Then stretch our bones in a still gloomy valley;
Nothing’s so dainty sweet as lovely melancholy.”[31]
King James and Family.
Meanwhile, how are London and England getting on with their ram-shackle dotard of a King? Not well; not proudly. Englishmen were not as boastful of being Englishmen as in the days when the virgin Elizabeth queened it, and shattered the Spanish Armada, and made her will and England’s power respected everywhere. James, indeed, had a son, Prince Henry, who promised far better things for England, and for the Stuart name, than his pedant of a father.
This son was a friend of Raleigh’s (would, maybe, have saved that great man from the scaffold, if he had lived), a friend, too, of all the high-minded, far-seeing ones who best represented Elizabethan enterprise; but he died, poor fellow, at nineteen, leaving the heirship to that Charles I. whose dismal history you know. James had also a daughter—Elizabeth—a high-spirited maiden, who, amid brilliant fêtes made in her honor, married that Frederic, Elector Palatine, who received his bride in the magnificent old castle, you will remember at Heidelberg. There they show still the great gateway of the Princess Elizabeth, clad in ivy, and the Elizabeth gardens. ’Twas said that her ambition and high spirit pushed the poor Elector into political complications that ruined him, and that made the once owner of that princely château an outcast, and almost a beggar. The King, too, by his vanities, his indifference, and cowardice, helped largely the discomfiture of this branch of his family, as he did by his wretched bringing up of Charles pave the way for that monarch’s march into the gulf of ruin.
In foreign politics this weak king coquetted in a childish way—sometimes with the Catholic powers; sometimes with the Protestant powers of Middle Europe; and at home, with a ridiculous sense of his own importance, he angered the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Puritans of England by his perpetual interferences. He provoked the emigration that was planting, year by year, a New England west of the Atlantic; he harried the House of Commons into an antagonism which, by its growth and earnestness was, by and by, to upset his throne and family together. His power was the power of a blister that keeps irritating—and not like Elizabeth’s—the power of a bludgeon that thwacks and makes an end.
And in losing respect this King gained no love. Courtiers could depend on his promises as little as kingdoms. He chose his favorites for a fine coat, or a fine face, and thereafter, from sheer indolence yielded to them in everything. In personal habits, too, he grew more and more unbearable; his doublets were all dirtier; his wigs shabbier; his coarse jokes coarser; his tipsiness frequenter. A foulness grew up in the court which tempted such men as Fletcher and Massinger to fouler ways of speech, and which lured such creatures as Lady Essex to ruin. A pretty sort of King was this to preach against tobacco!
James had given up poetry-writing, in which he occasionally indulged before coming to England; yet he had poetical tastes; he enjoyed greatly many of Shakespeare’s plays; Ben Jonson, too, was a pet of his, and had easy access to royalty, certainly until his quarrel with the great court architect, Inigo Jones. But, as in all else, the King’s taste in poetry grew coarser as he grew older, and he showed a great liking for a certain John Taylor,[32] called “the Water-Poet,” a rough, coarse creature, who sculled boats across the Thames for hire; who made a foot-trip into Scotland in rivalry of Ben Jonson, and who wrote a Very merry wherry Voyage from London to York, and a Kecksy-Winsey, or a Lerry-cum-twang, which you will not find in your treasures of literature, but which the leering King loved to laugh over in his cups. Taylor afterward was keeper of a rollicking, Royalist tavern in Oxford, and of another in London, where he died at the age of seventy-four.
Tobacco, first introduced in Raleigh’s early voyaging times, came to have a little fund of literature crystallizing about it—what with histories of its introduction and properties, and onslaughts upon it. Bobadil, the braggart, in “Every Man in his Humor,” says: “I have been in the Indies (where this herbe growes), where neither myself nor a dozen gentlemen more (of my knowledge) have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but Tobacco only. Therefore it cannot be, but ’tis most Divine.”
There were many curious stories afloat too—taking different shapes—of the great apprehension ignorant ones felt on seeing people walking about, as first happened in these times, with smoke pouring from their mouths and noses. In an old book called The English Hue and Crie (printed about 1610), it takes something like this form: