Text below by F.X. Feller. - 1860
from the Biographie universelle des hommes qui se sont fait un nom
JAMES VI, King of Scotland, known as I, since he was King of England and Ireland, was the son of Henry Stuart and the unfortunate Mary Stuart. The queen was five months pregnant when her advisor Rizzio was stabbed in front of her. The sight of the naked, bloody swords made an impression on her, which was passed on to the child she was carrying. James I, who was born four months after this fatal adventure, in 1566, trembled all his life at the sight of a naked sword, no matter how hard his mind tried to overcome this deposition of his organs (proof of fact, among a thousand others, against physicists who deny the influence of the imagination of mothers on the children they bear). After the death of Elizabeth, who had named him her successor,
he ascended the throne in 1608 and reigned over Scotland, England and Ireland. This prince, the son of such a Catholic mother, signalled his accession to the crown with an edict ordering all Catholic priests to leave England on pain of death. Those who harboured them were also put to death as criminals of lèse-majesté. There was nothing but talk of executions, and the blood of Catholic lords flowed daily on the scaffolds in almost every town in the three kingdoms. In 1605, some furious people resolved to put an end to this carnage by exterminating the king, the royal family and all the peers of the kingdom in one fell swoop. They resolved to place 36 barrels of gunpowder under the chamber where the king was to address Parliament. Everything was ready; all they had to wait for was the day of the assembly to carry out their plan. An anonymous letter, which one of the conspirators wrote to one of his friends to divert him from the assembly, aroused suspicion of the conspiracy. All the underground passageways were searched, and at the entrance to the cellar below the Chamber a skilled fuse was found who, in a few hours, was to set off the mine and destroy Parliament. Fear tore all the secrets of the conspiracy from this unfortunate man. Some of the conspirators were killed when they relaxed; several left the kingdom; eight were caught and executed. (See Garnet and Oldecorn)’. Some writers (says Ladvocat, Dictionnaire historique,) have accused the Jesuits of having taken part in this conspiracy; but M. Antoine Le Fèvre de La Boderie, at that time French ambassador to England, and since then father-in-law of M. Arnauld d'Andilly, fully vindicates them of this accusation in his Négociations (printed in 1749) ‘. Several authors have written that this conspiracy had been devised by Minister Cecil, and that he himself had trusted persons artificially propose the plan to Catholics, whom he knew to be in despair at the cruelties being exercised against them. Mr Higgons, in his Coup-d'œil sur l'histoire d'Angleterre (Hague edition, 1727, page 252), speaks of it in these terms :
Some assert that this plot was formed with hammers in the forges of Cecil, who had at first prepared it for the reign of Elizabeth; but who, forewarned by the death of that princess, resolved to put it into operation during the reign of James I, with the design of rousing the nation to such an extent against the Catholics that it would drive them all out, and that he would then be able to seize their property ; that, in order to achieve this, he used his secret emissaries, who encouraged a few hotheads to undertake this affair quickly, without them knowing that the plan for the plot came from him in the right. But I do not want this to be certain: it is still indubitable that the court in London was informed of this treason through France and Italy, long before the alleged discovery, and that Cecil, who knew the whole affair, was the one who fabricated this letter to milord Montaigle, to make this discovery seem marvellous, and to give the king reason to admire his talents.
Mr Challoner, Bishop of Dibra, Vicar Apostolic in London, in Memoirs printed in London in 1741, and the author of the Grammaire politique, speak in the same way of this conspiracy. The terror that James spread among Catholics did not make him respected by Presbyterians or Anglicans, still less by foreign nations. His reign was despised at home and abroad. As head of the Protestant party in Europe, he did not support it against the Catholics in the great crisis of the Bohemian War. James abandoned his son-in-law, the Elector Palatine, negotiating when it was necessary to fight, deceived by both the court of Vienna and that of Madrid, always sending famous embassies, and never having allies. His lack of credit among foreign nations did much to deprive him of the credit he should have had at home. His authority in England suffered a great setback as a result of the crucible in which he himself put it, by trying to give it too much weight and too much prominence. He never ceased to tell his Parliament that ‘God had made him absolute master, that all their privileges were but concessions from the goodness of kings’. In so doing, he encouraged the Parliaments to examine the limits of royal authority and the extent of the nation's rights.
It was in the Parliament of 1621 that the two parties so well known were formed, one called Torys for the king, the other called Wighs for the people. The king's pedantic eloquence only served to draw harsh criticism. His erudition was not given the justice it deserved. Henri IV only ever called him Maître Jacques, and his subjects did not give him more flattering titles. What particularly angered them against him was his abandonment to his favourites. A Scotsman named Carr ru0led him absolutely, and since then he has left this favourite for Georges de Villiers, known as the Duke of Buckingham, as a woman leaves one lover for another.
He died on 27 March 1625, aged 50, after 22 years of reign, with the reputation of a prince more indolent than peaceful, a pedantic king and an unskilful politician. It was as if he were merely a passenger in the ship of which he was, or should have been, the pilot.
James I,’ says a historian, ’a prince with small ideas, who thought he was expanding by leaving his sphere, issued an ordinance to authorise dances and games, which served as a source of entertainment for the people on feast days. The bishops and magistrates were strictly enjoined to ensure that this was carried out as a matter of the utmost importance. The king gave two reasons of the first order: the fear of making the Protestants stupid, and the hope of attracting the Papists to them. Wonderful views for the progress of the pure Gospel! What could be more beautiful than to attract men to it, by making them dance under the clasp of religion !
We can recognise in James's conduct that of all the oppressors of religion, freedom and the laws, that of the tyrants of Rome and Greece: festivals and games were always called upon to aid violence, to distract and stupefy the multitude, to blind them to public evils. James was the first person to take the title of King of Great Britain.
One cannot read without indignation the patience with which he suffered the insolence of Buchanan, who dared to dedicate to him a book in which this author subjects kings to the judgment of their subjects, and to punishments of which the most severe is not deposition. What this mercenary historian wrote falsely about Mary Stuart should have found in the heart of a son a little more vivacity against the slanderer of a mother. We have a few works of controversy by him, strangely entitled and written in the same way: Le triple coin pour le triple nœud; Tortura torti: this one is against Bellarmin, who in one of his works had taken the title of Matthœus tortus; the Basilicodoron, or Royal Gift, his main work. It was translated by Jean Holman de Villiers, Paris, 1603, in-8; La vraie loi des monarchies libres; des Discours au Parlement. His works prove that his genius was a little above mediocre: without being a despicable author, he was not a sublime man. He also commented on the Apocalypse, and wanted to prove that the Pope is the antichrist. His dull works, written in English, were collected in London in 1616, folio, and published in Latin in 1619 by Jacques de Montaigu.
The comments are only those of the author of this 1860 biography.
