Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/61

1611. another at the king's Whitehall. The text of the preacher at St. James's was remarkable:—"Man, that is born of a woman, is of short continuance and full of trouble."

In the afternoon, after dinner, he was compelled to yield to the complaint, and hastened home and to bed. By the 29th he was so ill that there was a great dismay amongst the people, and this was immensely aggravated by a lunar rainbow, which appeared to span that part of the palace of St. James's where the sick prince lay. The most fatal auguries were drawn from this phenomenon.

The fever now assumed a putrid form, and was declared by the medical men highly infectious; and his parents and sister were debarred from entering his room. He grew daily worse, was highly delirious, calling for his clothes and his arms, and saying he must be gone. On the 5th of November, the anniversary of the gunpowder plot, James was informed that all hope was extinct; and unable to bear his feelings so near the scene of sorrow, he hastened away to Theobalds; but the queen would only retire to Somerset House, whence she sent continual messengers to inquire after her son's symptoms. The prince had entertained a romantic admiration of Sir Walter Raleigh, declaring that no prince but his father would keep such a bird in a cage, and he had joined with his mother in entreating for his liberty. To Sir Walter the life or death of the prince was life or death to himself. The agonised mother was now seized with a desperate desire to obtain from Raleigh a nostrum which he possessed, and which she had herself formerly taken in a fit of ague. Sir Walter sent it, with the assurance that it would cure any mortal malady except poison.

The prince had been informed that day, in a lucid interval, of his danger, by the archbishop of Canterbury, and had given the primate his confession of faith. He then called repeatedly, "David! David!" for David Murray, his confidential servant, but when asked what he wished for, only said, "I would say something, but I cannot utter it." Murray at length understood that he wished some letters in his cabinet to be burnt, and complied with his wish. After taking Raleigh's nostrum he seemed to revive for a time, but again became worse, and expired at eight o'clock on Friday night, the 6th of November.

Perhaps a more extraordinary 5th of November was never passed than that one preceding Henry's death. The people were assembled in dense crowds around the palace, eagerly listening for news of the prince's condition, whilst all around them were the noises, the firing and the bonfires, of the celebration of the gunpowder plot. They were still remaining there the following day, and when the cry of the prince's servants was heard in the palace on beholding him dead, the people howled, groaned, stamped, and wept in agony. The catholics, on their part, regarded the death of the first-born of the royal house as a manifest judgment for the persecution of their church.

The violence of the queen's grief exceeded that of the people. For some hours after the taking of Raleigh's nostrum, she heard accounts of his rapid improvement, and then came the news that he was as rapidly sinking,—was dead. She fell into the most violent paroxysms of grief; and recollecting Raleigh's assurance that his specific would cure all ailments but poisoning, she declared that the prince was the victim of foul play. Henry had shown the most uncompromising aversion to Carr, the favourite, and she called to mind the evil visage of his agent. Sir Thomas Overbury, and believed that he had been employed to poison him. This led to a post mortem examination, which clearly demonstrated that no poison had been used, but that the prince died from natural causes. The words of the queen, however, flew far and wide, and in that age of superstition, and of violent antipathies, originated the most atrocious rumours, in which the reputation of James himself was not spared.

We may close this chapter with the relation of a circumstance in which the king was as much deserving of censure as he was innocent of all participation in the death of his son.

A Dutch clergyman named Vorstius had written a treatise on the nature and attributes of the Deity. In fact, religious controversy was running high in the Low Countries. Arminius, the pastor of the cathedral at Amsterdam, and afterwards professor at Leyden, had broached the doctrine of free-will in opposition to the predestinarianism of Calvin. The whole country came divided into two hostile sections on these points, which no human intellect has ever been able to settle to the satisfaction of all parties. The Arminains acquired the name of Remonstrants, from the remonstrance of Arminius against Calvinism. Barneveldt, the patriot, stood at the heart of the remonstrants, prince Maurice of Nassau at the head of the anti-remonstrants, or Gomarists. On the death of Arminius, Vorstius was elected to his chair at Leyden, and put forth a treatise in defence of his predecessor's opinions. This treatise was put into James's hands whilst he was in the country hunting, and in the space of a single hour he had picked out of it a long list of what he termed damnable heresies. Forthwith he conceived that it rested with him to settle the fierce controversy which had whirled in its vortex all the intellects of Holland. He wrote to Winwood, his ambassador there, to accuse Vorstius before the states of heresy and infidelity, charging him with denying the omniscience of the godhead and the divinity of Christ.

The Dutch wore by no means pleased with this foreign interference in their affairs, and in a respectful manner made answer to that effect. But James wrote them back with his own hand that he could not be thus put by; that he was willing, "if the professor could excuse his blasphemies, he should escape the stake, though no heretic ever deserved it better." He bade them remember that the king of England was the defender of the faith, and that if they would not separate from the heretic, he would separate from them; and he warned them that in that case "he would call in other foreign powers to remand to hell such abominable doctrines."

The states still obstinately ignoring James's interference, he published a declaration against Vorstius in French, and the Gomarists combining with the king's friends, at length succeeded in getting Vorstius expelled from his professorship, and banished from Leyden. James had thus succeeded in ruining a worthy and distinguished man for his religious opinions, and caused him to be driven into banishment