Cassell's History of England, Vol. 2 (of 8) / From the Wars of the Roses to the Great Rebellion

by Anonymous

On the 7th of July James set out for his capital, and at Stamford Hill was met by the lord mayor and aldermen in their scarlet robes, followed by a great crowd, and with these he entered the City, and proceeded to the Charterhouse. He immediately caused a proclamation to be made that all licences and monopolies granted by Elizabeth, and which had excited so much discontent, should be suspended till they had been examined by the Council; that all protections from the Crown to delay the progress of justice in the courts of law should cease, as well as the abuses of purveyance, and the oppressions of saltpetre-makers and officers of the household. From the Charterhouse he proceeded, according to routine, to the Tower, and thence to Greenwich and back to Whitehall, at every step making more knights and creating peers. He had sent for the Earl of Southampton to meet him at York, and he now restored both him and the son of his friend the Earl of Essex to their honours and estates. Mountjoy and three of the Howards were raised to the rank of earls; nine new barons were created, amongst them Cecil, who was made Lord Cecil, and afterwards Viscount Cranbourne, and finally Earl of Salisbury. Buckhurst and Egerton were promoted; and eventually, besides his seven hundred spick-and-span new knights, he added sixty-two fresh members to the peerage. So extravagant was his distribution of honours that a pasquinade was affixed to the door of St. Paul's, offering to teach weak memories the art of recollecting the titles of the nobility.

The coronation took place on the 25th of July. James's wife, Anne of Denmark, was crowned with him. The weather had been intensely hot, but it now set in very rainy. To spoil the pleasure of the people, the plague was raging in the City, and the inhabitants were by proclamation forbidden to enter Westminster. No queen-consort had been crowned since Anne Boleyn, nor had any king and queen been crowned together since Henry VIII. and Catherine of Aragon, and therefore the restriction was the more mortifying. Queen Anne went to the coronation "with her seemly hair down hanging on her princely shoulders, and on her head a coronet of gold. She so mildly saluted her new subjects, that the women, weeping, cried out with one voice, 'God bless the royal queen! Welcome to England, long to live and continue!'"

That week there died in London and the suburbs eight hundred and fifty-seven persons of the plague. On the 5th of August James ordered morning and evening prayers and sermons, with bonfires all night to drive away the pestilence, not forgetting to order that all men should praise God for his Majesty's escape that day three years before, from the Gowrie conspiracy; and on the 10th of August he commanded that a fast, with sermons of repentance, should be held, and repeated every week on Wednesday so long as the plague continued.

James's pride was soon gratified by the flocking in of ambassadors from all the great nations of Europe, soliciting his alliance; and on the first intimation of their approach he appointed Sir Lewis Lewknor master of the ceremonies, to receive and entertain these distinguished persons. This was the first establishment of such an office in England. First arrived, from Holland and the United Provinces, Prince Frederick of Nassau son of the Prince of Orange, attended by the three able diplomatists Valck, Barneveldt, and Brederode. James, with equally high notions of the royal prerogative, had not the sympathy of Elizabeth with the struggles of Protestantism abroad, and therefore regarded the revolted Netherlanders as rebels and traitors, and did not fail amongst his courtiers to pronounce them so; the more particularly as they owed the English crown large sums for past assistance, which they were in no hurry to pay. He, therefore, framed various excuses to defer their audiences till the arrival of the envoy of the King of Spain, Count Aremberg, who was not long in appearing, bringing the agreeable news that the Archduke had liberated all English prisoners, as the subjects of a friendly power. Two days after Aremberg's arrival, Henry IV.'s great minister, the Duke of Sully, reached London. Aremberg was in no condition to negotiate on any positive terms till he received instructions from Spain; and Sully seized time by the forelock, by distributing amongst the courtiers sixty thousand crowns, a considerable part of which found its way into the queen's purse. He prevailed on James to make a treaty with Henry IV., in which he engaged to send money to the States in aid against the Spaniards, and join France in open hostilities should Philip attempt to invade that country. Sully, delighted with his success—for Henry feared nothing more than James's making peace with Spain, and leaving him to assist Holland alone—returned to France. But a little time convinced the French court that nothing in reality had been secured by it, for James had no money to send to Holland had he been really so disposed, which is doubtful, and that he merely temporised with them as he had done with different States before.

Meantime the Court of Spain, notwithstanding the activity of France, was slow in deciding the course of policy to be adopted towards England under the new king. After the decided hostility towards it under Elizabeth, and the signal defeats experienced, pride forbade Philip to solicit a peace, lest it should look like weakness. And, indeed, Spain had never recovered from the severe blow received in the loss of its Armada, and the other ravages of its ports and colonies by the English, added to the loss of a great portion of the Low Countries; and this consciousness made it more tardy in its proceedings. But while engaged in prolonged discussions on this head, two Englishmen arrived at the court of Spain, whose mission was of a nature to bring it to a decision. These were Wright and Fawkes, who were soon to assume a conspicuous position in the strife between the Catholics and Protestants of England. Previous to the death of Elizabeth, Thomas Winter had negotiated with the Spanish Court a plan for the invasion of England, which had been abandoned on her decease. Now, however, the scheme was revived, and these two emissaries were despatched to sound the present disposition of the Court of Madrid. This direct appeal from the conspirators seems to have startled the Spanish Government from its wavering policy. It was not prepared for anything so desperate, and replied that it had no cause of complaint against James, but, on the contrary, regarded him as a friend and ally, and had appointed the Condé de Villa Mediana as ambassador to his Court.

This was decisive, and the way now seemed open towards a more friendly tone between Spain and England; but at the same moment a secret and mysterious correspondence seems to have been going on between Aremberg, the agent of the King of Spain, and a discontented party in England. Northumberland, Cobham, and Raleigh were ill at ease under the disappointment which they had met with in their hopes of favour at James's Court. Northumberland had been to a certain degree graciously received, and even entertained with promises by James; but he felt that while Cecil was so completely in the ascendant there was little hope of a cordial feeling towards him in the monarch's heart. Cobham and Raleigh were undisguisedly in disgrace, and were shunned by the courtiers as fallen men. The three friends, therefore, entered into intrigues with the Court of France through the resident minister Beaumont, and Sully the envoy extraordinary. For a time their suggestions were listened to, but the apparent success of Sully with James put an end to further overtures, and there Northumberland was prudent enough to desist. But Cobham and Raleigh, disappointed of Court favour and burning with resentment against Cecil—whom they felt to be the cause of their disgrace—plotted for the overthrow of the crafty minister.

Sully, the French envoy, had, while in London, done his best to inspire James with distrust of Cecil; and there is little doubt that this was at the suggestion, or with the co-operation of Cobham, Northumberland, and Raleigh. When Northumberland drew back, these two held communication with Aremberg, to whom they offered their services in promoting the objects he sought on behalf of Spain and the Netherlands. Aremberg, who did not know what was going on at the Spanish Court, communicated the proposal to his master, who instructed him to give a favourable answer. What the scheme proposed by Cobham and Raleigh precisely was seems never to have been known, but we may suppose that in return for aid from the Continent, these ambitious men were to attempt the removal of Cecil by some means, and on their succeeding to power, their influence was to be exerted with the king on behalf of Spain.

This was designated by those in the secret as "The Main" conspiracy; but there was also another going on simultaneously, of which these gentlemen are supposed to have been cognisant, but not mixed up with. This was called "The Bye" conspiracy, and was composed of an extraordinary medley of the discontented, the most determined of whom aimed at nothing less than the seizure of the king, and the government of the country in his name, for their own party purposes.

The grand cause of discontent was the disappointment of both Catholics and Puritans in James. Before his coming to the English crown he had held out the most flattering expectations to the Catholics that he would grant them toleration, whilst the Puritans calculated on his Presbyterian education for a decided adhesion to their views. But no sooner did he reach England than he threw himself into the arms of the High Church party, declaring that it was the only religion fit for a king. To the Catholics he declared he would grant no toleration—rather would he fight to the death against it; and he took no pains to conceal his disgust at the Presbyterian clergy amongst whom he had spent his youth. The antagonism of Catholic and Puritan was forgotten in the resentment against this disclosure of the king's disposition. Instantly plans were cogitated to avenge themselves of the royal perfidy, as it was termed, and to secure themselves against the threatened storm. Sir Griffin Markham, a Catholic gentlemen of no great property or influence, concerted with two priests, Watson and Clarke, the means of raising the Catholics against the Government. Watson had been sent into Scotland, to James, on behalf of the Catholics, before the death of Elizabeth, and he indignantly represented that James had given them, through him, the most solemn promises of toleration, which he had now broken. He, therefore, threw himself with the greatest heat into the conspiracy: he drew up an awful oath of secrecy, and he and Clarke travelled far and wide amongst the Catholic families, calling upon them to come forward in the name of their religion and their property.

But their success was trivial; few or none of the Catholics of weight and station would engage in the enterprise. Failing there, Watson turned his attention to the Puritans; and with them he was more successful, by artfully concealing from them the paucity of the Catholics who had joined the conspiracy, and the full extent of his own intentions. Lord Grey de Wilton, who was a leading Puritan, and had his discontent from the same causes as Cobham and Raleigh, was induced by Watson to join the conspiracy, under the impression that a strong Catholic body was engaged in it. He agreed to furnish a troop of a hundred horse, but he was not long in discovering that he had been imposed upon, and advised the conspirators to defer the execution of their design to a more favourable opportunity.