by this moderation, that though he stoutly refused all application for a free exercise of the catholic worship, and even committed individuals to the Tower who offended in this respect, yet he invited the catholics to frequent his court, he conferred knighthood on some of them, and assured them generally that they should not suffer for recusancy so long as they abstained from a breach of the laws as it regarded religion, and from all acts of political insubordination.

But towards the puritans he was by no means so courteous. He could never forget the restraint in which they had kept his infancy and youth: that they had been the defamers and persecutors of his mother; and that to the very hour in which he escaped into the larger field of English power, they had goaded him with their demands and defied his authority. As he drew nearer to the English throne, the charms of the English church increased in his imagination. A church which set up the king as its head was a church as much after James's own heart as after that of Henry VIII. Like that monarch, he dearly loved to shine in polemics, and long before he arrived in England, it required no great shrewdness to perceive where his affections lay. In 1590 "he had," says Calderwood, "stood up in the general assembly at Edinburgh, with his bonnet off, and his hands lifted up to heaven, and said that he praised God that he was born in the time of the height of the gospel, and in such a place, as to be king of such a church, the sincerest (purest) kirk in the world. The church of Geneva, he said, keeps pasch and yule, what have they for them? They have no institution. As for our neighbour kirk of England, their service is an evil-said mass in English; they want nothing of the mass but the liftings. I charge you, my good ministers, doctors, elders, nobles, gentlemen, and barons, to stand to your purity, and to exhort the people to do the same: and I, forsooth, as long as I brook my life, shall maintain the same."

This was solemn and emphatic, but it was all hollow, and merely a play of that kingcraft which James gloried in. No sooner was he in England than he spoke his mind roundly as to his real feelings towards the puritans. He said to the bishops and courtiers: "I will tell you, I have lived amongst this sect of men ever since I was ten years old; but I may say of myself as Christ said of himself, though I lived amongst them, yet, since I had ability to judge, I was never of them." And this was at least sincere. He had grown more undisguisedly episcopalian as he saw Elizabeth sinking, and felt his hold on the throne through her own ministers. He had given seats in parliament to a certain number of clergymen, thus making them bishops without the name; but it was in his Basilicon Doron, or manual for the instruction of his son, published in 1779, that he had given loose to his deep dislike of the presbyterians. He tells his son to "take heed to such puritans, very pests in the church and commonwealth, whom no deserts can oblige, neither oaths nor promises bind, breathing nothing but sedition and calumnies, aspiring without measure, ruling without reason, making their own imaginations, without any warrant of the Word, the square of their conscience. I protest," he added, "before the great God, and since I am here upon my testament, it is no place for me to be in, that you shall never find with any Highland or Border thieves greater ingratitude, and more lies and perjuries than with these fanatic spirits; and suffer not the principal of them to brook your land, if ye list to sit at rest; except you would keep them for trying your patience, as Socrates did an evil wife."

But whilst the royal Solomon thus plainly enunciated his hatred of puritanism, he was cautious not to let the English bishops too early into his fixed intention to patronise them. He liked to feel himself the undoubted head of that church, and to see those dignitaries in fear and trembling prostrate at his feet; and it was not till they had sufficiently humbled themselves before him, that he revived their spirits with the declaration of his real sentiments. The puritans precipitated this avowal, by urging on James a further reform of the church, and its purgation from ceremonies. In their