The Town: Its Memorable Characters and Events

by Leigh Hunt

We suspect that some excuse might be found for James's tendency to drinking, in the same lax and ricketty constitution which made him timid and idle. His love of field sports might indeed have given him strength enough to counteract it, had he been forced into greater economy of living; but the sportsman is seldom famous for eschewing the pleasures of the table; he thinks he has earned, and can afford, excess; and so he can, more than most men. James would have died of idleness and repletion at half the age he did, had he not been a lover of horseback; but when he got to his table he loved it too well; one excess produced another; the nerves required steadying; and the poor disjointed, "ill-contrived" son of Mary (to use a popular, but truly philosophic epithet,) felt himself too stout and valiant by the help of the bottle, not to become overfond of it when he saw it return. All his feelings were of the same incontinent maudlin kind, easily flowing into temptation, and subjecting themselves to a ruler. The bottle governed him; the favourite governed him; his horse and dogs governed him; pedantry governed him; passion governed him; and when the fit was over, repentance governed him as absolutely.

Sir Anthony Welldon (a discharged servant of James's for writing a banter upon Scotland, and therefore of doubtful authority concerning him, but credible from collateral evidence, and in some respects manifestly impartial,) says that there was an organised system of buffoonery for the King's amusement, at the head of which were Sir Edward Souch, singer and relater of indecent stories, Sir John Finet, composer of ditto, and Sir George Goring, master of the practical jokes! Sir George sometimes brought two fools riding on people's shoulders, and tilting at one another till they fell together by the ears. The same writer says that James was not addicted to drinking; but in this he is contradicted by every other authority, and indeed a different conclusion may be drawn from what Sir Anthony himself subsequently remarks. Sully (Henry the Fourth's Sully, who was at one time ambassador to James, and who tells us that the English monarch usually spent part of the afternoon in bed, "sometimes the whole of it,") says that his custom was "never to mix water with his wine;"[348] and Sir Roger Coke says he was—

"Excessively addicted to hunting and drinking, not ordinary French and Spanish wines, but strong Greek wines; and though he would divide his hunting from drinking those wines (that is to say, have set times for them, apart), yet he would compound his hunting with drinking those wines; and to that purpose he was attended with a special officer, who was, as much as could be, always at hand to fill the King's cup in his hunting when he called for it. I have heard my father say that, being hunting with the King, after the King had drank of the wine, he also drank of it, and though he was young and of a healthful constitution, it so disordered his head that it spoiled his pleasure, and disordered him for three days after. Whether it was from drinking these wines, or from some other cause, the King became so lazy and unwieldy, that he was thrust on horseback, and as he was set, so he would ride, without otherwise poising himself on his saddle; nay, when his hat was set on his head, he would not take the pains to alter it, but it sat as it was upon him."[349]

Perhaps Sir Anthony was fond of the bottle himself, and thought the King drank no more than a gentleman should. It is curious, that Churchill, in his long and laboured invective against James,[350] does not even allude to this propensity. The poet drank himself; probably wrote the very invective with the bottle at his side. However, it is strange, nevertheless, he did not turn the habit itself against the Scottish monarch, as a virtue which failed to redeem him and make him a good fellow.

Sir Anthony Welldon's account of James's person and demeanour is so well painted that we must not omit it. It carries with it its own proofs of authenticity, and is one of those animal likenesses which, in certain people, convey the best evidence of the likeness moral:—

"He was of a middle stature, more corpulent through his clothes than in his body, yet fat enough, his clothes being made large and easie, the doublets quilted for steletto proofe, his breeches in great pleits and full stuffed. He was naturally of a timorous disposition, which was the reason of his quilted doublets; his eyes large, ever rolling after any stranger that came in his presence, insomuch as many for shame have left the roome, as being out of countenance; his beard was very thin; his tongue too large for his mouth, which ever made him speak full in the mouth, and made him drink very uncomely, as if eating his drink, which came out into the cup of each side of his mouth; his skin was as soft as taffeta sarsnet, which felt so because he never washt his hands, onely rubb'd his fingers' ends slightly with the wet end of a napkin; his legs were very weake, having had (as was thought) some foul play in his youth, or rather before he was born, that he was not able to stand at seven years of age, that weaknesse made him ever leaning on other men's shoulders. His walke was ever circular, his fingers ever in that walke fiddling about."—"In his dyet, apparell, and journeys, he was very constant; in his apparell so constant, as by his good-will he would never change his clothes, until worn out to ragges; his fashion never—insomuch, as one bringing to him a hat of a Spanish block, he cast it from him, swearing he neither loved them nor their fashions. Another time, bringing him roses on his shooes, he asked, If they would make him a ruffe-footed dove? One yard of sixpenny ribbon served that turn. His diet and journeys were so constant, that the best observing courtier of our time was wont to say, were he asleep seven yeares, and then awakened, he would tell where the King every day had been, and every dish he had had at his table."[351]

Sir Anthony tells us, that James could be as pleasant in speech, and "witty," as any man, though with a grave face; and that he never forsook a favourite, not even Somerset, till the "poisoning" stories about the latter forced him. It may be added, that he did not even then forsake Somerset, as far as he could abide by him; for he gave a pardon to him and his wife for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, though he hanged their agents. This is the greatest blot on James's character; for though it was a very mean thing in him to put Raleigh to death, we really believe Raleigh "frightened" him; and as to his discountenance of the "mourning" for Queen Elizabeth, it appears to us, that, instead of telling against him, and being a thing "ungrateful," it was the least evidence he could give of something like a feeling for his own mother whom Elizabeth had put to death. James owed no "gratitude" to Elizabeth. She would manifestly have hindered him from succeeding her, could she in common policy, or regal feeling, have helped it; and she kept him, or tried to keep him, in doubt of his succession to the last.

James's style of evincing his regard for his favourites was of a maudlin and doating description, not necessary to be dwelt upon; and it was traceable perhaps to the same causes as his other morbid imperfections; but the horrible injustice which he would allow these favourites to perpetrate, and his open violation of his own solemn oaths and imprecations of himself to the contrary, deepen the suffocating shadow which is thrown over this part of the history of Whitehall by the perfumes of effeminacy and the poisons of murderous incontinence. James's lavish bestowal of other people's money upon his favourites (for it was all money of the State which he gave away, not his own; though, indeed, he might have bestowed it in a less generous style upon himself) was the fault of those who let him give it. There was something hearty and open in the character of Buckingham, though he was a "man of violence" after his fashion, and made Whitehall the scene of his "abductions." But the sternest and most formidable testimony we know against the spirit of this prince's favouritism, and the horrors with which it became mixed up, probably against his will, but still with a connivance most weak and guilty, is in the verses entitled the "Five Senses," the production of his countryman, admirer, and panegyrist, and one of the most loyal of men to his house—Drummond of Hawthornden, who had formerly written a beautiful eulogium upon him, in a poem which Ben Jonson wished had been his own, the "River of Forth Feasting." It is clear by these verses that Drummond believed in the worst stories related of Somerset and the Court. The history of that unhappy favourite is well known. The Countess of Essex, the young and beautiful wife of the subsequent parliamentary general, fell in love with him, and got divorced from her husband under circumstances of the most revolting indelicacy. Sir Thomas Overbury, an agent of Somerset's, and one of those natures that puzzle us by the extreme inconsistency of a fine and tender genius, combined with a violent worldliness (with such at least is he charged), was to be got rid of for stopping short in his furtherance of their connection after the divorce. He was poisoned, and Somerset and his new wife were tried for the murder. Somerset denied it, but was found guilty; the Countess confessed it; yet both were pardoned, while other agents of theirs were hung. There is no rescuing James, after this, from the imputation of the last degree of criminal weakness, to say the least of it. It is said that the other guilty parties (the victims, most likely, of a bad bringing-up,) grew at last as hateful to one another, as they had been the reverse—the dreadfulest punishment of affections destitute of all real regard, and furthered by hateful means.