268 THE HISTORY OF NEWMARKET, [Book IV. 



Bishop Goodman, who was, as he himself declares, 

 " the last man that did homage " in the time of the 

 king's sickness, attributed the fatal illness of James I. 

 to the excessive use of screen fruits : " After eating 

 of fruit in the spring time, his body fell into great 

 looseness, which although while he was young 

 did tend to preserve his health, yet now, being 

 grown toward sixty, it did a little weaken his 

 body, and going to Theobalds, to Newmarket, and 

 stirring abroad when as the coldness of the year 

 was not yet past almost, it could not be prevented, 

 but he must fall into a quartan ague, for the recovery 

 whereof the physicians taking one course, and the 

 plaister another, I fear the King was wronged be- 

 tween both." The plasters referred to by the bishop 

 were applied, by Buckingham and his mother, to 

 the king's wrist, without the consent of his physi- 

 cians ; and, through the medium of the plasters, it 

 was alleged that the king was poisoned. On the 

 fourteenth day of his illness the king lost the faculty 

 of speech, and in the course of a few hours expired, 

 in the fifty-ninth year of his age and the twenty- 

 third of his reign. Of his seven children, three sons 

 and four daughters, only two survived him : Charles, 

 his successor on the throne ; and Elizabeth, the titular 

 Queen of Bohemia. 



Dr. Lingard says : " James, though an able man, 

 was a weak monarch, . . . To forget his cares in the 

 hurry of the chase, or the exercise of golf, in carousing 

 at table, or laughing at the buffoonery and indecencies 

 practised by those around him, seems to have con- 



