General History for Colleges and High Schools

by P. V. N. Myers

I. THE FIRST TWO STUARTS.

1. Reign of James the First (1603-1625).

THE "DIVINE RIGHT" OF KINGS AND THE "ROYAL TOUCH."—With the end of the Tudor line (see p. 561), James VI. of Scotland, son of Mary Stuart, came to the English throne, as James I. of England. The accession of the House of Stuart brought England and Scotland under the same sovereign, though each country still retained its own Parliament.

The Stuarts were firm believers in the doctrine of the "Divine Right" of kings. They held that hereditary princes are the Lord's anointed, and that their authority can in no way be questioned or limited by people, priest, or Parliament. James I.'s own words were, "As it is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do, so it is high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do, or to say that the king cannot do this or that."

This doctrine found much support in the popular superstition of the "Royal Touch." The king was believed to possess the power—a gift transmitted through the royal line of England from Edward the Confessor—of healing scrofulous persons by the laying on of hands. [Footnote: Consult Lecky, A History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I. p. 73. The French kings were also supposed to possess the same miraculous power, inherited, as most believed, from Louis the Saint.] It is simply the bearing of this strange superstition upon the doctrine of the divine right of kings that concerns us now. "The political importance of this superstition," observes Lecky, "is very manifest. Educated laymen might deride it, but in the eyes of the English poor it was a visible, palpable attestation of the indefeasible sanctity of the royal line. It placed the sovereignty entirely apart from the categories of mere human institutions."

By bearing this superstition in mind, it will be easier for us to understand how so large a proportion of the people of England could support the Stuarts in their extravagant claims, and could sincerely maintain the doctrine of the sinfulness of resistance to the king.

THE GUNPOWDER PLOT (1605).—In the third year of James's reign was unearthed a plot to blow up with gunpowder the Parliament Building, upon the opening day of the Session, when king, lords, and commons would all be present, and thus to destroy at a single blow every branch of the English Government. This conspiracy, known as the Gunpowder Plot, was entered into by a few Roman Catholics, because they were disappointed in the course which the king had taken as regards their religion. [Footnote: Though son of the Catholic Mary Stuart, James had been educated as a Protestant.] The leader of the conspiracy, Guy Fawkes, was arrested, and after being put to the rack, was executed. His chief accomplices were also seized and punished. The alarm created by the terrible plot led Parliament to enact some very severe laws against all the Roman Catholics of the realm.

COLONIES AND TRADE SETTLEMENTS.—The reign of James I. is signalized by the commencement of that system of colonization which has resulted in the establishment of the English race in almost every quarter of the globe.

In the year 1607 Jamestown, so named in honor of the king, was founded in Virginia. This was the first permanent English settlement within the limits of the United States. In 1620 some Separatists, or Pilgrims, who had found in Holland a temporary refuge from persecution, pushed across the Atlantic, and amidst heroic sufferings and hardships established the first settlement in New England, and laid the foundations of civil liberty in the New World.

Besides planting these settlements in the New World, the English during this same reign established themselves in the ancient country of India. In 1612 the East India Company, which had been chartered by Elizabeth in 1600, established their first trading-post at Surat. This was the humble beginning of the gigantic English empire in the East.