James ascended the English throne as a poor man comes to a large inheritance. In securing peace he deemed he had granted the people all they desired, and he was the only monarch who cast a generous thought on their social recreations. That image of peace and of delight was to be reflected in the court: and in that enchanted circle of flattery and of hope, the silvery voices of his silken parasites told how “he gave like a king;” but he himself, a man of simple habits, with an utter carelessness of money, learned a lesson which he never rightly comprehended, how an exchequer might be voided.
James was a polemical monarch when polemics were political. But what creed or system did this royal polemic wholly adopt? Born of Roman Catholic parents and not abhorrent to the mother-church, for the childhood of antiquity had its charms for him; brought up among the Scottish presbyterians, with whom he served a long accommodating apprenticeship of royalty, and with the doctrines of the Anglican Church become the sovereign of three realms, did James, like his brother of France, modify his creed, for a crown, by the state-religion?
Behold this luckless philosopher on the throne closing the last accompts of his royalty with nothing but zeros in his own favour. By puritans hated, by Romanists misliked, and surrounded by trains of the “blue-bonnets,” who were acted on the stage, and balladed in the streets; little gracious with his English subjects, to whom from the first “the coming-in” seemed as much like an invasion as an accession; never forgiven by the foreigner for his insular genius, whose pacific policy refused to enter into a project of visionary conquest; and finally falling into a new age, when the monarch, reduced to a mere metaphysical abstraction, whose prerogative and privilege were alike indefinite, had to wrestle with “the five hundred kings,” as James once called the Commons; deservedly or undeservedly, this monarch for all parties was a convenient subject for panegyric or for libel, true or false.
But in reality what was the character of James the First? Where shall we find it?[3]
[1] James granted to the Puritans the public discussion then prayed for—the famous conference at Hampton Court.
[2] A curious list of some of the more remarkable controversialists on both sides may be found in Irving’s “Lives of the Scottish Poets,” ii. 234.
[3] I have at least honestly attempted “An Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James the First.”
