Page:Cassell's Illustrated History of England vol 3.djvu/68

54 Oliver St. John, a gentleman who had not only refused such payment, but had vindicated his conduct in an able letter, in which he commented freely on the king's violation of magna charta, was fined by the tyrannic star-chamber five thousand pounds, and ordered to be imprisoned during the king's pleasure.



But the tyranny of the government went far beyond this. It adopted the worst practices of the Spanish inquisition—violation of private houses and desks, the torture of suspected persons, and their punishment without any trial by a jury. James has been described by historians and romancers as an uncouth and ludicrous creature, a sort of learned and pedantic biped to be laughed at; but he was something worse than that, as the whole course of his history shows; a most cruel and arbitrary monarch, who had no belief in the rights of any living thing but himself, and who, with the same licence, seized the property and crushed the consciences of his subjects. He wanted only the martial rashness of his son Charles, to take arms for the enforcement of his win, and he would have reaped the reward of popular vengeance which fell upon his son. Such a king naturally was surrounded by base sycophants, one of the most crawling of whom was that bishop Neale, just mentioned. Waller the poet relates that when a youth he went to James's court, and stood in the circle to see the king dine. At the table with James were bishops Andrews and Neale. James asked them whether it was not lawful for him to take his subjects money without all this formality of parliaments. Neale replied, "God forbid that you should not, for you are the breath of our nostrils." Andrews was silent, but James would not let him escape, but repeated the question to him, and said that he would admit of no evasion; whereupon Andrews said, "Why, then, I think your majesty may lawfully take my brother Neale's money, for he offers it."

With such advisers as Neale, we need not so much wonder at James's perpetration of acts like the following:—Edmund Peacham, a puritan minister in Somersetshire, attracted the attention of the king's officers by the boldness of his preaching, in which he did not spare the follies and tyrannies of the court. Nothing, however, seems to have been sufficiently prominent in his sermons delivered from the pulpit, to bring him within the clutches of the pursuivants; but probably the old man—he was upwards of sixty—had read to some of his friends more stinging matters, for his house was suddenly entered, his desk broken open, and a manuscript sermon was found and carried oft, criticising severely the king's extravagance in keeping separate courts for himself, his queen, and his son, in gifts for dances and banquets, in the costliness of his dress, the frauds of his officers, &c. Peacham was dragged up to London and committed to the Tower. There he was examined by the archbishop of Canterbury, the lord chancellor Ellesmere, the earls of Suffolk and Worcester, Sir Ralph Winwood, the lord chief justice Coke, and others, who endeavoured to draw out of him what advisers and instigators he had had in the matter. Now the sermon was a private paper, had never been preached or published, and, as the old man declared, never was intended to be. It had, therefore, in point of law, no more public existence than the thoughts in his bosom, and the law had no more right to take cognisance of it. Peacham