Side-Lights on the Stuarts, etc

Front matter

E ac simile of a Golden Angel of HENRY VI. supposed to te the first com used as a Touch-piece. Tac simile of an actual Touch-piece of CHARLES H from the British Museum. SIDE-LIGHTS ON THK STUAETS BY F. A. INDERWICK, Q.C. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS LONDON SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON Limited £t. ghmstim's 9<msc Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, E.C. 1888 [All rights reserved] LONDON: PRINTED BY GILBEHT AND HITTNGTON, LIMITED, 8T. John's house, clebkenwell road. TO MY SON WALTER, IN WHOM 1 WISH TO INSPIRE A LOVE FOR THE HISTORY OF HIS COUNTRY, $ HcUtcatc these $age<s.

Introduction

. Lucretius in his poem on the nature of things compares himself to a doctor who smears the rim of a cup with honey to induce the patient to take the draught. We are familiar in these days with various devices for con cealing the nastiness of drugs, but withal we cannot divest ourselves of the feeling that the physic is there ; and, in the same sense, however skilfully we may dis guise the potion or gild the pill, historical essays must ever contain what Byron calls the amari aliquid of instruction. Melius est petere fontes quam sectari rividos (it is, better to drink at the source than to sip at the stream) is a sentiment quite as applicable to history as to law, but, nevertheless, there may be much pleasant sipping from the banks of a rivulet, and the refreshing taste of the cool and limpid stream may induce a search for the fountain-head which would otherwise probably be undiscovered.

With a hope that by administering small nips of history I may stimulate at least a healthy thirst, if I do not induce deep draughts of the historical well of our country, I publish these pages. CONTENTS. I. P*OF That Hioh and Mighty Prince, King James .... 1 II. Lady Arabella Stuakt ..... . 22 Her Letters ... .72 III. WlTCHCliAET . . . . . . . . . .123 List of Trials . .190 IV. King Chakles 1. . . . . . . . .195 V. The Regicides ... ... . . . 272 VI. Mbkkie England .... . 315 VII. The King's Healing ... . . . 353 VIII. Monmouth's Rebellion ........ 365 The Western Circuit Gaol-Book (1685) . . . 397 Index ........... LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. PAGE James L, a.d. 1603 ........ .1 Arabella Seymour ..... ... 64 Facsimile of Letter to the Queen 106 Facsimile of Letter to the Lord Chief Justice . . . .115 King James VI. of Scotland ....... 138 Serjeant Bradshaw, by Worlledge 218 Whitehall with Holbein's Gate as it appeared at the Restoration . 239 Execution of Charles I., from a Dutch broadsheet published at the Hague shortly after the event ...... 244 Queen Henrietta Maria at Tyburn ...... 270 Oliver Cromwell as Oliver I. ....... 274 Major-General Harrison ........ 284 Facsimile page of a Diurnal for 5th February, 1649 . . . 324 Facsimile of an Angel of Henry VI., and a Touch-piece of Charles II. 357 Jeffreys as Earl of Flint, &c 367 Facsimile of page in Gaol-Book containing conviction of Alice Lisle 380 Facsimile of first page of Calendar for Taunton, 17th Sept., 1685 (from the Gaol- Book) ..... .

Jacobus VI. Scotiæ Rex, et Primus eo nomine Angliæ, Franciæ et ITiberniæ maximo applausu electus Rex, &c. , anno Domini K503. i. THAT HIGH AND MIGHTY PRINCE, KING JAMES. The settlement of the succession to the throne had for years been a subject of great concern to our monarchs and our statesmen. Henry VIII. , who, with his many faults, had a great and patriotic love for his country, and was according to his lights a true Englishman, had been most careful in pro viding for the succession. From his knowledge of the temper and the instincts of the English people, he judged with prophetic wisdom that the Scotch family, with their strong sacerdotal proclivities and high handed autocracy, were unsuited to become rulers of the English nation, and he declared by the will under which he settled the Crown, and which was at his death accepted as a valid and binding decree, that in the event of all his three children dying without issue and his own blood thus wholly failing, the Scotch line being the descendants of his eldest sister, Margaret, married to James IV. of Scotland, should be passed over, and that the Crown should devolve on the descendants of his younger sister, Mary, Duchess 'of Suffolk.1 His son, 1 See Froude's " History of England," vol. iv. p. 523, for a copy of Henry VHIth's will.

B Edward VI., died at the age of sixteen without issue; his daughter, Mary, died without having son or daughter to succeed her; and Elizabeth, for her own reasons, one of which undoubtedly was to secure the succession to the Scotch branch and thus to unite the two kingdoms under one sovereign, lived a life of celibacy and devoted herself during the later years of her reign to making careful and statesmanlike preparation for the establish ment of King James of Scotland. That the old Tudor was right in his appreciation of the Scotch stock was proved by the event, but whether the country would have ultimately been better for the Eng lish succession is matter of doubt. The time was rapidly approaching, even in the sixteenth century, for the ending of Cæsarism and for the assertion of popular rights, and had we been governed by a sovereign and statesmen of the Tudor order, we might have waited longer for the shock which in 1648 galvanized the liberalism of Eno-land into permanent political life.

As it was, the ultimate result of Elizabeth's disregard of King Henry's testament was to revolutionize the institutions of the country, and by putting us well ahead of other nations in the theory and in the practice of freedom, to preserve us from those calamities which, in the name and cause of popular liberties, overtook most of the nations of Europe. In the shadow of that great revolution we still walk and there we shall abide till the overpowering force of an ever-increasing democracy may in the course of time induce an equal convulsion to restore the natural equilibrium of political forces. Elizabeth, to carry out her project of the succession, was in constant correspondence with the Scotch kino and exercised over him the natural control of a strono over a weaker mind. She took a personal interest in his affairs, required him to marry, and offered him the choice as a bride of Arabella Stuart, a Royal Princess of great beauty aud culture and a possible pretender to the Throne, or of Anne, daughter of the King of Denmark, a Protestant princess with some reputation for beauty.

She also went so far as to describe the fair Dane, to tell him where Denmark was, and to explain the language which the Danes spoke, as to both of which points the Royal Scot appears to have been in considerable ignorance. She re conciled her people and her statesmen to the advent of the Scotch king, and provided for a peaceful change of Government, not however without searchings of heart and some misgivings which haunted her even to the last, for we learn in the graphic account of her illness by a gossip ping priest, that as she rolled on her bedside she " raved of Tyrone and Arabella," Tyrone representing Ireland, then as now discontented and ungovernable, and Arabella representing the succession, which (differing in her judgment of the people from the opinion formed by her father) she thought it best for the country to be diverted from the English into the Scotch line, and to be conferred upon the son of the misguided but unfortunate Queen of Scots, whose life she had found herself compelled to take.

All things, therefore, worked favourably for the accession of King James. Very little was known of him in this country; and what was generally known or believed was favourable. He had a reputation for learning and for piety, for good-nature, and for liberality. It was known that he had been since his childhood separated from the evil influence of his mother, and it was believed that he was thoroughly imbued with the strong Pro testant instincts of his guardians and tutors. Before b Philip, the Prince of Spain, could marry Mary, Queen of England, the Parliament of the day pledged him by an oath to keep our laws, our liberties, and our customs inviolate and inviolable, to appoint no foreigner under any circumstances to any office or commission under the crown, and to quit the kingdom on the death of the queen, should she leave no issue to succeed her.

But James was taken by the English people on the mere nomination of the dying Queen. Par liament was not consulted, no questions were put to him, no conditions were imposed. He was ac cepted free and unpledged, and was duly proclaimed in London and Westminster, on the 28th of March, 1603, without a voice being raised in opposition. His accession was quietly and amiably acquiesced in by the citizens, who mourned with unaffected grief the loss of their great queen, and who felt that the dearest wish of her heart, namely, the peace ful'union of England and Scotland, was being then fulfilled. The omens were propitious, and as an indication of future greatness a lioness whelped in the Tower.2 The grand old men of the Elizabethan era had passed or were passing away, but there still remained a goodly con tingent of statesmen holding to the traditions of the last reign, able and willing to guide King James's foot steps and to protect the throne, if his vanity and im periousness had not led him to spurn their advances and to reject their counsel.

He quickly turned to other counsellors, corrupt, slavish, and dependent ; he lavished his means and his caresses upon unworthy favourites ■ he quarrelled with his Parliament, which under the Tudor sovereigns had become a great and increasing power in 2 State Papers, 10. 6 (1603). the land; he gradually alienated the nobility, and lost touch with the people ; and he began from the very day of his coronation to sow the seeds of that discord which for many years raged in the country, and ulti mately drove his descendants, bag and baggage, from English soil. James, whose impatience and anxiety to secure the throne of England had, during the queen's life, been unbounded, who had described himself as Moses on Mount Pisgah, gazing at the promised land, which he seemed destined never to tread, ceased all impatience and all anxiety on hearing of his proclamation, and set out for his new kingdom with the easy and ..shambling progress that usually characterized his every movement.

Shortly after his accession he had his portrait painted, and he is described on the legend as " Jacobus Maximo apjjlausu electus Rex" a character, however, which he and his family violently repudiated at a later date. His personal appearance on his arrival in England was not quite in accordance with the popular idea of a British king. He was of middle height, with thin hair, his legs were weak from his childhood, and his walk was described as " circular." He was a fair horseman, and was fond of hunting, though he had not a very firm grip of the saddle, for he appears once to have been thrown into a pond in Suffolk, and once at Theobalds in 1622, while hunting with Sir Symon D'Ewes, to have been thrown into the New River through the ice, and " much water came out of his mouth and body." He also delighted in bear-baiting and cock-fighting, the Keeper of his Majesty's cock-pit receiving 200L per annum, not much under the then salary of a Secretary of State.3 He had a good-natured, slobbering kind of 3 Jesse's " Court of England under the Stuarts." mouth, with a tongue somewhat too large, and a face that revealed like a mirror the inner workings of his mind — he grew pale and red by turns, and seldom attempted to control either his feelings or his speech.

His hands were soft as silk, which is said to have arisen from his never washing them, contenting himself with performing his ablutions by wiping them with the end of a damp towel. His clothes gave him the appearance of corpulence, through being quilted thickly enough to be dagger-proof, and he was so much afraid of or averse to crowds, that on his arrival in York on his way to London, he threw a wet blanket over the enthusiasm and loyalty of his new subjects by issuing a proclamation forbidding all un necessary resort to his Royal person. Neither can he be said to have had a very pretty taste in dress. One of his household says, " I saw him in the same progresse after his inauguration in a dress which was as greene as the grasse he trod on, with a fether in his cap and a home instead of a sword by his side.

How suitable to his age, calling, or person, I leave others to judge." 4 On one of these progresses, stopping for a night at Houghton Tower, in Lancashire, he showed his apprecia tion of the beef of England over the mutton of his Scottish marshes by conferring a knighthood on a loin of the British ox, a distinction which, unlike all other knio-ht hoods, has become world-wide and hereditary, and will never become extinct so long as Great Britain or her colonies pasture oxen and live upon beef. There are several of his portraits extant, of such great dissimilarity that many of them can have no possible resemblance to him whatever. The best I conceive are some two or three by William Faithorne, a contemporary artist and engraver, a very carefully-preserved and 1 " Traditional Memoyres on the Reigne of King James."

London, 1658. beautiful collection of whose drawings is to be found in the Print Department of the British Museum. He had an intense belief in his learning and in his skill in divining the motives of men, and in unravelling difficult and complicated questions of law, of fact, or of policy, as also in his power of governing, which he called king-craft, and the exercise of which brought down upon him nearly all the troubles of his reign. He also prided himself on his foresight and deter mination, and like most weak persons he was some times capable for a moment of acts of unnecessary vigour. For instance, in 1589, he took a most unne cessary and solitary voyage to Denmark, in boisterous and stormy weather, to meet his future queen, in order, as he quaintly says in his letter to the Privy Council of Scotland,5 that he might clear himself of " being led by the nose like an unreasonable creature or a bairn that could do nothing of himself," and that he might not be " unjustly slandered as an irresolute asse," a slander to which, whether justly or not, he has been universally subjected from that day to this.

As to his personal character, it is, I think, only justice to say, that much of the scurrilous abuse to which he has been subjected, appears to be without warrant, and that he was personally a man of good moral character, a quality for which he was probably much indebted to the strict and careful training he had received from his Presbyterian tutors, and the hard lessons he had learnt from the experiences of his mother and his grandfather. His language, however, both written and oral, partook too much of the grossness and rudeness of the age, his manners were effeminate and effusive, and he was not quite so 5 " Secret History of James I.," vol. ii. 232. much a practitioner as preacher of the virtue of tem perance, for there is on record a contemporaneous account of the visit of his brother-in-law, the King of Denmark, to the English Court in 1606, on which occasion both kings got intoxicated at the public reception.

James was in such a disgraceful state that he had to be carried to bed by his courtiers, a task performed with considerable difficulty, and the King of Denmark was so disguised with liquor that he grossly insulted the Countess of Nottingham, wife of the Lord High Admiral, and had to be carried off in the same fashion as his brother of England.6 In his family, how ever, he appears to have been loved, probably through his easy disposition and his liberality. He was, un doubtedly, much attached to his children, and par ticularly to his son Charles, upon whom he expended an extraordinary amount of good advice both oral and written, and it certainly must be put to his credit that bis sons, Henry Prince of Wales and Charles, after wards king, and his unfortunate daughter Elizabeth of Bohemia, were all in their private life well conducted, and, indeed, exemplary persons.

Whether he was quite so fond of his wife is a more doubtful matter, but like many husbands who are not too fond of their wives in private, he professed a great affection for her in public, ostentatiously kissing her between the shoulders when he parted from her, and eulogizinoin his maudlin moments the " yellownesse of her haire." Among the Petyt MSS. in the Inner Temple Library, are the following verses on the death of Queen Anne, " by King James himself," showing good feelinoand kindness of heart, if somewhat exaggerated in metaphor. 6 Peynton : Jesse's " Court of England under the Stuarts " vol i p. 59. " Her to invite the Great God sent His star,'' Whose friend and nearest kin good princes are, Who, though they run the race of man and die, Death serves but to enhance their majesty. So did my queen from hence her court remove, And left of earth to be enthroned above, She's changed, indeed, for sure no good prince dies, But like the sun sets only for to rise."

According to all accounts the queen was a strong minded but extravagant woman, fond of dress and of dis play, showing kindness, however, and generosity to her friends and attendants, but she was strongly suspected of being a Papist, and was accordingly not very popular in England. She appears, however, to have lived on good terms with the king, who treated her well, and exercised over her the only good influence which he seems to have exercised over any one. In many respects the king was mean and paltry. He was suspicious, inquisitive and chattering; he took a minute interest in the private affairs of the persons of his court, and in the daily life and conversation of his state prisoners, of whom, during this reign the Tower and other prisons were full ; and the State Paper Office is filled with reports of a more or less scandalous nature on the private lives of all the prominent persons in the kingdom.

He had an almost insane view of his Divine right and Royal Prerogative, and on one occasion, shortly after his accession, he insisted, in gross disregard of our laws and customs, on trying a thief himself, and sentencing him to be hanged. He also wished to sit in the King's Bench and hear arguments ' Referring to the comet that had lately appeared, and which was generally believed to be of Divine import, but whether favourable to the Protestant or the Catholic party abroad, men's minds were hopelessly divided. Petyt MSS., No. 538, vol. xlix. p. 93. Side-lights of the Stuarts. 10 on demurrers and special pleadings, and when, through the remonstrance of the judges, he was dissuaded from so doing, he sent his directions to the Courts of Common Law and to the Privy Council, to act on his orders, one of which was to punish an unhappy man who was reported to have spoken of him as " King Joram."

For although he prided himself on his wit, he was, like many professed humorists, very susceptible to any witticism which might be turned against himself. One of his most trusty and faithful servants was Sir Henry Wootton, who, in 1613, was Ambassador at the Hague. Being asked at table what was the chief duty of an ambassador, he answered that he was " an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country " (ad mentiendum reijmblicœ causa). Whereupon one Gaspar Schoppius published a pamphlet quoting the above as upon King James' authority, to show that Protestants dissembled as well as Papists, and discharged their diplomatic duties with lies and equivocations. The king was greatly angered at this, and although Sir Henry Wootton in the following month8 published a pamphlet defending the kino from the charge of sending ambassadors abroad to lie, he was kept out of employment for some years, and was only restored to favour when, at a late period of the reign, it was found impossible any longer to dispense with his services.

The Court from the very earliest period occupied its many hours of leisure in card-playing, diceing, and gambling. The king held his reception and lived at the palace at Whitehall, where every nio-ht the tables were crowded, and the king, the queen and the royal princes, whose sense of dignity would not 8 November 25th, 1613. permit them to mix with the crowd of courtiers and themselves to throw for their stakes, played vicariously through the hands of their favourites, and regularly lost and won sums that entailed constant interviews with " Jingling Geordie," the Court banker and Rothschild of the period. " On Twelfth Eve," says Chamberlain in one of his gossipping letters,9 " there was great golden play at Court, no gamester admitted that brought not 300/. at least. Montgomery played the king's money and won him 750/., which he had for his labor ; the Lord Monteagle lost the queen 400/., Sir Robert Cary for the prince 300/., the Earl of Salisbury 300/., the Lord Buckhurst 500/., et sic de cæteris ; so that I heard of no winners but the king and Sir Francis Woolley, who got about 800/."

And thus almost the first glimpse we have of the royal family of the Stuarts after their arrival in England shows them seated round the green cloth and playing for the stakes that even then they were beginning to wring from the purses of a somewhat reluctant people. This mania for play and for luxurious entertainments naturally brought with it the desire for a suitable habitation for the great monarch and a proper house of re ception for his courtiers and his guests. With this object in view, the king at the very beginning of his reign took steps to rebuild the old Palace of White hall, and to erect on its site and on other land to be acquired by purchase, a house worthy of so great a king and so magnificent a kingdom. The designs for the new palace by Inigo Jones still exist. Had they been carried out, London would have possessed one of the most extensive and beautiful royal residences in 9 Chamberlain to Carlton, February 8th, 1G07.

State Tapers, 31. 4. Europe, but architects, builders, and freeholders required pay as the work proceeded, and thus the building never got further than the banquetting-house at Whitehall. A fire which took place in 1698 entirely destroyed the rest of the old palace, but the banquetting-house was by good fortune rescued from the flames, and it still stands with its melancholy associations as the first and only instalment of the great project of King James. This habitual gambling, coupled with the unbridled extravagance indulged in by king and queen, by princes and favourites, was the first cause of estrangement between the Crown and the people, and quickly led to other disasters. Elizabeth's reign was marked by thrift to a remarkable degree, and so averse were she and her ministers to avoidable taxation, and so close did they run their expenditure, that at the queen's death it was reported to the Council that there was no money in the Exchequer.

Gambling debts, costly entertainments, reckless expenditure on favourites, male and female, gross extravagance of the queen and her Court, and lavish entertainment of foreigners, induced calls on Parliament which could not be justified, and were only granted sullenly and under pressure, and other means were naturally sought to raise the necessary funds. In 1613 the king gave 17,000/. for jewels presented to Lady Frances Howard1 on her marriage to the Lord 1 This lady was the divorced wife of the Earl of Essex. On the marriage Rochester was created Earl of Somerset, in order that the lady might not lose her rank at Court. Within little more than a year of this date the Countess was tried for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in conjunction with one Mrs. Turner, widow of a physician, and one Forman, an astrologer and wizard, whom she employed for the purpose.

The two latter were executed, but the Countess, having pleaded "uilty was pardoned by the king. She afterward retired into the country, lived in great misery with her husband, and died of a malignant disease at an early age. State Papers, vol. lxxv. 13. November 18th, 1613. Rochester, while his personal guard and his postmen from Royston were still unpaid. He gave 2500/. for a single jewel for the queen, and 3200/. for one for the prince, while the pay of the navy was so much in arrear that the wives and children of the sailors were hardly kept from making an outcry at the gate.2 In order to meet this wilful waste it was pro posed to create and sell new titles of nobility. There existed at this time in France one of the quaint titles which associated the temporal with the spiritual power of the great prelates who, there as elsewhere, exercised a powerful influence over the fortunes and the politics of the country.

There were to be found scattered through the various provinces of France wealthy and noble landowners, who held by hereditary right certain territories of the Church on condition of their acting as judges in the temporal affairs of the bishopric and leading the bishop's troops to battle when the ecclesiastical trumpet summoned them to the field. The title they held was that of Vidame (vice dominus), the word dame in the old French language signifying dominus, or lord. Thus there were the Vidame de Chartres, the Vidame d' Amiens, the Vidame de Rheims, and many others. Latterly, however, the title had become appurtenant to the soil, and the purchasers of these ecclesiastical lands acquired with them the title of Vidame with the then not very onerous burthens. The king accordingly, looking about for the means of raising revenue, conceived the idea of replenishing his exchequer by adapting the title and position of a vidame to the exist ing state of society in England.

The English counterpart was to be called a Vidom, but as the peers resented any increase of their body being created by purchase, these State Papers, vol. lxxv. 13. November 18th, 1613. new vidoms were not to be called as Lords to Parliament, but to be eligible as commoners for seats in the Lower House. This scheme, however, was too unpopular to be seriously pressed, and in its place the king created and sold the title of baronet, or little baron, for 1000/. cash to each claimant, with the further liability on each baronet to have his eldest son knighted at the age of twenty-one at a further fee, or to compound in a lump sum for the fee and the knighthood to gether. This title still continues among us, but the title of Vidame gradually died out among our neigh bours. At the time of the French Revolution there were only five or six vidamies in the whole of France, and after that date they disappeared altogether.

The creation of these new titles, however, only ad dressed itself to the vanity or the patriotism of the country; far worse schemes were afterwards enter tained. The crown timber, which had been carefully nursed by Henry VIII. and Elizabeth for building the wooden walls of old England, inasmuch as the English oak alone in the world would last out a sea-fight without cleaving on receipt of a shot, was put up to auction, and millions of trees were felled and sold to whom soever, Englishman or foreigner, would bid the highest price. Large sums were thus received, and in 1608 a scheme was proposed, and a Bill was drafted, for selling the Crown lands by bastardizing Queen Eliza beth, an act of perfidy, of ingratitude, and of base ness, from which the memory of the king has only been saved by the total collapse of the scheme on its first suggestion to the House.

Considerable sums were also raised by fines and by selling the right to persecute popish recusants in various parts of England. I have come across two of these warrants.3 They are dated in 1610, and are endorsed as follows: "Sir John Smith gives 8000/. per annum for Yorkshire recusants." " Sir Thomas Grantham gives 2000/. a year more than before for Lancashire recusants." Poor unhappy papists, to live under a king who was believed to be with them in heart, but who, for his selfish ends, handed them over to their persecutors, and at a time when the country had not yet realized that a man's religion as his politics should be as free and as unfettered as the sea that surrounds him, and the air that he breathes. Every office and every tax in course of time was either farmed out for a money payment or granted to some favourite who had claims on the Crown, and so wholesale and inveterate was the habit of receiving payments or bribes by persons in high office, that the greatest of Chancellors, and in other respects the wisest of men, Lord Bacon, succumbed to the temptation, and closed what would otherwise have been an honourable, if not a glorious career, in retirement and disgrace.