"He that dieth with honour, liveth for ever,And the defamed dead recovereth never."
"He that dieth with honour, liveth for ever,And the defamed dead recovereth never."
And a sadly inglorious death was destined to be his own. For, shortly after Wyatt's insurrection, he was sent to the Tower, Wyatt at his own trial declaring that the conspiracy to assassinate Queen Mary when out walking was Thomas's, he himself having been opposed to it. For this cause, at all events, Thomas was hanged and quartered in May 1554, and his head set the next day upon London Bridge. He assured the crowd, in a speech before his execution, that he died for his country. Wood says he was of a hot, fiery spirit, that had sucked in damnable principles. Possibly they were not otherwise than sensible, for if he died on Wyatt'sevidence alone, one cannot feel sure that he died justly. But had the insurrection only succeeded, it is curious to think what an amount of misery might have been spared to England, and how dark a page been lacking from the history of Christianity!
Thomas's book was republished in 1561: but the first edition, that of 1549, is, of course, the right one to possess; though its fate has caused it to be extremely rare.
Coming now to Queen Elizabeth's reign, the comparative rarity of book-burning is an additional testimony to the wisdom of her government. But (to say nothing of books that were prohibited or got their printers or authors into trouble) certain works, religious, political, and poetical, achieved the distinction of being publicly burnt, and they are works that curiously illustrate the manners of the time.
The most important under the first of these heads are the translations of the works of Hendrick Niclas, of Leyden, Father of the Family of Love, or House of Charity, which were thought dangerous enough to be burnt by Royal Proclamation on October 13th, 1579; so that such works as theJoyful Message of the Kingdom,Peace upon Earth,the Prophecy of the Spirit of Love, and others, are nowexceedingly rare and costly. There are many extracts from the first of these in Knewstub'sConfutation "of its monstrous and horrible blasphemies"(1579), wherein I fail to recognise either the blasphemies or their confutation, nor do I find anything but sense in Niclas's letter to two daughters of Warwick, whom he seeks to dissuade from suffering death on a matter of conformity to certain Church ceremonies. He insists on the life or spirit of Christ as of more importance than any ceremony. "How well would they do who do now extol themselves before the simple, and say that they are the preachers of Christ, if they would first learn to know Christ before they made themselves ministers of Him!" "Whatever is served without the Spirit of Christ, it is an abomination to God." Nevertheless the young persons seem to have preferred death to his very sensible advice.
Probably the Family of Love were misunderstood and misrepresented, both as regards their doctrines and their practices. Camden says that "under a show of singular integrity and sanctity they insinuated themselves into the affections of the ignorant common people"; that they regarded as reprobate all outside their Family, and deemed it lawful to deny onoath whatsoever they pleased. Niclas, according to Fuller, "wanted learning in himself and hated it in others." This is a failing so common as to be very probable, as it also is, that his disciples allegorised the Scriptures (like the Alexandrian Fathers before them), and counterfeited revelations. Fuller adds that they "grieved the Comforter, charging all their sins on God's Spirit, for not effectually assisting them against the same . . . sinning on design that their wickedness might be a foil to God's mercy, to set it off the brighter." But that they were Communists, Anarchists, or Libertines, there is no evidence; and the Queen's menial servant who wrote and presented to Parliament an apology for the Service of Love probably complained with justice of their being "defamed with many manner of false reports and lies." This availed nothing, however, against public opinion; and so the Queen commanded by proclamation "that the civil magistrate should be assistant to the ecclesiastical, and that the books should be publicly burnt." The sect, however, long survived the burning of its books.
But already it was not enough to burn books of an unpopular tendency, cruelty against the author being plainly progressivefrom this time forward to the atrocious penalties afterwards associated with the presence of Laud in the Star Chamber. All our histories tell of John Stubbs, of Lincoln's Inn, who, when his right hand had been cut off for a literary work, with his left hand waved his hat from his head and cried, "Long live the Queen!" The punishment was out of all proportion to the offence. Men had a right to feel anxious when Elizabeth seemed on the point of marrying the Catholic Duke of Anjou. They remembered the days of Mary, and feared, with reason, the return of Catholicism. Stubbs gave expression to this fear in a work entitled theDiscoverie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by another French marriage, if the Lord forbid not the banes by letting her Majestie see the sin and punishment thereof(1579). Page, the disperser of the book, suffered the same penalty as its author.
The book made a great stir and was widely circulated, much to the vexation of the Queen. On September 27th appeared a very long proclamation calling it "a lewd, seditious book . . . bolstered up with manifest lies, &c.," and commanding it, wherever found, "to be destroyed (= burnt) in open sight of somepublic officer." The book itself is written with moderation and respect, if we make allowance for the questionable taste of writing on so delicate a subject at all. It is true that he calls France "a den of idolatry, a kingdom of darkness, confessing Belial and serving Baal"; nor does he spare the personal character of the Duke himself: he only desires that her Majesty may marry with such a house and such a person "as had not provoked the vengeance of the Lord." But plain speaking was needed, and it is possible that the offensive book had something to do with saving the Queen from a great folly and the nation from as great a danger.
Stubbs, one is glad to find, though maimed, was neither disgraced nor disheartened by his misfortune. He learnt to write with his left hand, and wrote so much better with that than many people with their right, that Lord Burleigh employed him many years afterwards (1587) to compose an answer to Cardinal Allen's work,A Modest Answer to English Persecutors. After that I lose sight of Stubbs.
The strong feeling against Episcopacy, which first meets us in works like Fish'sSupplication of Beggars, or Tyndale'sPractice of Prelates, and which found vent at last, as a powerful contributory cause,in the Revolution of the seventeenth century, was most clearly pronounced under Elizabeth in the famous tracts known as those of Martin Marprelate; and among these most bitterly in a small work that was burnt by order of the bishops, entitled aDialogue wherein is plainly laide open the tyrannical dealing of Lord Bishops against God's Church, with certain points of doctrine, wherein they approve themselves (according to D. Bridges his judgement) to be truely Bishops of the Divell(1589). This is shown in a sprightly dialogue between a Puritan and a Papist, a jack of both sides, and an Idol (i.e., church) minister, wherein the most is made of such facts as that the Bishop of St. David's was summoned before the High Commission for having two wives living, and that Bishop Culpepper, of Oxford, was fond of hawking and hunting. It is significant that this little tract was reprinted in 1640, on the eve of the Revolution.
I pass now to a book of great political and historical interest:The Conference about the Succession to the Crown of England(1594), attributed to Doleman, but really the handiwork of Parsons, the Jesuit, Cardinal Allen, and others. In the first part, a civil lawyer shows at length that lineal descent and propinquity of bloodare not of themselves sufficient title to the Crown; whilst in the second part a temporal lawyer discusses the titles of particular claimants to the succession of Queen Elizabeth. Among these, that of the Earl of Essex, to whom the book was dedicated, is discussed; the object of the book being to baffle the title of King James to the succession, and to fix it either on Essex or the Infanta of Spain. No wonder it gave great offence to the Queen, for it advocated also the lawfulness of deposing her; and it throws some light on those intrigues with the Jesuits which at one time formed so marked an incident in the eventful career of that unfortunate earl. Great efforts were made to suppress it, and there is a tradition that the printer was hanged, drawn, and quartered.
The book itself has played no small part in our history, for not only was Milton'sDefensiomainly taken from it, but it formed the chief part of Bradshaw's long speech at the condemnation of Charles I. In 1681, when Parliament was debating the subject of the exclusion of the Duke of York from the succession, it was thought well to reprint it; but only two years later it was among the books which had the honour of being condemned to the flamesby the University of Oxford, in its famous and loyal book-fire of 1683 (see p.194).
But if the history of the book was eventful, how much more so was that of its chief author, the famous Robert Parsons, first of Balliol College, and then of the Order of Jesus! Parsons was a very prince of intrigue. To say that he actually tried to persuade Philip II. to send a second Armada; that he tried to persuade the Earl of Derby to raise a rebellion, and then is suspected of having poisoned him for not consenting; that he instigated an English Jesuit to try to assassinate the Queen; and, among other plans, wished to get the Pope and the Kings of France and Spain to appoint a Catholic successor to Elizabeth, and to support their nominee by an armed confederacy, is to give but the meagre outline of his energetic career. The blacksmith's son certainly made no small use of his time and abilities. His life is the history in miniature of that of his order as a body; that same body whose enormous establishments in England at this day are in such bold defiance of the Catholic Emancipation Act, which makes even their residence in this kingdom illegal.
Doleman'sConferencewas answered in a little book by Peter Wentworth, entitledA Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for establishing her Successor to the Crown, in which the author advocated the claims of James I. The book was written in terms of great humility and respect, the author not being ignorant, as he quaintly says, "that the anger of a Prince is as the roaring of a Lyon, and even the messenger of Death." But this he was to learn by personal experience, for the Queen, incensed with him for venturing to advise her, not only had his book burnt, but sent him to the Tower, where, like so many others, he died. So at least says a printed slip in the Grenville copy of his book.
But Wentworth is better and more deservedly remembered for his speeches than for his book—his famous speeches in 1575, and again in 1587, in Parliament in defence of the Commons' Right of Free Speech, for both of which he was temporarily committed to the Tower. Rumours of what would please or displease the Queen, or messages from the Queen, like that prohibiting the House to interfere in matters of religion, in those days reduced the voice of the House to a nullity. Wentworth's chief question was, "Whether this Council be not a place for any member of thesame here assembled, freely and without control of any person or danger of laws, by bill or speech to utter any of the griefs of this Commonwealth whatsoever, touching the service of God, the safety of the prince and this noble realm." Yet so servile was the House of that period, that on both occasions it disclaimed and condemned its advocate—on the first occasion actually not allowing him to finish his speech. Yet, fortunately, both his speeches live, well reported in the Parliamentary Debates.
To pass from politics to poetry; little as Archbishop Whitgift's proceedings in the High Commission endear his name to posterity, I am inclined to think he may be forgiven for cleansing Stationers' Hall by fire, in 1599, of certain works purporting to be poetical; such works, namely, as Marlowe'sElegies of Ovid, which appeared in company with Davies'sEpigrammes, Marston'sMetamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image, Hall'sSatires, and Cutwode'sCaltha Poetarum; or, The Bumble Bee. The latter is a fantastic poem of 187 stanzas about a bee and a marigold, and deserved the fire rather for its insipidity than for the reasons which justified the cleansing process applied to the others, the youthful productions of menwho were destined to attain celebrity in very different directions of life.
Marlowe, like Shakespeare, from an actor became a writer of plays; but though Ben Jonson extolled his "mighty muse," I doubt whether hisEdward II.,Dr. Faustus, orJew of Malta, are now widely popular. Anthony Wood has left a very disagreeable picture of Marlowe's character, which one would fain hope is overdrawn; but the dramatist's early death in a low quarrel prevented him from ever redeeming his early offences, as a kinder fortune permitted to his companions in the Stationers' bonfire.
Marston came to be more distinguished for hisSatiresthan for his plays, hisScourge of Villainiebeing his chief title to fame. Of hisPigmalionall that can be said is, that it is not quite so bad as Marlowe'sElegies. Warton justly says, with pompous euphemism: "His stream of poetry, if sometimes bright and unpolluted, almost always betrays a muddy bottom." But this muddy bottom is discernible, not in Marston alone, but also in Hall'sVirgidemiarum, or Satires, of which Warton did all he could to revive the popularity. Hall was Marston's rival at Cambridge, but Hall claims to be the first English satirist. He took Juvenal forhis model, but the Latin of Juvenal seems to me far less obscure than the English of Hall. I quote two lines to show what this Cambridge student thought of the great Elizabethan period in which he lived. Referring to some remote golden age, he says:—
"Then men were men; but now the greater partBeasts are in life, and women are in heart."
"Then men were men; but now the greater partBeasts are in life, and women are in heart."
But strange are the evolutions of men. The author of the burnt satires rose from dignity to dignity in the Church. He became successively Bishop of Exeter and Bishop of Norwich, and to this day his devotional works are read by thousands who have never heard of his satires. He was sent as a deputy to the famous Synod of Dort, and was faithful to his Church and king through the Civil War. For this in his old age he suffered sequestration and imprisonment, and he lived to see his cathedral turned into a barrack, and his palace into an ale-house, dying shortly before the Restoration, in 1656, at the age of 82. Bayle thought him worthy of a place in his Dictionary, but he is still worthier of a place in our memories as one of those great English bishops who, like Burnet, Butler, or Tillotson, never put their Church before their humanity,but showed (what needed showing) that the Christianity of the clergy was not of necessity synonymous with the absolute negation of charity.
Davies, too, Marlowe's early friend, rose to fame both as a poet and a statesman. But he began badly. He was disbarred from the Middle Temple for breaking a club over the head of another law student in the very dining-hall. After that he became member for Corfe Castle, and then successively Solicitor-General and Attorney-General for Ireland. He was knighted in 1607. One of the best books on that unhappy country is hisDiscovery of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued, nor brought under obedience of the Crown of England until the beginning of Her Majesty's happy reign(1611), dedicated to James I. His chief poems are hisNosce TeipsumandThe Orchestra. In 1614 he was elected for Newcastle-under-Lyme, and he died in 1626, aged only 57. Yet in that time he had travelled a long way from the days of his early literary companionship with Christopher Marlowe.
The Church at the end of the sixteenth century assuredly aimed high. At the time the above books were burnt, it was decreed that no satires or epigrams shouldbe printed in the future; and that no plays should be printed without the inspection and permission of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London! But even this is nothing compared with that later attempt to subject the Press to the Church which called forth Milton'sAreopagitica; there indeed soon came to be very little to choose between the Inquisition of the High Commission and the more noxious Inquisition of Rome.
Near to the burnt works of the previous writers must be placed those of that prolific writer of the same period, Samuel Rowlands. The severity of his satire, and the obviousness of the allusions, caused two of his works to be burnt, first publicly, and then in the hall kitchen of the Stationers' Company, in October 1600. These were:The Letting Humour's Blood in the Headvein, and,A Merry Meeting; or, 'tis Merry when Knaves meet; both of which subsequently reappeared under the titles respectively ofHumour's Ordinarie, where a man may be verie merrie and exceeding well used for his sixpence, and theKnave of Clubs. Either work would now cost much more than sixpence, and probably fail to make the reader very merry, or even merry at all. One of the epigrams, however, of the first work may be quotedas of more than ephemeral truth and interest:—
"Who seeks to please all men each way,And not himself offend,He may begin his work to-day,But God knows when he'll end."
"Who seeks to please all men each way,And not himself offend,He may begin his work to-day,But God knows when he'll end."
Little appears to be known of Rowlands, but, like Bishop Hall, he could turn his pen to various purposes with great facility; for the prayers which he is thought to have composed, and which are published with the rest of his works in the admirable edition of 1870, are of as high an order of merit as the religious works of his more famous contemporary.
The only wonder is that the Archbishop did not enforce the burning of much more of the literature of the Elizabethan period, whilst he was engaged on such a crusade. He may well, however, have shrunk appalled from the magnitude of the task, and have thought it better to touch the margin than do nothing at all. And, after all, in those days a poet was lucky if they only burnt his poems, and not himself as well. In 1619 John Williams, barrister, was actually hanged, drawn, and quartered, for two poems which were not even printed, but which exist in manuscript at Cambridge to this day. These wereBalaam's Assand theSpeculum Regale.Williams was indiscreet enough to predict the King's death in 1621, and to send the poems secretly to his Majesty in a box. The odd thing is that he thought himself justly punished for his foolish freak, so very peculiar were men's notions of justice in those far-off barbarous days.
bird woodcut
flowers and urns woodcut
DESPITE Mr. D'Israeli's able defence of him, the fashion has survived of speaking disdainfully of James I. and all his works. The military men of his day, hating him for that wise love of peace which saved us at least from one war on the Continent, complained of a king who preferred to wage war with the pen than with the pike, and vented his anger on paper instead of with powder. But for all that, the patron and friend of Ben Jonson, and the constant promoter of arts and letters, was one of the best literary workmen of his time; nor will any one who dips into his works fail to put them aside without a considerably higher estimate than he had before of the ability of the most learned king that ever occupied the British throne—a monarch unapproached by any of his successors, save William III., in any sort of intellectual power.
Yet here our admiration for James I. must perforce stop. For of many of his ideas the only excuse is that they were those of his age; and this is an excuse that is fatal to a claim to the highest order of merit. All men to some extent are the sport and victims of their intellectual surroundings; but it is the mark of superiority to rise above them, and this James I. often failed to do. He cannot, for instance, in this respect compare with a man whose works he persecuted, namely, Reginald Scot, who in 1584 published his immortalDiscoverie of Witchcraft, a book which, alike for its motive as its matter, occupies one of the highest places in the history of the literature of Europe.
Yet Scot was only a Kentish country gentleman, who gave himself up solely, says Wood, to solid reading and the perusal of obscure but neglected authors, diversifying his studies with agriculture, and so producing the first extant treatise on hops. Nevertheless, he is among the heroes of the world, greater for me at least than any one of our most famous generals, for it was at the risk of his life that he wrote, as he says himself, "in behalf of the poor, the aged, and the simple"; and if he has no monument in our English Pantheon, he has a better and moreabiding one in the hearts of all the well-wishers of humanity. For his reading led him to the assault of one of the best established, most sacred, yet most stupid, of the superstitions of mankind; and to have exposed both the folly of the belief, and the cruelty of the legal punishments, of witchcraft, more justly entitles his memory to honour than the capture of many stormed cities or the butchery of thousands of his fellow-beings on a battlefield.
How trite is the argument that this or that belief must be true because so many generations have believed it, so many countries, so many famous men,—as if error, like stolen property, gained a title from prescription of time! Scot pierced this pretension with a single sentence: "Truth must not be measured by time, for every old opinion is not sound." "My great adversaries," he says, "are young ignorance and old custom. For what folly soever tract of time hath fostered, it is so superstitiously pursued of some as though no error could be acquainted with custom." May we not say, indeed, that beliefs are rendered suspect by the very extent of their currency and acceptance?
But Scot had a greater adversary than even young ignorance or old custom; and that was King James, who, whilst King ofScotland, wrote hisDemonologieagainst Scot's ideas (1597). James's mind was strictly Bible-bound, and for him the disbelief in witches savoured of Sadduceeism, or the denial of spirits. Yet Scot had taken care to guard himself, for he wrote: "I deny not that there are witches or images; but I detest the idolatrous opinions conceived of them." Nor can James have carefully read Scot, for tacked on to theDiscoverieis aDiscourse of Devils and Spirits, which to the simplest Sadducee would have been the veriest trash. Scot, for instance, says of the devil that "God created him purposely to destroy. I take his substance to be such as no man can by learning define, nor by wisdom search out"; a conclusion surely as wise as the theology is curious. Anyhow it is the very reverse of Sadduceean. It is said that one of the first proceedings of James's reign was to have all the copies of Scot's book burnt that could be seized, and undoubtedly one of the first of his Acts of Parliament was the statute that made all the devices of witchcraft punishable with death, as felony, without benefit of clergy.
But about the burning there is room for doubt. For there is no English contemporary testimony of the fact. Voet, a professorof theology in Holland, is its only known contemporary witness; but he may have assumed the suppression of the book to have been identical with its burning; a common assumption, but a no less common mistake. On the other hand, many books undoubtedly were burnt under James that are not mentioned by name; and the great rarity of the first edition of the book, and its absence from some of our principal libraries, support the possibility of its having been among them.[52:1]Nevertheless, to quote Mr. D'Israeli: "On the King's arrival in England, having discovered the numerous impostures and illusions which he had often referred to as authorities, he grew suspicious of the whole system of Dæmonologie, and at length recanted it entirely. With the same conscientious zeal James had written the book, the King condemned it; and the sovereign separated himself from the author, in the cause of truth; but the clergy and the Parliament persisted in making the imaginary crime felony by the statute." So that if James really burnt the book, he must have burnt it to please others, not himself; and thoughhe may have done so, the presumption is rather that he did not.
The wonder is that Scot himself escaped the real or supposed fate of his book. Pleasing indeed is it to know that he lived out his days undisturbed to the end (1599) with his family and among his hops and flowers in Kent; not, however, before he had lived to see his book make a perceptible impression on the magistracy and even on the clergy of his time, till a perceptible check was given to his ideas by theDemonologie. But at all events he had given superstition a reeling blow, from which it never wholly recovered, and to which it ultimately succumbed. More than this can few men hope to do, and to have done so much is ample cause for contentment.
Fundamental questions of all sorts were growing critical in the reign of James, who had not only the clearest ideas of their answer, but the firmest determination to have them, if possible, answered in his own way. The principal ones were: The relationship of the King to his subjects; of the Pope to kings; of the Established Church to Puritanism and Catholicism. And on the leading political and religious questions of his day James caused certain books to be burnt which advocated opinions contrary to his own—a mode ofreasoning that reflects less credit on his philosophy than does his conduct in most other respects.
But the first book that was burnt for its sentiments on Prerogative was one of which the King was believed personally to approve. This was probably the gist of its offence, for it appeared about the time that the King made his very supercilious speech to the Commons in answer to their complaints about the High Commission and other grievances.
I allude to the famousInterpreter(1607) by Cowell, Doctor of Civil Law at Cambridge, which, written at the instigation of Archbishop Bancroft, was dedicated to him, and caused a storm little dreamt of by its author. Sir E. Coke disliked Cowell, whom he nicknamed Cow-heel, and naturally disliked him still more for writing slightingly of Littleton and the Common Law. He therefore caused Parliament to take the matter up, with the result that Cowell was imprisoned and came near to hanging;[54:1]James only saving his life by suppressing his book by proclamation, for which the Commons returned him thanks with great exultation over their victory.
For Cowell had taken too strongly the high monarchical line, and the episode of his book is really the first engagement in that great war between Prerogative and People which raged through the seventeenth century. "I hold it uncontrollable," he wrote, "that the King of England is an absolute king." "Though it be a merciful policy, and also a politic policy (not alterable without great peril) to make laws by the consent of the whole realm . . . yet simply to bind the prince to or by these laws were repugnant to the nature and custom of an absolute monarchy." "For those regalities which are of the higher nature there is not one that belonged to the most absolute prince in the world which doth not also belong to our King." But the book was condemned, not only for its sins against the Subject, but also for passages that were said to pinch on the authority of the King. Yet, considered merely as a Law Dictionary, it is still one of the best in our language.
In the King's proclamation against theInterpreterare some passages that curiously illustrate the mind of its author. He thus complains of the growing freedom of thought: "From the very highest mysteries of the Godhead and the most inscrutable counsels in the Trinitie to thevery lowest pit of Hell and the confused action of the divells there, there is nothing now unsearched into by the curiositie of men's brains"; so that "it is no wonder that they do not spare to wade in all the deepest mysteries that belong to the persons or the state of Kinges and Princes, that are gods upon earth." King James's attitude to Free Thought reminds one of the legendary contention between Canute and the sea. No one has ever repeated the latter experiment, but how many thousands still disquiet themselves, as James did, about or against the progress of the human mind!
In the proclamation itself there is no actual mention of burning, all persons in possession of the book being required to deliver their copies to the Lord Mayor or County Sheriffs "for the further order of its utter suppression" (March 25th, 1610); neither is there any allusion to burning in the Parliamentary journals, nor in the letters relating to the subject in Winwood'sMemorials. The contemporary evidence of the fact is, however, supplied by Sir H. Spelman, who says in hisGlossarium(under the word "Tenure") that Cowell's book was publicly burnt. Otherwise, James's proclamations were not always attended to (by one, for instance,he prohibited hunting); and Roger Coke says that the books being out, "the proclamation could not call them in, but only served to make them more taken notice of."[57:1]
That books were often suppressed or called in without being publicly burnt is well shown by Heylin's remark about Mocket's book (presently referred to), that it was "thought fit not only to call it in, but to expiate the errors of it in a public flame."[57:2]Among works thus suppressed without being burnt may be mentioned Bishop Thornborough's two books in favour of the union between England and Scotland (1604), Lord Coke's Speech and Charge at the Norwich Assizes (1607), and Sir W. Raleigh's first volume of theHistory of the World(1614). I suspect that Scott'sDiscoveriewas likewise only suppressed, and that Voet erroneously thought that this involved and implied a public burning.
But it was not for long that James had saved Cowell's life, for the latter's death the following year, and soon after the resignation of his professorship, is said by Fuller to have been hastened by the trouble about his book. The King throughoutbehaved with great judgment, nor is it so true that he surrendered Cowell to his enemies, as that he saved him from imminent personal peril. Men like Cowell and Blackwood and Bancroft were probably more monarchical than the monarch himself; and, though James held high notions of his own powers, and could even hint at being a god upon earth, his subjects were far more ready to accept his divinity than he was to force it upon them. It was not quite for nothing that James had had for his tutor the republican George Buchanan, one of the first opponents of monarchical absolutism in his famousDe Jure Regni apud Scotos; nor did he ever quite forget the noble words in which at his first Parliament he thus defined for ever the position of a constitutional king: "That I am a servant it is most true, that as I am head and governor of all the people in my dominion who are my natural vassals and subjects, considering them in numbers and distinct ranks: so, if we will take the whole people as one body and mass, then, as the head is ordained for the body and not the body for the head, so must a righteous king know himself to be ordained for his people and not his people for him. . . .I will never be ashamed to confess it my principal honourto be the great servant of the Commonwealth."
And in this very matter of Cowell's book James not only denied any preference for the civil over the common law, but professed "that, although he knew how great and large a king's rights and prerogatives were, yet that he would never affect nor seek to extend his beyond the prescription and limits of the municipal laws and customs of this realm."[59:1]
A few years later Sir Walter Raleigh's first volume of hisHistory of the Worldwas called in at the King's command, "especially for being too saucy in censuring princes." This fate its wonderful author took greatly to heart, as he had hoped thereby to please the King extraordinarily;[59:2]and, considering the terms wherewith in his preface he pointed the contrast between James and our previous rulers, one cannot but share his astonishment.
This would seem to indicate that the King grew more sensitive about his position as time went on; and this conclusion is corroborated by his extraordinary conduct in reference to the works of DavidParæus, the learned Protestant Professor of Divinity at Heidelberg. One can conceive no mortal soul ever reading those three vast folios of closely printed Latin in which Paræus commented on the Old and New Testament; but in those days people must have read everything. At all events, it was discovered that in his commentary on Romans xiii. Paræus had contended at great length and detail in favour of the people's right to restrain, even by force of arms, tyrannical violence on the part of the superior magistrate. On March 22nd, 1622, therefore, the Archbishop of Canterbury and twelve bishops, at the King's request, represented this doctrine to be most dangerous and seditious; and accordingly, on July 1st, the books of Paræus were publicly burnt after a sermon by the Bishop of London; and about the same time the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, ever on the side of the divine right, proved their loyalty by condemning and burning the book, perhaps the only book whose condemnation never tempted to its perusal. But that very same year (August 22nd, 1622) the King found it necessary to issue directions concerning preaching and preachers, so freely was the Puritanical side of the communitythen beginning to express itself about the royal prerogative.
As connected with the question of the prerogative must be mentioned, as burnt by James' order, theDoctrina et Politia Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ(1616), a Latin translation of the English Prayer Book, as well as of Jewell'sApologyand Newell'sCatechism, by Richard Mocket, then Warden of All Souls'. Mocket was chaplain to Archbishop Abbot, and wished to recommend the formularies and doctrines of the Church of England to foreign nations. History does not, indeed, record any deep impression as made on foreign nations by the book; though Heylin asserts that it had given no small reputation to the Church of England beyond the seas (Laud, 70); but it does record the fact of its being publicly burnt, as well as give some intimations of the reason. Fuller says that the main objection to it was, that Mocket had proved himself a better chaplain than subject, touching James in one of his tenderest points in contending for the right of the Archbishop of Canterbury to confirm the election of bishops in his province. Mocket also gave such extracts from the Homilies as seemed to have a Calvinistic leaning; and treated fast days as only of political institution.For such reasons the book was burnt by public edict, a censure which the writer took so much to heart that, as Fuller says, being "so much defeated in his expectation to find punishment where he looked for preferment, as if his life were bound up by sympathy in his book, he ended his days soon after." Poor Mocket was only forty when he died, succumbing, like Cowell, to the rough reception accorded to his book.
Mocket's book is less one to read than to treasure as a sort oflusus naturæin the literary world; for it would certainly have seemed safe antecedently to wager a million to one that no Warden of All Souls' would ever write a book that would be subjected to the indignity of fire; and, in spite of his example, I would still wager a million to one that a similar fate will never befall any literary work of Mocket's successors. Mocket's book, therefore, has a certain distinction which is all its own; but those who do not love the Church of England without it will hardly be led to such love by reading Mocket. And Mocket himself, if we follow Fuller, seems to have wished to make his love for the Church a vehicle to his own preferment; but as, perhaps, in that respect he does not stand alone, I should be sorry that the impliedreproach should rest as any stain upon his memory.
Next to the question of the rights of kings over their subjects, the most important one of that time was concerning the rights of popes over kings—a question which, having been intensified by the Reformation, naturally came to a crisis after the Gunpowder Plot. James I. then instituted an oath of allegiance as a test of Catholic loyalty, and many Catholics took the oath without scruple, including the Archpriest Blackwell. Cardinal Bellarmine thereupon wrote a letter of rebuke to the latter, and Pope Paul V. sent a brief forbidding Catholics either to take the oath or to attend Protestant churches (October 1606). But it is remarkable that, so little did the Catholics believe in the authenticity of this brief, another—and an angry one—had to come from Rome the following September, to confirm and enforce it. King James very fairly took umbrage at the action and claims of the Pope, and spent six days in making notes which he wished the Bishop of Winchester to use in a reply to the Pope and the Cardinal. But when the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely saw the King's notes, they thought them answer enough, and so James'sApology for theOath of Allegiancecame to light, but without his name, the author, among other reasons, deeming it beneath his dignity to contend in argument with a cardinal. As the Cardinal responded, the King took a stronger measure, and under his own name wrote, in a single week, hisPremonition to all most Mighty Monarch, wherein he exposed with great force the danger to all states from the pretensions of the Papacy. Thereupon, at Paul's invitation, Suarez penned that vast folio (778 pp.), theDefensio Catholicæ Fidei contra Anglicanæ Sectæ Errores(1613), as a counterblast to James'sApology. Considering the subject, it was certainly written with singular moderation; and James would have done better to have left the book to the natural penalty of its immense bulk. As it was, he ordered it to be burnt at London, and at Oxford and Cambridge; forbade his subjects to read it, under severe penalties; and wrote to Philip III. of Spain to complain of his Jesuit subject. But Philip, of course, only expressed his sympathy with Suarez, and exhorted James to return to the Faith. The Parlement of Paris also consigned the book to the flames in 1614, as it had a few years before Bellarmine'sTractatus de Potestate summi Pontificis in Temporalibus, in which thesame high pretensions were claimed for the Pope as were claimed by Suarez.
The question at issue remains, of course, a burning one to this day. To James I., however, is due the credit of having been one of the earliest and ablest champions against the Temporal Power; and therefore side by side on our shelves with Bellarmine and Suarez should stand copies of theApologyand thePremonition—both of them works which can scarcely fail to raise the King many degrees in the estimation of all who read them.
But we have yet to see James as a theologian, for on his divinity he prided himself no less than on his king-craft. The burnings of Legatt at Smithfield and of Wightman at Lichfield for heretical opinions are sad blots on the King's memory; for it would seem that he personally pressed the bishops to proceed to this extremity, in the case of Legatt at least. Nor in the case of poor Conrad Vorst did he manifest more toleration or dignity. It was no concern of his if Vorst was appointed by the States to succeed Arminius as Professor of Theology at Leyden; yet, deeming his duty as Defender of the Faith to be bound by no seas, he actually interfered to prevent it, and rendered Vorst's life a burden to him,when he might just as reasonably have protested against the choice of a Grand Lama of Thibet.
Vorst's book—theTractatus Theologicus de Deo, an ugly, square, brown book of five hundred pages—is as unreadable as it is unprepossessing. Bayle says that it was shown to the King whilst out hunting, and that he forthwith read it with such energy as to be able to despatch within an hour to his resident at the Hague a detailed list of its heresies. Nothing in his reign seems to have excited him so much. Not only did he have it publicly burnt in St. Paul's Churchyard (October 1611), and at Oxford and Cambridge, but he entreated the States, under the pain of the loss of his friendship, to banish Vorst from their dominions altogether. No heretic, he said, ever better deserved to be burnt, but that he would leave to their Christian wisdom. "Such a Disquisition deserved the punishment of the Inquisition." If Vorst remained, no English youths should repair to "so infected a place" as the University of Leyden.
The States resented at first the interference of the King of England, and supported Vorst, but the ultimate result of James's prolonged agitation was that in 1619 the National Synod of Dortdeclared Vorst's works to be impious and blasphemous, and their author unworthy to be an orthodox professor. He was accordingly banished from the University and from Holland for life, and died three years afterwards, fully justified by his persecution in his original reluctance to exchange his country living for the dignity of a professorship of theology.
Bayle thinks he was fairly chargeable with Socinian views, but what most offended James was his metaphysical speculations on the Divine attributes. I will quote from Vorst two passages which vexed the royal soul, and should teach us to rejoice that the reign of such discussions shows signs of passing away:—