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

by Anonymous

PARLIAMENT HOUSE, DUBLIN, IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

The answer of the king struck him at once to the earth. The great philosopher was not aware how far the compact with Coke had really gone; and when he read the king's letter, reprimanding his presumption, accompanied by another from Buckingham, in which he rated him for his officious meddling, and telling him that the same hand which had made him could unmake him, he saw the gulf into which he had plunged. At once he wrote off to both monarch and minion, imploring the humblest pardon for this unworthy offence, which he would now do all in his power to wipe away. Accordingly, he stopped the proceedings before the Council and in the Star Chamber against Coke, and assured Lady Hatton and her friends that he could not assist them in a course so opposed to the wishes of the young lady's father.

On the return of the Court, Bacon hastened to pay his homage to the proud favourite; but he was then made to feel how much it is in the power of a base and little-souled man in favour, to humiliate the most gigantic mind when it forgets to be submissive. The great renovator of science, the proud and vaunting Lord Keeper, was made to wait for two whole days in the lobby of the upstart. This is Weldon's account of it:—"He attended two days at Buckingham's chamber, being not admitted to any better place than the room where trencher-scrapers and lackeys attended, there sitting upon an old wooden chest, amongst such as for his baseness were only fit for his companions, although the honour of his place did merit far more respect, with his purse and Seal lying by him on that chest. Myself told a servant of my Lord of Buckingham, it was a shame to see the purse and Seal of so little value or esteem in his chamber, though the carrier without it merited nothing but scorn, being worst amongst the basest. But the servant told me they had command it must be so. After two days he had admittance. At his first entrance he fell down flat at the duke's foot, kissing it, and vowing never to rise till he had his pardon; and thus was he again reconciled. And since that time so very a slave to the duke and all that family, that he durst not deny the command of the meanest of the kindred, nor yet oppose anything. By which you see a base spirit is even most concomitant with the proudest mind; and surely, never so many brave parts, and so base and abject a spirit, tenanted together in any one earthen cottage, as in this one man."

Buckingham condescended to forgive the suppliant Lord Keeper: the projected marriage was accomplished, and Bacon soon after—that is, on the 4th of January, 1618—was raised to the dignity of Lord Chancellor, with a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year and the title of Baron Verulam. For, provided he threw no obstacle in the way of the marriage, both James and Buckingham preferred his pliancy to the sturdy spirit of Coke.

The consequences of this forced and unnatural marriage were as deplorable as the means of effecting it were vile. The brother of Villiers was created Viscount Purbeck; but no title could give him a sound body or a healthy intellect. It was not long before he was pronounced utterly mad, was shut up in an asylum, and Buckingham took possession of Lady Purbeck's property under pretence of managing it for her and Lord Purbeck, but spent it for his own purposes; and Coke's daughter, outraged in all her feelings as a woman and her rights as a subject, became a degraded and abandoned character.

Buckingham now reigned supreme at Court. He had rapidly risen from a simple country youth into a baron, viscount, earl, and marquis; he was a member of the Privy Council, Knight of the Garter, had been a Master of the Horse, and was now Lord High Admiral; the Earl of Nottingham—the brave old Howard, hero of the Armada—having been compelled to resign to make way for him. He and his mother disposed of all places about Court, in the Church, in the courts of law, and in the Government. Peers, prelates, and men of all degrees courted humbly his favour, and paid him large sums of money for the places they sought, or agreed to annuities out of their salaries and emoluments. The king seemed to rejoice in the wealth which flowed in on his favourite from these corrupt services, and could not bear him out of his sight.

Let us take Weldon's account of this state of things:—"And now Buckingham, having the Chancellor or Treasurer, and all great officers, his very slaves, swells in the height of pride, and summons up all his country kindred, the old countess providing a place for them to learn to carry themselves in a Court-like garb." The old countess, as Weldon calls her, was far from old, but a woman yet in her prime, and of singular beauty and notorious wickedness. She was another Elizabeth Woodville in looking out for rich heirs and heiresses, and marrying her kin to them. The brothers, half-brothers, cousins of Buckingham, were all matched to rich women, and the women were matched to the eldest sons of earls, barons, and men of large estate. And where there was no title, such was soon conferred. The madman that they gave to Coke's daughter, as we have seen, was made Lord Purbeck; another brother was created Earl of Anglesea. Fielding, who married Buckingham's sister, was made Earl of Denbigh, and his brother Earl of Desmond. Cranfield, who married a female relative, was made Earl of Middlesex. But the most shameful case of all, perhaps, was that of Williams, Dean of Westminster, a paramour of the countess's, who was made Bishop of Lincoln, and allowed to retain not only the deanery of Westminster, but the rectories of Dinam, Waldgrave, Grafton, and Peterborough; the prebends of Asgarbie and Nonnington, besides other dignities; so that, says Heylin, he was a perfect diocese in himself, being bishop, dean, prebendary, residentiary, and parson, and these all at once. Other livings and bishoprics were sold as highly as these were freely given. Fotherby of Salisbury paid three thousand five hundred pounds for his see, and all other dignities and benefices in the Church were equally at the disposal of this upstart and his venal, lascivious mother. "There were books of rates," says Weldon, "on all offices, bishoprics, and deaneries in England, that could tell you what fines and pensions were to pay." He adds, "that Buckingham's female relatives were numerous enough to have peopled any plantation. So that King James, that naturally in former times hated women, had his lodgings replenished with them, and all of the kindred, and little children did run up and down the king's lodgings like rabbits startled out of their burrows. Here was a strange change, that the king, who formerly would not endure his queen and children in his lodgings, now you would have judged that none but women frequented them. Nay, this was not all; but the kindred had all the houses about Whitehall, as if bulwarks and flankers to that citadel."

Buckingham himself, in time, seemed to clothe himself with half the offices in the country. He became Warden of the Cinque Ports, chief justice in eyre of all the parks and forests south of the Trent, Master of the King's Bench Office, High Steward of Westminster, and Constable of Windsor Castle. In his person he was lavish and showy even to tawdriness. He was skilled in dancing, and therefore kept the Court one scene of balls and masques. He had his clothes trimmed at even an ordinary dance with great buttons of diamond, with diamond hatbands, cockades, and earrings; "he was yoked with manifold ropes and knots of pearl; in short, he was accustomed to be manacled, fettered, and imprisoned in jewels."

But one of the most interesting and painful events of the reign of James, and one which does him little credit, now occurred. Sir Walter Raleigh, deprived (as we have seen, to gratify the favourite Carr) of his beautiful estate of Sherborne in Dorsetshire—"which he had beautified with orchards, gardens, and groves, of much variety and delight"—had remained in the Tower from the time of his trial in 1603, that is, thirteen years. His captivity was rendered less severe by the presence in the Tower of other prisoners of intelligence, and, more than all the rest, of the Earl of Northumberland, who gathered around him in his prison men of science and literature, and thus was instrumental in converting his cell into a palace of knowledge and refined delight. Northumberland was another of those men who revelled in learning, whom a king really wise and learned would have rejoiced to honour. But James's love was not a love of learning or literature on its own account, it was a love of himself. It was the vanity of passing for a sagacious and learned king which he possessed, and not the sagacity and the learning themselves. Therefore, so far from cherishing science and learning, and loving the possessor of them, James was too shallow to comprehend the one, and so egotistical that he hated the other. Northumberland had been in prison ever since the year of the Gunpowder Plot, 1605, eleven years, a victim to the suspicions of the king and the tyranny of the Star Chamber, for no participation in the plot was ever proved against him. Amongst his visitants and pensioners were the most profound mathematicians of the age, Allen, Hariot, Warner—"the Atlantes of the mathematical world," Burchill—the celebrated Greek and Hebrew scholar, and other noted characters. Amongst them Sir Walter found the pleasure of cultivating inquiries which his busy public and Court life had before kept unknown to him. He commenced a series of chemical experiments, and the celebrated Lucy Hutchinson, who was the daughter of Sir Allen Apsley, Lieutenant of the Tower, in the preface to her interesting life of her husband, Colonel Hutchinson, says:—"Sir Walter Raleigh and Mr. Ruthin, being prisoners in the Tower, and addicting themselves to chemistry, my mother suffered them to make their rare experiments at her cost, partly to comfort and divert the poor prisoners, and partly to gain the knowledge of their experiments and the medicines, to help such poor people as were not able to seek physicians."

In these chemical inquiries, Sir Walter imagined that he had discovered a universal panacea. The queen in an illness had taken it, and appeared cured by it, and afterwards, as we have seen, tried it in the case of Prince Henry, but without effect.