English Lands, Letters and Kings, vol. 2: From Elizabeth to Anne

by Donald Grant Mitchell

James I.

And now what sort of person was this James Stuart, successor to Elizabeth? He was a man in his thirty-eighth year, who had been a king—or called a king, of Scotland—ever since he was a baby of twelve months old; and in many matters he was a baby still. He loved bawbles as a child loves its rattle; loved bright feathers too—to dress his cap withal; was afraid of a drawn sword and of hobgoblins. He walked, from some constitutional infirmity, with the uncertain step of a child—swaying about in a ram-shackle way—steadying himself with a staff or a hold upon the shoulder of some attendant. He slobbered when he ate, so that his silken doublet—quilted to be proof against daggers—was never of the cleanest. He had a big head and protruding eyes, and would laugh and talk broad Scotch with a blundering and halting tongue, and crack unsavory jokes with his groom or his barber.

Yet he had a certain kindness of heart; he hated to see suffering, though he had no objection to suffering he did not see; the sight of blood almost made him faint; his affection for favorites sometimes broke out into love-sick drivel. Withal he had an acute mind; he had written bad poems, before he left Scotland, calling himself modestly a royal apprentice at that craft. He had a certain knack at logical fence and loved to argue a man to death; he had power of invective, as he showed in his Counterblast to Tobacco—of which I will give a whiff by and by. He had languages at command, and loved to show it; for he had studied long and hard in his young days, under that first and best of Scotch scholars and pedagogues—George Buchanan. He had, in general, a great respect for sacred things, and for religious observances—which did not prevent him, in his moments of petulant wrath or of wine-y exaltation, from swearing with a noisy vehemence. Lord Herbert of Cherbury—elder brother of the poet Herbert, and English ambassador to France—wittily excused this habit of his sovereign, by saying he was too kind to anathematize men himself, and therefore asked God to do so.

This was the man who was to succeed the great and courtly Elizabeth; this was the man toward whom all the place-hunters of the court now directed their thoughts, and (many of them) their steps too, eager to be among the foremost to bow in obsequience before him; besieging him, as every United States President is besieged, and will be besieged, until the disgraceful hunt for spoils is checked by some nobler purpose on the part of political victors than the rewarding of the partisans.

There was Sir Robert Cary—a far-away cousin of Elizabeth’s—who was so bewitched to be foremost in this agreeable business that he dashes away at a headlong gallop, night and day—before the royal couriers have started—gets thrown from his horse, who gave him a vicious blow with his heels, which he says “made me shed much blood.” But he pushes on and carries first to Edinburgh the tidings of the Queen’s death. Three days of the sharpest riding would only carry the news in those days; and the court messenger took a week or so to get over the heavy roads between the Scotch capital and London.

It does not appear that James made a show of much sorrow; he must have remembered keenly, through all his stolidity, how his mother, Mary Queen of Scots, had suffered at Fotheringay; and remembered through whose fiat this dismal tragedy had come about. He hints that perhaps the funeral services had better not tarry for his coming;—writes that he would be glad of the crown jewels (which they do not send, however) for the new Queen’s wearing.

Then he sets off at leisure; travels at leisure; receiving deputations at leisure, and all manner of prostrations; stopping at Berwick; stopping at Belvoir Castle; stopping at York; stopping wherever was good eating or lodging or hunting; flatterers coming in shoals to be knighted by him; even the great Bacon, wanting to be Sir Francised—as he was presently: and I am afraid the poets of the time might have appeared, if they had possessed the wherewithal to make the journey, and were as hopeful of fat things.

Curiously enough, the King is grandly entertained in Huntingdonshire by one Oliver Cromwell, to whom James takes a great liking; not, of course, the great Cromwell; but this was the uncle and the godfather of the famous Oliver, who was to be chief instrument in bringing James’ royal son, Charles, to the scaffold. Thence the King goes for four or five days of princely entertainment to Theobalds, a magnificent seat of old Burleigh’s, where Elizabeth had gone often; and where his son, Cecil, now plies the King with flatteries, and poisons his mind perhaps against Raleigh—for whom Cecil has no liking;—perhaps representing that Raleigh, being in Parliament at the time, might have stayed the execution of Queen Mary, if he had chosen. The King is delighted with Theobalds; so far delighted that a few years after he exchanges for it his royal home of Hatfield House, which magnificent place is still held by a descendant of Cecil, in the person of the present Earl of Salisbury.

That place of Theobalds became afterward a pet home of the King; he made great gardens there, stocked with all manner of trees and fruits: every great stranger in England must needs go to see the curious knots and mazes of flowers, and the vineries and shrubbery; but the palace and gardens are now gone. At last King Jamie gets to London, quartering at the Charter-house—where is now a school and a home of worn-out old pensioners (dear old Colonel Newcome died there!) within gunshot of the great markets by Smithfield;—and James is as vain as a boy of sleeping and lording it, at last, in a great capital of two realms that call him master.