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

by Anonymous

These singular precautions, which betrayed an awful terror on the part of the king of some withering exposure from the exasperated favourite, so far prevailed, that Somerset stood upon his trial with apparent calmness, but refused steadfastly to plead guilty. Bacon, on his part, was careful in stating the charges against him, to do it so mildly that the prisoner should not be excited to any dangerous pitch. Somerset never mentioned the king, but he defended himself resolutely and with consummate ability. He analysed the whole string of charges brought against him, explained away whatever appeared to tell most forcibly to his disadvantage, and for eleven hours prolonged the trial and the intolerable agony and suspense of the king, who, during the whole time, was in the most pitiable condition of terror. "But who had seen," says Sir Anthony Weldon, in a passage which is fully borne out by the letters of More, the lieutenant, "the king's restless motion all that day, sending to every boat landing at the bridge, cursing all that came without tidings, would have easily judged that all was not right, and that there had been some grounds for his fears of Somerset's boldness; but at last, one bringing him word that he was condemned, all was quiet."

In the course of a few weeks James actually granted a pardon to the murder-stained countess, on the plea that she was not tried as a principal, but as an accessory before the fact; though all the facts of the case go to show that she was the chief instrumental instigator of the death of Overbury. He also offered the same grace to Somerset; but the proud, though fallen, favourite haughtily refused it, saying that he was an innocent man, who therefore needed no pardon, but expected a reversal of his sentence.

Time, however, showed him that the favour of the prince had passed on to others, and that his enemies were working for further injury to him; he therefore condescended in the autumn of 1624 to petition for the pardon formerly rejected. It was granted on the 24th of October, with a promise of the restoration of his property. James meanwhile allowed him an income of four thousand pounds a year, and protected him from the infamy attaching to his condemnation. He would not allow him to be expelled from the Order of St. George, nor his arms to be reversed in the chapel of that saint at Windsor.

The guilty earl and countess are said to have retired together into the country, not to the felicity of innocent affection but, as it was said, to mutual hatred and recrimination. The countess died in 1632; the earl, who never recovered his estates, lived on thirteen years longer. Their only child, Lady Ann Carr, who was born in the Tower, was married to William, the fifth Earl, and afterwards Duke, of Bedford, and became the mother of the celebrated Lord William Russell, who perished on the scaffold under Charles II. Out of such a soil can rise such plants; nay, even the daughter of this infamous couple is declared to have been a woman of the purest and noblest character; and so carefully was the horrible history of her parents kept from her, that it never reached her ears till a few years before her own death. The Earl of Essex, so cruelly treated in this revolting affair, lived to lead with high distinction the army of the Commonwealth.

Fast on the fall of Somerset followed that of the Chief Justice Coke. He had rendered distinguished service to James in hunting out the evidence and bringing to punishment the favourite and his wife; but he had neutralised this benefit by his haughtiness and opposition to the royal authority in other respects. Coke and Bacon had pursued two opposite systems of policy in their courses towards the highest honours of the State. Bacon had affected liberalism and a championship of popular rights, which the higher he rose the more he sacrificed to the pleasure of the monarch. There was a profound flattery in this, for it seemed to give an additional value to his growing attachment to the Crown, that it was won from his original bias towards the people. On the other hand, Coke commenced as a thorough-going supporter of the prerogative, and as his abilities were pre-eminent, and his prosecution of State offenders unrestrained by any scruples of conscience, he did the work of that despotic prince with a gusto and a ruthlessness which highly delighted his employer. No lawyer, except Jeffreys, in a later age, ever indulged in the same unsparing abuse of those against whom he was retained. His disposition was not merely unfeeling, it was truculent, and the insolence of his language was beyond all former experience. When let loose on a victim, he certainly was no respecter of persons; an Arabella Stuart or a Raleigh were abused in a style which would not now be tolerated towards the most abject criminal. But when Coke had reached the summit of his ambition, and thought the height to which he had climbed secure, he began to display the inherent pride of his nature, by assuming an independence of manner and a haughtiness of opinion, exhibited even towards the Throne, which astonished and irritated James. In the Commons he openly opposed the claims of prerogative, came out in defence of popular rights, and ended where Bacon had begun. From abject servility he rapidly passed to daring opposition. On the subject of the late benevolences, he stood forward as a patriot in the Commons; in the case of Peacham, that which was prosecuted as treason, Coke declared was only defamation; and in that of Owen, he agreed with the prisoner that he had committed no treason in saying that the king, if excommunicated, might lawfully be killed, because the king not having been excommunicated, the opinion could not apply to him. These declarations, both in Parliament and on the Bench, roused James to a keen resentment, and this was continually augmented. He set his own court of the King's Bench above every other, and threatened with the penalties of a Præmunire the judges of the Court of Chancery, and all other judges who should grant relief in Equity after judgment had been pronounced in the King's Bench; and he extended the same menace to all suitors who sought for such relief. The judges of the Courts of Admiralty, of High Commission, of Requests, of the Duchy of Lancaster, and even the presidents of the Councils of the North and of Wales, felt their jurisdictions invaded and repressed by his pretensions. The Court of Star Chamber even, hitherto above all law, was called in question by him, and its power to levy fines in many cases denied. He went farther, and, as in the case of Owen and Peacham, dictated to the Privy Council, and contradicted the Sovereign to his very face.

It would seem as if at the moment when Coke was hunting down his former benefactor Somerset, the secret decree had gone out from the king against the Lord Chief Justice himself. Somerset was condemned on the 25th of May, and on the 30th of June Coke received an order from the king to absent himself from the Council chamber, and not to proceed on his circuit, but to employ himself in correcting the errors in his Book of Reports. He had outraged James's sense of his own supreme authority, by opposing him in the matter of Commendams and bishoprics, and had, moreover, contended with Villiers, the new favourite, respecting a patent place at Court. Long before he received this startling order for the suspension of his diplomatic and judicial functions, the Archbishop, the Chancellor, and Mr. Attorney-General Bacon had been employed by royal command to collect charges against him. He was now charged with concealing a debt of twelve thousand pounds, due from the late Chancellor Hatton to the Crown; with contempt of the king's authority in declaring from the Bench that the Common Law would be overthrown by proceedings in Equity, or by claims of prerogative; and for disrespect to the Crown in the affair of the Commendams.

The charge regarding the money Coke refuted when brought before the Council, and confirmed his case by a decision at law; as to the second charge, he explained it as in no way reflecting on the king; and for the third, he humbly solicited his majesty's forgiveness. James professed to retain the highest regard for the Lord Chief Justice, and intended, on his showing a proper humility, to continue to him his favour; but when Coke brought in his Book of Reports, and maintained that he could only find five trivial errors in it, James, in great anger for his "deceit, contempt, and slander of government," dismissed him from the Bench, and made Montague, the Recorder of London, chief justice in his place. Coke, with all his harshness and cutting style to others, felt for himself keenly, and is said to have wept like a child on receiving his dismissal. Bacon displayed anything but a philosophical magnanimity on the fall of his rival. He not only joked with Villiers on the disgrace of the great man who had offended the favourite, but he wrote a most insulting letter to the fallen judge, which was particularly odious from being garnished with the cant of piety.

Bacon now looked confidently towards the Chancellorship, and in March of the next year (1617) Brackley resigning from age, the Great Seal was transferred to him, with the title of Lord Keeper. Sir Francis had reached the elevation to which he had so long and so ardently aspired, by a slavish advocacy of the most unlimited claims of prerogative and, as far as in him lay, the restriction of constitutional liberty—a deplorable instance of how completely the most transcendent talents can be united in an ignoble and mercenary nature. Indeed, the conduct of Bacon on this occasion was vain and weak to a pitiable degree. Though he had now reached the mature age of fifty-four, and drew an enormous income from his grants and offices, he was so profuse of expenditure that he was a needy man, pressed with difficulties, which he saw in the Chancellorship an exhaustless means of dispersing. His vanity burst forth to a surprising extent and he assumed all the state of a Wolsey. He rode to Westminster Hall on horseback, in a gown of rich purple satin, and attended by a crowd of nobles, judges, great law officers, lawyers, and students, rivalling even the splendour of the king.

While these affairs were progressing at home, the credit of James abroad had sunk very low. At the conference for effecting a truce between Holland and Spain, held at the Hague—a conference which established the independence of the Low Countries—the English ministers had been made to feel the ignominy of their position, compared with the dignity of the ambassadors of Elizabeth. Prince Maurice told them openly that their master dare not open his mouth in contradiction to the King of Spain; and their allies, the French, in consequence assumed a superiority throughout the negotiations which mortified deeply the English envoys. Nor was that the only slight which James's truckling policy brought on him abroad. He was anxious to ally his son to the Court of Spain, notwithstanding the intense aversion of his subjects from the idea of a Catholic Princess. But Spain declined the offer. He next applied for the hand of Madame Christine, sister to Louis XIII. of France; but here again he was met with the contempt which his mean and insecure character merited: France preferred the suit of the Duke of Savoy. It was never before the fortune of England to have to go begging to the Continental states for wives for its princes: they had hitherto been only too officiously pressed on its acceptance.

We must now trace the proceedings of James in Scotland and Ireland, where he was anxious to establish his principles of Church and State supremacy as thoroughly as in England, and where the seed he sowed rapidly grew into the same harvest of bloodshed and revolution as on the south side of the Tweed.