The People for Whom Shakespeare Wrote

Produced by David Widger
By Charles Dudley Warner
Queen Elizabeth being dead about ten o'clock in the morning, March 24, 1603, Sir Robert Cary posted away, unsent, to King James of Scotland to inform him of the accident, and got made a baron of the realm for his ride. On his way down to take possession of his new kingdom the king distributed the honor of knighthood right and left liberally; at Theobald's he created eight-and-twenty knights, of whom Sir Richard Baker, afterwards the author of A Chronicle of the Kings of England, was one. God knows how many hundreds he made the first year, says the chronicler, but it was indeed fit to give vent to the passage of Honour, which during Queen Elizabeth's reign had been so stopped that scarce any county of England had knights enow to make a jury.
Sir Richard Baker was born in 1568, and died in 1645; his Chronicle appeared in 1641. It was brought down to the death of James in 1625, when, he having written the introduction to the life of Charles I, the storm of the season caused him to break off in amazement, for he had thought the race of Stewards likely to continue to the world's end ; and he never resumed his pen. In the reign of James two things lost their lustre—the exercise of tilting, which Elizabeth made a special solemnity, and the band of Yeomen of the Guard, choicest persons both for stature and other good parts, who graced the court of Elizabeth; James was so intentive to Realities that he little regarded shows, and in his time these came utterly to be neglected. The virgin queen was the last ruler who seriously regarded the pomps and splendors of feudalism.
It was characteristic of the age that the death of James, which occurred in his fifty-ninth year, should have been by rumor attributed to poyson ; but being dead, and his body opened, there was no sign at all of poyson, his inward parts being all sound, but that his Spleen was a little faulty, which might be cause enough to cast him into an Ague: the ordinary high-way, especially in old bo'dies, to a natural death.