Page:The Queens of England.djvu/489

 ANNE OF DENMARK. 441 invented, were oii'erd for a thousand pounds each to any who thought fit to be purchasers, and made the king richer by some hundred thousand pounds. The peerage was not less openly put up to sale. A man became a baron for five thou- sand pounds, a viscount for ten, and for twenty might obtain an earldom. The court, meanwhile, never thought of releasing itself by abating its monstrous extravagance ; and while mo- nopolies, increasing on all sides, and exorbitant Star-chamber fines, swelled the popular discontent, the court did not scruple to turn even its commonest amusement to the exasperation and oppression of the people. The chase, for example, had become well-nigh an innocent pastime, but James made it hateful again; hateful as it was under the Norman kings, as well as contemptible, which then it was not. "I shall leave him dressed for pos- terity," says Osborne, "in the colors I saw him in, the next progress after his inauguration ; which was as green as the grass he trod on, with a feather in his cap, and a horn instead of a sword by his side ; how suitable to his age, calling, or person, I leave others to judge from his pictures." But upon the whole it was no laughing matter. Among the state papers of this time are found very remarkable corre- spondences in proof of the intolerable grievance it became. It will be enough to mention here the elaborate protest for- warded by Cecil to Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, in which the venerable prelate, as one that honoreth and loveth his most excellent majesty with all his heart, petitions earnestly for less wastening of the treasure of the realm, and more mod- eration in the lawful exercise of hunting, both that poor men's corn may be less spoiled, and other his majesty's subjects more spared ; and to which Cecil makes answer, not by deny- ing, but by excusing the royal prodigality on the ground of the necessity for a liberal expenditure at the beginning of. a reign, and by defending hunting as a manlike and active recreation, such as those to which the good emperor Trajan was disposed. The courtly minister should have called the sport womanlike as well, the queen following it as eagerly as her husband. She is the "queen and huntress, chaste as fair," of Ben Jonson's celebrated lines. She handled the cross-bow, too ; and was in the habit of shooting with it at the deer, from a stand. But not with remarkable success. She mistook the king's favorite dog for the deer on one occasion, and disabled