286 TWO CHAPTERS ILLUSTRATIVE OF 



his familiar correspondence with Buckingham,* which, upon most 

 occasions, was so loose and full of gross buffoonery, as more fitted a 

 jester or mountebank than the successor of the great Elizabeth — and 

 to a court which was a general agglomerate of all licentiousness ?t 

 Upon these several subjects, mostly of moral antipathy and rebuke, 

 Burnett manifests either a shyness in speaking, as if he were step- 

 ping out of his province by so doing, or a heartless assent, in the place 

 of godly intrepidity of censure. One might have reasonably imagin- 

 ed that each and all of these striking facts would have disgusted him 

 excessively ; so that he could not have even glanced at them with- 

 out the true sparks of indignation " kindling as he ran." To 

 affirm, then, that he ever yields to the suggestions of malice at the 

 mention of James — that he is here ready deliberately to sacrifice 

 truth, honesty, and candour at the shrine of his dislikes and malig- 

 nities — is to give as unfair a representation of our historian, as the 

 artist would of his personal appearance who should represent him as 

 a negro with a black face and woolly hair. 



But if the cloven foot of malice were so unblushingly apparent, 

 why, also, has Burnett omitted some important historical materials, 

 which would further demonstrate the justice of his opinions on the 



ears of this inquisitive king. See the ridiculous letter of the Duchess of 

 Buckingham to him concerning " the weaning of Mall." — Dalrymple's Let- 

 ters, &.C., vol. i., p. 179. 



• This sovereign of the sovereign whom Sir Edward Coke blasphemously 

 called our Saviour, says Clarendon, could not have paraded with all his irre- 

 ligion, the utterance of so many blasphemies in his correspondence with 

 James, if he had not been pretty certain that his epistolary effusions, with- 

 out being seasoned with a touch of them, would have been dull and taste- 

 less to the royal palate. Why a man in these days would be hooted down 

 for a fool or atheist even in the purlieus of St. Giles, if he were to express 

 himself in the manner in which Buckingham did to James respecting the 

 Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and the fruits of Paradise — See Hardwick 

 Papers, vol. i., p. 464, 468. In the dispatches of Count Tilliers, the French 

 Ambassador in London, whose general representations of the Court affairs 

 do great credit to his acuteness and accuracy, the " fiery Duke" is thus 

 alluded to. " His will and pleasure pass for statute and prescription, and in 

 place of his iiiHuence soon decreasing, as was expected, it increases daily to 

 that degree that several (in the absence of a sufficient solution), believe 

 that the king has been bewitched." — See Kaumer's Historij of the XVI. 

 and XVII. Centuries, vol. ii., p. 268. 



-|- For the honour of royalty we could heartily wish that that celebrated 

 woman Mrs. Hutchinsou were chargeable with dealing in exaggerated lan- 

 o-ua^e in that part of her description of the Court of James in which she 

 says, " the generality of the gentry of the land soone learnt tlie Court fashion, 

 and every greate house in the country became a stye of uncleanUness." — See 

 Memoirs of the Life of Col. Ilulchimon, p. ot). 



