II. The Spanish Alliance. 1614—1617.—James was always anxious to be the peacemaker of Europe, being wise enough to see that the religious wars which had long been devastating the Continent might be brought to an end if only the contending parties would be more tolerant. It was partly in the hope of gaining influence to enable him to carry out his pacificatory policy that he aimed, early in his reign, at marrying his children into influential families on the Continent. In 1613 he gave his daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V., Elector Palatine, who was the leader of the German Calvinists, and he had long before projected a marriage between his eldest son, Prince Henry, and a Spanish Infanta. Prince Henry, however, died in 1612, and, though James's only surviving son, Charles, was still young, there had been a talk of marrying him to a French princess. The breaking-up of the Parliament of 1614 left James in great want of money; and, as he had reason to believe that Spain would give a much larger portion than would be given with a French princess, he became keenly eager to marry his son to the Infanta Maria, the daughter of Philip III. of Spain. Negotiations with this object were not formally opened till 1617, and in 1618 James learnt that the marriage could not take place unless he engaged to give religious liberty to the English Roman Catholics. He then offered to write a letter to the king of Spain, promising to relieve the Roman Catholics as long as they gave no offence, but Philip insisted on a more binding and permanent engagement, and, on James's refusal to do more than he had offered to do, Gondomar, the very able Spanish ambassador who had hitherto kept James in good humour, was withdrawn from England, and the negotiation was, for the time, allowed to drop.

12. The rise of Buckingham. 1615-1618.-In 1615 Somerset and his wife were accused of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury. There can be no doubt that the Countess was guilty, but it is less certain what Somerset's own part in the matter was. In 1616 they were both found guilty, and, though James spared their lives, he never saw either of them again. He had already found a new favourite in George Villiers, a handsome youth who could dance and ride gracefully, and could entertain the king with lively conversation. The opponents of the Spanish alliance had supported Villiers against Somerset, but they soon found that Villiers was ready to throw himself on the side of Spain as soon as he found that it would please the king. James gave him large estates, and rapidly advanced him in the peerage, till, in 1618, he created him Marquis of Buckingham. He also made him Lord Admiral in the

1617-1618

RALEIGH'S VOYAGE TO GUIANA

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hope that he would improve the navy, and allowed all the patronage of England to pass through his hands. Statesmen and lawyers had to bow down to Buckingham if they wished to rise. No wonder the young man felt as if the nation was at his feet, and gave himself airs which disgusted all who wished to preserve independence of character.

13. The Voyage and Execution of Raleigh. 1617-1618.-In 1617 Raleigh, having been liberated through Buckingham's influence, sailed for the Orinoco in search of a gold-mine, of which he had heard in an earlier voyage in Elizabeth's reign (see p. 464). He engaged, before he sailed, not to touch the lar of the king of Spain, and James let him know that, if he broke his promise, he would lose his head. It was, indeed, difficult to say where the lands of the king of Spain began or ended, but James left the burden of proving this on Raleigh; whilst Raleigh, imagining that if only he could find gold he would not be held to his promise, sent his men up the river, without distinct orders to avoid fighting. They attacked and burnt a Spanish village, but never reached the mine. Heart-broken at their failure, Raleigh proposed to lie in wait for the Spanish treasure-ships, and, on the refusal of his captains to follow him in piracy, returned to England with nothing in his hands. James sent him to the scaffold for a fault which he should never have been given the chance of committing. Raleigh was the last of the Elizabethan heroes--a many-sided man: soldier, sailor, statesman, historian, and poet. He was as firmly convinced as Drake had been that there was no peace in American waters, and that to rob and plunder Spaniards in time of peace was in itself a virtue. James's unwise attempt to form a close alliance with Spain made Raleigh a popular hero.

1607-1620.—

14. Colonisation of Virginia and New England. Gradually Englishmen learned to prefer peaceable commerce and colonisation to piratical enterprises. In 1585 Raleigh had sent out colonists to a region in North America to which he gave the name of Virginia, in honour of Elizabeth, but the colonists either returned to England or were destroyed by the Indians. In 1607 a fresh attempt was made, and, after passing through terrible hardships, the Colony of Virginia grew into a tobacco-planting, well-to-do community. In 1608 a congregation of Separatists emigrated from England to Holland, and, after a while, settled at Leyden, where, anxious to escape from the temptations of the world, many of them resolved to emigrate to America, where they might lead an ideally religious life. In 1620 the emigrants, a hundred in all, 'lifting up

II.

K K

their eyes to heaven, their dearest country,' crossed the Atlantic in the Mayflower,' and found a new home which they named Plymouth. These first emigrants, the Pilgrim Fathers, as their descendants fondly called them, lost half their number by cold and disease in the first winter, but the remainder held on to form a nucleus for the Puritan New England of the future.

15. The Beginning of the Thirty Years' War. 1618-1620.As yet, however, these small beginnings of a colonial empire attracted little attention in England. Men's thoughts ran far more on a great war—the Thirty Years' War-which, in 1618, began to desolate Germany. In that year a revolution took place in Bohemia, where the Protestant nobility rose against their king, Matthias, a Catholic, who was at the same time Emperor, and, in 1619, after the death of Matthias, they deposed his successor, Ferdinand, and chose Frederick, the Elector Palatine, James's Calvinist son-in-law, as king in his place. Almost at the same time Ferdinand became by election the Emperor Ferdinand II. James was urged to interfere on behalf of Frederick, but he could not make up his mind that the cause of his son-in-law was righteous, and he therefore left him to his fate. Frederick's cause was, however, popular in England, and in 1620, when there were rumours that a Spanish force was about to occupy the Palatinate in order to compel Frederick to abandon Bohemia, James-drawing a distinction between helping his sonin-law to keep his own and supporting him in taking the land of another-went so far as to allow English volunteers, under Sir Horace Vere, to garrison the fortresses of the Palatinate. In the summer of that year, a Spanish army, under Spinola, actually occupied the Western Palatinate, and James, angry at the news, summoned Parliament in order to obtain a vote of supplies for war. Before Parliament could meet, Frederick had been crushingly defeated on the White Hill, near Prague, and driven out of Bohemia.

16. The Meeting of James's Third Parliament. 1621.—Parliament, when it met in 1621, was the more distrustful of James, as Gondomar had returned to England in 1620 and had revived the Spanish marriage treaty. When the Houses met, they were disappointed to find that James did not propose to go to war at once. James fancied that, because he himself wished to act justly and fairly, every one of the other Princes would be regardless of his own interests, and, although he had already sent several ambassadors to settle matters without producing any results, he now proposed to send more ambassadors, and only to fight if negotia

1621

THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR

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tion failed. On learning this, the House of Commons only voted him a small supply, not being willing to grant war-taxes unless it

King James I.: from a painting by P. van Somer, dated 1621, in the

National Portrait Gallery.

was sure that there was to be a war. Probably James was right in not engaging England in hostilities, as ambition had as much to do with Frederick's proceedings as religion, and as, if James had helped his German allies, he could have exercised no control over them ; but he had too little decision or real knowledge of the situation to inspire confidence either at home or abroad; and the Commons, as soon as they had granted a supply, began to criticise his government in domestic matters.

17. The Royal Prerogative. 1616-1621.-Elizabeth had been high-handed enough, but she had talked little of the rights which she claimed, and had set herself to gain the affection of her subjects. James, on the other hand, liked to talk of his rights, whilst he took It was his business, he held, to see that the judges did not break the law under pretence of administering it. "This," he said in 1616, “is a thing regal and proper to a king, to keep every court within its true bounds." More startling was the language which followed. "As for the absolute prerogative of the Crown," he declared, "that is no subject for the tongue of a lawyer, nor is it lawful to be disputed. It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do: good Christians content themselves with His will revealed in His word; so it is presumption and high contempt in a subject to dispute what a king can do, or say that a king cannot do this or that; but rest in that which is the king's will revealed in his law." What James meant was that there must be in every state a power above the law to provide for emergencies as they arise, and to keep the authorities— judicial and administrative—from jostling with one another. At present this power belongs to Parliament. When Elizabeth handed on the government to James, it belonged to the Crown. What James did not understand was that, in the long run, no one--either king or Parliament-will be allowed to exercise powers which are unwisely used. Such an idea probably never entered into James's mind, because he was convinced that he was himself not only the best but the wisest of men, whereas he was in reality-as Henry IV. of France had said of him-'the wisest fool in Christendom.'

no trouble to make himself popular.

18. Financial Reform. 1619.-James not only thought too