282 TWO CHAPTERS ILLUSTRATIVE OF 



worst of his proceedings, as Burnett has done, as matter exciting no 

 attention, and therefore to be passed over as never to be known ; 

 wliereas, from the publicity and interest given to Peacham's case, in 

 consequence of the Chief Justice Coke's dispute with the king and 

 Bacon, then attorney-general, respecting extrajudicial questions to 

 the judges, he must have felt that he was swerving from the line 

 drawn by historical justice, in not presenting his readers with a full 

 and fair account of this abominable transaction. A manuscript ser- 

 mon had been found in the study of Peacham, which he had not 

 preached, and which, we learn from Judge Coke, he had never in- 

 tended to preach. In this discourse he complained of the kings's ex- 

 penses ; of his keeping divided courts for himself, his queen, and his 

 son ; of his gifts for dances, feastings, and maskings ; and of the 

 frauds of his officers. For these censures, which, had they been 

 published, might have amounted to a seditious libel, the puritan 

 minister was tried for high treason, under the statute of Edward 

 III. The old man — for he was above sixty — was put to the rack, 

 and examined upon various questions, says Winwood, then secretary 

 of state, before the torture, under the torture, between the torture, and 

 (ifter the torture, by express command of " the mild and gentle 

 prince,'' for so he is styled by Sir Symonds d'Ewes, in his Diary. 

 Yet Mr. D'Israeli, departing from his usual acuieness and love 

 of historical truth, tells us that " he exercised his power without an 

 atom of brutal despotism adhering to it."* 



Now, aware, that any attempt to convert the overt act of 

 writing a libel into compassing the king's death would be to 

 flounder in absurdity, but determined to wreak his vengeance on 

 the prisoner, James directed Bacon to procure the opinions of the 

 judges, separate and apart, previously to the trial, and for the direct 

 purpose of influencing their decision in behalf of the crown. With 

 this unconstitutional command Bacon had the baseness to comply. 



ing particeps criminis, however true it might be that the benefit of his in- 

 structions was defeated by James's sub-tutor, Young. Subtle, insinuating, 

 penetrating, and tinctured with all that pedantic learning so much afiected 

 afterwards by James, tl.is bad man soon found out that liis young sovereign 

 loved tliose only who were accustomed to humour and flatter him. Accord- 

 ingly lie connived at all his faults, paid a blind servile obedience to all his 

 whims and wishes, and injured the best interests of his ooimtry by secretly 

 cherishing in James that love of absolute monarchy whicli ultimately 

 proved the destruction of his race. See Sibbaldi's Comment, in. Vitain G. Bu- 

 chanaiii, p. 20. Irving's Memoirs of Buchanan, p. 160, and M'Cries's Life of 

 Melville, second edition, vol. i, p. 251 — 257- 



• See Inquiry into the Literary and Political Character of James I., p. 128. 



