CHAPTER III.
DECLINE OF THE KING’S HEALTH--CASE OF LORD MIDDLESEX--PROCEEDINGS IN BOTH HOUSES--SIR EDWARD COKE’S EXAGGERATION--BUCKINGHAM’S PARTICIPATION IN THE AFFAIR--MIDDLESEX STEALS AWAY TO THEOBALD’S, AND IS FOLLOWED BY CHARLES--FOUND GUILTY--CONFINED--BUCKINGHAM’S DANGEROUS ILLNESS--ARTHUR BRETT--DEATH OF THE KING--ASCRIBED TO BUCKINGHAM.
CHAPTER III.
The health of James the First had long been declining, and the vexations which troubled his last years contributed, it has been supposed, greatly to its decline. A mortal internal disease, however, aggravated by an attack of tertian ague, left, in the spring of the year 1625, little hope of his recovery. When told, during the access of this disorder, the proverb, that “ague in the spring was health to a king,” he remarked that the saying was meant to apply to a young king. The King was, in truth, only fifty-eight years of age, but, independent of his originally feeble constitution, he, like other men in those times, was old of his age. It has been our blessing, under the improvements of science, and in the habits of the nineteenth century, to retain, if not youth, many of its greatest advantages, to a period of life far more advanced than that in which James was styled the “old King,” a term to which he gave his mournful assent.
Amongst the numerous causes which, with the Spanish treaty, vexed the royal invalid, the case of the Lord Treasurer Middlesex was prominent. In this minister James had rested unbounded confidence, which nothing but the clearest evidence of the Lord Treasurer’s corruption could undermine.
In April, 1624, Middlesex had been questioned in the House of Lords on account of his neglect of the fortresses. He was much dejected by this attack; but the inquiry was ascribed to the jealousy of Buckingham, Lord Middlesex’s brother-in-law, Arthur Brett, having been put forward to supplant the Duke in James’s favour.[[140]] It was thought, however, such was the low standard of public morality, that the articles produced against the Treasurer were not worse than “might be found in most men in his place;” and the attempts to injure him were referred rather to his harsh and insolent manner, his want of respect to Prince Charles, and his inclination to the Spanish match, than to his devices for raising money, and so impoverishing the nation, and to his opposition to the calling a Parliament. Still he stood high in James’s favour, and boldly declared his own innocence; James, whatever he might really feel, “looking on” merely, and leaving his minister to his fate.[fate.][[141]]
Buckingham, addressing the Peers, read a letter from the Deputy in Ireland, who complained of neglect to his applications for repairing the forts, which had become the more necessary as the Irish were in a state of tumult and rebellion. Prince Charles added that a “member of the council” had undertaken to answer these letters, and that this was the Lord Treasurer, “who used to put such letters in his pocket, under pretence of answering them.” Middlesex was soon after suspended from his office, till he should clear himself; and it was even reported that his title, given for services in the royal wardrobe, where he had been guilty of many abuses, would be taken away; but rewards for services, acknowledged under the Great Seal, could not, it was found, be questioned. Even his life would have been in danger, could all have been proved against him.
The House, desirous to finish the matter, allowed Middlesex to produce forty witnesses, twelve of whom deposed directly against him; upon this, Prince Charles sent him a message, ordering him not to appear in the royal presence again until he had cleared himself. This command was the more necessary, since, at this very moment, the mind of James had been impressed by Inojosa with a suspicion that his son and the Duke were plotting against him; an idea which the King, with weeping, imparted to his son and the Duke. “The Lord Treasurer,” Sir Dudley Carleton writes, “is suspected to be at the bottom of it.” Hitherto, James had still appeared confident of the Lord Treasurer’s innocence,[[142]] and in a speech to the Lords, whom he had summoned to Whitehall,[[143]] he advised them as to their judgment. “Such a trial,” he observed, “had no precedent before the last parliament, and then the guilty party, Lord Bacon, had confessed, now the supposed delinquent denied the charge.” James, indeed, long clung to the Lord Treasurer, and told the lords he came to “sing a psalm of mercy and justice about him;” still the trial went on, and the accused, in spite of alleged ill-health, was examined both morning and afternoon; his illness was found, however, to be feigned; and his answers were so audacious, and so manifestly perjured, that, had it not been for the intercession of the Prince, he would have been sent to the Tower. Among other speeches, Middlesex said he had been baited by two mastiffs, Crew and the Attorney General; and he reasoned, in his defence, “saucily” for five hours, but was found guilty, and sentenced to pay 50,000l. fine, and to lose his office; never to sit in Parliament again, nor to come within the verge of the Court. “He would,” Mr. Chamberlain writes, “have been further degraded, but that he had great, if not gratis, friends in the bedchamber. He may live to crush his enemies, if his brother-in-law, Brett, should get into favour and marry the Duchess of Richmond, who would do anything to be prime courtier again.”[[144]]
Regarding this sentence, Lord Campbell remarks:--"The noble defendant had done various things, as head of the Treasury, which would now be considered very scandalous; but he had only imitated his predecessors, and was imitated by his successors."--A melancholy commentary on the state of public morality. It must have been galling to Lord Bacon, in his retirement, to have known that he was coupled with a man so dishonest, so specious, and so degraded as Middlesex.
Whilst all this was taking place, Buckingham was dangerously ill; so that on Charles the difficult task of infusing a sense of justice into the mind of James almost wholly devolved.[[145]] At length, however, irritated by the insolent bearing of Middlesex, who conducted himself as if he had not been expelled from Court, James, with his own hand, scratched out the culprit’s name from the commission of subsidy for Middlesex; and sent, through Sir Richard Weston, a message, saying that, without regarding any other charge, he condemned him merely in his capacity as Master of the Wardrobe, which Middlesex had “treated as a fee-farm not to be accounted for, and would not even allow the clerk to keep accounts, whereby great corruptions arose, and ordinary and mean stuffs were brought in.”[[146]]