some mood of mind a little more foolish than usual, or when striving-only too successfully—to train up his successor to follow in his own path. It seems like an irony of Fate to find that (in all probability,—for here again the proof is not quite clinching,) the King's informer, against COTTON and the other offenders, was WENTWORTH, who, not many years after 1629, was to sum up views of policy much akin to Robert DUDLEY'S in the memorable word "Thorough.' COTTON himself believed that this apparently trivial incident cost him his life. He said not long before his death,-'It has killed me.' We shall probably never know whether DUDLEY'S tract had anything to do with bringing about in the mind of WENTWORTH that eventful change of political views which is known to have passed over it (about the time when the incriminated manuscript was sent so eagerly from hand to hand), and which, in a few years more, was to work his death also. But one can hardly avoid, in passing, a momentary thought on the curious possibility that a pamphlet, written at Florence, in the hope that it might save, for the writer, some wreck or remnant of a despoiled inheritance, may have proved fatal alike to the close political friend of ELIOT, and to the close political friend of LAUD. A tract of such potency may well claim a few words about its contents. They bear in every line the stamp of mental energy, and also the stamp of moral recklessness. Book I, Chap. II. SIR ROBERT SIR R. DUDLEY, (THE TRUE Sir Robert DUDLEY knew well enough that a rooted dis- CAREER OF like of Parliaments was, in JAMES's mind, combined with a besetting dread of them. He knew that, between hate AUTHOR). and fear, a Parliament was like a nightmare, for ever crouching behind the royal pillow. It is the purpose of his tract to tell the King how to drive the nightmare BOOK I. SIR ROBERT COTTON. away. He recommends, amongst other and minor measures, the erection of a strong fortress in all the chief towns of the Kingdom, to be manned by trained bands, and to be placed in such situations as shall command the high roads. In addition to these measures, your Majesty, he says, must set up a strict system of passports, for travellers. Nor is all this merely a new and more elaborate version of the old story of belling the cat. The writer of this counsel knows, perfectly, that already the King's poverty is the Parliament's power; and that to build fortresses and array soldiers needs a full purse, not an exhausted one. But he says, as WENTWORTH said after him,-that soldiers can be set to work upon good hopes of the pay to come. A resolute King, he thinks, with resolute troops at his back, could do in England what had so often been done in Italy. He could tithe men's estates. He could make salt and some other things of prime necessity a royal monopoly. He could set a tariff on dignities of honour. He could establish sumptuary laws, such as should make the vanity and jealousy of thriving nobodies-men with full pockets and blank pedigrees-willing contributors to the King's Exchequer. He could buy up improvident leases of Crown lands, and resell them at a large profit. The shortsightedness of such advice as this is now obvious enough. But advice quite as shortsighted and far less plausibly couched,-for the eyes that were to read it,— had been fruitful of result, when offered to Stuarts. Nor was the man who now offered it to CHARLES a mere clever talker. He was a man who had already acquitted himself with conspicuous ability in several spheres of action, lying widely apart. Sir Robert DUDLEY possessed many splendid accom Chap. II. SIR ROBERT THE CAREER OF SIR DUDLEY. plishments. He had been educated by the same ripe BOOK I, scholar who afterwards became tutor to Prince HENRY. At the age of one and twenty, he had put himself into the lists with RALEGH, as navigator and discoverer, by heading an expedition to the Oronoco. In the course of that expedition he had captured nine Spanish ships; one of ROBERT them of twice his own strength. At three and twenty, he had fought, side by side with RALEGH, in the naval battle in the bay of Cadiz; had handled his ship with an ability which won the praise of his rivals; and had then fought, in the land attack, side by side with ESSEX. When his own unbridled passions and resentments gave a fatal opening for the equally unbridled cupidity of JAMES, and of JAMES'S courtiers, to despoil him of a great estate, and to drive him. into exile, he showed that he knew how to snatch honour out of defeat. He laid the foundation of a new English trade with Italy and created—it is not saying too much-the maritime prosperity of Leghorn. He drained vast Italian marshes, and made corn to grow where corn had never grown before. The man who, in early life, had won fame at once as a navigator full of pluck and resource, and as an able soldier by sea and land:-and who, on attaining full manhood, had shown himself both a clever diplomatist and a great engineer;-did not go to his foreign grave before he had won literary fame with the pen, and scientific fame at the furnace of the chemist. He had, in its fullest measure, the versatility and the energy of his race. English family biography, I suppose, can scarcely show a stranger group of lives than the successive lives of the last four DUDLEYS of that line:-Edmund, the Minister of HENRY VII, and author of The Tree of the Commonwealth; NORTHUMBERLAND, the subduer of EDWARD VI, and the murderer of Jane GREY; LEICESTER, the Favourite of BOOK I, Chap. II. LIFE OF SIR ROBERT COTTON. ELIZABETH; Sir Robert, the self-made exile, and the maker of Leghorn. Whilst English history, in its long course, can scarcely match the fatality which seems to have foredoomed powers of mind and strength of will, such as are rarely repeated in four successive generations, to teem with evil instead of good for England. Such, in few words, was the career of the man, the forgotten production of whose pen was to shorten the life of a statesman whose only connection with it-so far as the evidence goes-lay in the fact that a copy chanced to turn up in his library; fell under the keen eye of a lawyer who thought that something might be made of it; and was then copied probably by some clerk, who was in the habit of making transcripts for students to whom money was less precious than time. In some points of the story Registers of the Privy Council, James I, vol. v, pp. 484, 485, 489; Nov. 3-5, 1629. (C. O.) Domestic Correspondence, James I, vol. cli, § 24, § 69, seqq., and vol. clii, § 78, seqq. In this last-named document the following passage occurs. The writer is Richard James, who for very many years was Librarian to Sir Robert Cotton, and he is writing to Secretary Lord Dorchester.-'About July last, I was willed by Sir Robert Cotton to carry him [Mr. Oliver Saint John] into the Upper Study and there let him make search among some bundles of papers for business of the Sewers. . . . . If he (St. John) did make any mention of a projecting pamphlet there pretended to be found, so God save me as I entered into no further conversation of it. Neither can I believe that any such as this now questioned was ever in keeping with us, or ever seen by Sir R. Cotton until, of late, he received it from my Lord of Clare. For myself, let not God be merciful unto me if, before that time, I ever saw, heard, or thought of it' (R. James to Dorchester, vol. 152, § 78). (R. H.) There is also some further information on the subject in MS. Harl. 7000, ff. 267, seqq. (B. M.) A considerable number of the letters of Richard James to Sir Robert Cotton, his friend and benefactor, are preserved in MS. Harl. 7002. But these throw no satisfactory light on the incident of 1629. I believe, however, that to an observant reader they will be likely to suggest the idea that Richard James knew more Chap. II. there is still considerable uncertainty. But so much as this Book I, seems to be established. How the tract came, at the LIFE OF first, into Sir Robert COTTON's library there is no evidence whatever to shew. SIR ROBERT COTTON. It is not the least curious point in this transaction that the Earl of SOMERSET should have been mixed up with it. He had been released from the Tower almost eight years before (namely, on the 28th of January, 1622), but was prohibited from living near the Court. At first, he was ordered to restrict himself to one or other of two old mansions in Oxfordshire-Caversham and Grey's Court. After- Council wards, his option was enlarged, by including, in the license, James I, Aldenham, in Hertfordshire. It is evident that, after 425 (C. O.). than he was willing that Sir Robert should know. The letters are without dates, after the fashion of the times, and this adds to their obscurity. But one thing is plain. The writer ran away from London, either when he knew that the first inquiry was imminent or thought it probable that a renewed inquiry would be set on foot. In one of these letters, after many professions of attachment, he writes thus: 'From you, at this time, I should not have parted, if the exigence and penurie of my life had not forc'd a silent retreat into myself, and my owne home at Corpus Christi College;' and then, a fit of poesy-such as it was-coming over him, he ends his letter metrically, as thus: 'The poore young Russian youth, that slave In minde, the which none, truely, were. You will no worse remember me.' -MS. Harl. 7002, f. 118. Registers, vol. v, pp. 230, |
