A mere chance saved king and Parliament. When all was ready, and the cellar was charged with its murderous contents, one of the conspirators wrote an anonymous letter to his cousin, Lord Monteagle, a Catholic peer, imploring him not to attend on the 5th of November, on account of a great blow that was impending. Monteagle sent the letter to the king, whose suspicious mind—it will be remembered that his own father had perished by gunpowder—soon read the secret. The cellars were searched on the night of November 4, and Guy Fawkes, who was to fire the train, was discovered lurking there with his great hoard of powder. On the news of his arrest the other conspirators took arms, but their preparations had been ridiculously inadequate for their end, and they were easily hunted down and slain. Fawkes and Garnet the Jesuit were tortured, and then hung, drawn, and quartered. The only result of the Gunpowder Treason was to make the lot of the English Romanists much harder than before, for the nation thought that most of them had been implicated in the plot, and Parliament greatly increased the harshness of the Recusancy laws.
Strife between king and Parliament.
The persecuting of Romanists, however, was about the only point on which the king and Parliament could agree. From the very first, James and the House of Commons were at odds on almost every matter which they had to discuss. When peace was made with Spain in 1604, the House was ill pleased; for a whole generation of Englishmen had grown up who looked upon war with King Philip as one of the natural conditions of life, and thought that the Spanish colonies in America existed solely for the purpose of being plundered by English buccaneers. James, on the other hand, hated all wars with a coward's hatred, and had a great respect for the ancient greatness and autocratic sovereignty of the Spanish kings. Taxation furnished another fertile source of dispute: the court was numerous, profligate, and wasteful, and, in spite of Cecil's economy, the king piled up a mountain of debts, and exceeded his revenue year by year. To fill his purse, he raised the scale of the customs-duties without the consent of Parliament (1608), and then refrained from calling the Houses together for two years. But in 1610 his increasing necessities forced him to summon them, and a sharp dispute about the legality of the increased customs at once began. It grew so bitter that the king dismissed the Parliament without having obtained the money that he wanted, and was constrained to go on accumulating unpaid debts (1611).
Death of Cecil.—Rise of Rochester.
Next year the great minister, Robert Cecil, died, and James was left to govern for himself as best he might. A great change was at once apparent. Its chief symptom was the beginning of the system of government by royal favourites. Hitherto James had heaped wealth and favour on his minions, but had not dared to entrust them with affairs of state, so great was his fear of his able Lord Treasurer. When Salisbury was gone, the king fell entirely into the hands of the favourite of the hour, a young Scot named Robert Ker, who had been his page. James made him Viscount Rochester, put him in the Privy Council, and entrusted him with all his confidential business. Ker was a worthless adventurer, whose good looks and ready tongue were his only stock-in-trade. He used his influence purely for personal ends—to fill his pocket and indulge his taste for ostentation. When he meddled in politics, it was to encourage the king in courses which were hateful to the nation—in forming an alliance with Spain, and in persisting in illegal taxation.
Murder of Sir T. Overbury.—Fall of Rochester.
Ker's domination in the king's council lasted about three years, and was ended by a shocking crime, which did more to lower the court and the king in the eyes of the people than anything which had yet occurred since James's accession. Ker had become enamoured of Frances Howard, the wife of the young Earl of Essex, son of Elizabeth's unfortunate favourite. The countess returned his passion, became his paramour, and agreed to procure her divorce from her husband by bringing scandalous and indelicate accusations against Essex. But a certain Sir Thomas Overbury, an unscrupulous courtier, who was in the secret of this wicked plot, set himself to hinder the marriage, and threatened to make public what he knew. Rochester got him thrown into the Tower, and there he was poisoned by the revengeful countess, with or without the guilty knowledge of the favourite. Lady Essex brought her suit against her husband, and as the king interfered with the course of justice in her favour, the divorce was accomplished. The guilty pair were married with great state, and James raised Rochester to the earldom of Somerset to celebrate the occasion. But murder will out. Two years later the tale of Overbury's assassination got abroad, and the king learnt the story of his favourite's dishonour. James was not quite dead to all feelings of right and wrong, the revelation greatly shocked him, and, moreover, he was growing tired of Somerset's arrogance and dictatorial ways. Hence it came about that he suffered the law to take its course. The earl and countess were tried and convicted of having poisoned Overbury; their lives were spared, but they suffered long imprisonment, and disappeared into obscurity. It is said that Somerset saved his neck by threatening to reveal some disgraceful secret of the king's, of which he was possessed (1616).
Ascendency of Buckingham.
It might have been supposed that Ker's scandalous end would have weaned King James from his propensity for favourites. But this was not so. He replaced the Earl of Somerset by another minion, George Villiers, the son of a Leicestershire squire. Villiers was as handsome and insinuating as Ker, and possessed far greater ability. He not only acquired an entire ascendency over James himself, but mastered as completely the heir to the throne, Prince Charles. The king's elder son, Henry, Prince of Wales, had died four years before, during Somerset's day of power. He had been a very promising youth, and hated his father's ways; hence some suspected that Somerset had poisoned him, though there seems to have been no foundation for the charge.
For the nine years which James had yet to live, he was completely in the hands of Villiers. The young favourite was vain, arrogant, and ambitious; but worse men than he have lived; he had the saving vice of pride, which kept him from many of the meaner sins. He was not cruel, avaricious, or revengeful, as his predecessor Somerset had been. But his influence on the realm was all in the direction of evil; in his headstrong self-confidence, he thought that he was a Heaven-sent statesman, and led his weak and doting master into many follies.