284 TWO CHAPTERS ILLUSTRATIVE OF 



yet James, who was here so intent in degrading the judges into the 

 abject characters of the mere instruments of the crown, could, in a 

 speech to his parliament in 1601, assert in the most unequivocal 

 terms — and the assertion was highly just and proper — that " the 

 doing any act that may procure less reverence to the judges, cannot 

 but breed a looseness in the government and a disgrace to the whole 

 nation." Surely, if James had not flattered himself that he had 

 succeeded in his design of reducing the people at large, as well as 

 the judges, into so complete a servitude that they had ceased to per- 

 ceive the distinction between despotism and monarchy, he would 

 not have ventured to utter such a public declaration as the above, 

 and then, in the face of it, to insist upon the judges doing 

 those acts whereby the law of the land was grievously infring- 

 ed. But, that he never sincerely contemplated to render the 

 judges anything but obsequious tools in their official capacities, 

 may be clearly inferred from his employing the common law judges 

 in acts of prerogative ; upon which Lord Clarendon has pronounced 

 the following manly and unanswerable sentence of reprobation : — 

 " The damage and mischief cannot be expressed," says he, " that 

 the crown and state sustained by the deserved reproach and infamy 

 that attended the judges, by being made use of in acts of power :" 

 and in the next page of his immortal work, he observes : — " In the 

 wisdom of former times, when the prerogative went highest, never 

 any court of law, seldom any judge or lawyer of reputation, was 

 called upon to assist in an act of power. The crown, well knowing 

 the moment of keeping those the objects of reverence and venera- 

 tion with the people, and that though it might sometimes make 

 sallies upon them by the prerogative, yet the law would keep the 

 people from any invasion of it, and that the king could never suffer 

 whilst the law and the judges were looked upon by the subject as 

 the asylum for their liberties and security."* 



Now, if it were so notorious that Burnett had passionately pledg- 

 ed himself to aggravate the royal failings, as he is charged by Hig- 

 gons, whenever he speaks of James, would he have been content to 

 omit the above-mentioned striking instances of scandalous and intol- 

 erable abuse of kingly power, which, when we calmly and impar- 

 tially consider, must be regarded with a shuddering sense of abhor- 

 rence ? Vv'hat else, too, could be demanded in the most thorough- 

 paced and unprincipled partizan of the degenerate monarch of 

 Whitehall, than to drop all pointed reference to his systematic at- 



• History of the Rebellion, vol. i., p. 124, 125, Oxford Edition. 



