stimulated and rewarded the zeal of their ancestors in the good work of the reformation. Great difficulty was experienced in procuring a nomination of lords of the articles conformable to the wishes of the king; and he was on the point of dissolving the parliament in anger, when some mode equally effectual and secret was discovered of overcoming this opposition. An act was now proposed, as the basis of all further proceedings, declaring, "that in ecclesiastical affairs, whatever should be determined by the king, with the advice of the prelates and a competent number of the clergy, should receive the operation and force of law." This was, in other words, declaring the sovereign head of the church, and giving up for ever the presbyterian worship and discipline, the idol of the people. The clergy, in well-founded alarm, hastened to prepare a protestation, which was presented to the parliament just as the act was about to receive the royal assent. It was judged inexpedient to carry it through: but nothing was gained to the religious liberties of the country by this apparent victory of their champions; for the king now claimed, by his inherent prerogative and absolute power, all that the proposed law could have given him. He immediately established a court of high-commission, and one of its first acts was the deprivation of three clergymen who had been active in the drawing and presenting of this remonstrance; by a further exertion of lawless power two of them were also committed to prison, and a third banished his country for life.

Five articles were propounded to the assembled: clergy under the intimidation of these examples of royal vengeance, which were the following: That the eucharist should be received kneeling: That it should be administered in private to the sick : That baptism should be privately administered in cases of necessity: That episcopal confirmation should be given to youth: That the great festivals in commemoration of the principal events in the history of Christ should be duly celebrated.

The rites and practices enjoined by these articles were precisely those which the English puritans peculiarly objected to in the service of their own church, as relics of popery; and what aggravated the tyranny and folly of forcing them upon the Scotch was, that even the English bishops held them to be things in their own nature indifferent; for which reason alone, indeed, they maintained that the church had the right of instituting them and decreeing their perpetual observance.

The afflicted clergy, overawed by the peremptoriness of the king, yielded for the time a qualified assent to some of the articles, but implored upon their knees the convocation of a general assembly. This, after many precautions to insure its subserviency to the royal pleasure, was granted; and the articles were the next year confirmed by its authority, though not without extreme reluctance and many dissenting voices: the new ordinances, moreover, were observed by none excepting the creatures of the court; the body of the people, inflexible

in their religious prepossessions, continued to set at nought both the mandates of the king and the decrees of an assembly which they regarded as irregularly convoked. What was worse, their disobedience was in general displayed with impunity;—for James, destitute alike of treasure and of troops, possessed no means of enforcing submission to the dictates of that prerogative in the omnipotence of which he gloried. The Scotch nation however gave him full credit for his intentions; it felt itself insulted, as well as aggrieved, by the imposition of an English ritual, an English episcopacy; and it viewed the defection of the king from that presbyterian establishment which he had formerly declared the purest church in christendom, and which he had repeatedly protested that he would maintain inviolate, as a base apostasy in which it would be infamous to concur. James, on his part, was incensed at all the resistance. which had been opposed to his absolute power, and rather provoked than conciliated by the few and reluctant concessions of the clergy; and he turned away his steps from his native soil in anger, and probably with the resolution to return no morea.

In the mean time his English court had been the theatre of intrigues, petty and sordid in their nature and objects, but memorable as well as mortifying from the eminence of the parties concerned.

Sir Edward Coke, whose appetite for power and personal distinction was scarcely inferior to his at

* See Laing's History of Scotland, under the year 1617.

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tachment to the constitution of his country, began to be impatient of the exclusion from public life to which his late conduct had doomed him; and appears to have been on the watch for some opportunity of reconciling himself with the court and again confronting Bacon, his now triumphant rival. This opportunity the lord-keeper himself unwarily afforded him.

It seems that, on some occasion during the absence of the king, the airs of superiority which Bacon thought proper to assume had given high offence to sir Ralph Winwood, the secretary of state; who, not content with venting his spleen by some peevish expressions against the lord-keeper in a dispatch to his majesty, sought out Coke, his old friend, and earnestly entreated to be made the means of restoring him to the favor of Buckingham,—the only passport to the good-will of his master. This precious favor Coke had forfeited some time before by the coldness with which he had listened to proposals for a marriage between one of his daughters and sir Edward Villiers, the brother of the earl; and Winwood now proposed that this negotiation should be renewed under his auspices, with the offer, on the part of Coke, of a large marriage portion. Coke consented to this expedient; Buckingham, who had no object so much at heart as the advancement of all the members of his numerous and necessitous family, was propitiated by the overture, and all appeared to be going on prosperously, when sir Edward Coke found himself confronted by obstacles on which he had not calculated. His wife, the wealthy

wealthy widow of lord Hatton and grand-daughter of lord Burleigh,-was a woman much more remarkable for a high spirit than for any of the female virtues; and provoked beyond endurance at this attempt on the part of her husband to, dispose of their daughter without her concurrence, and contrary, it is said, to the wishes of the young lady herself, she carried her off and lodged her clandestinely at the house of sir Edmund Withipole near Oatlands. Coke thought it necessary to write to Buckingham to procure a warrant from the privy-council for his lady and some of her abettors, in order to the recovery of his daughter,—of so little force was his authority in his own household! Before the arrival of the warrant, however, he learned where his daughter was concealed, and, taking his sons with him, he went to sir Edmund Withipole's house and brought her away by force. Upon this, his contumacious lady made a complaint against him to the privycouncil.

Bacon, who dreaded nothing so much as the return of his old antagonist to power, was not ashamed to interfere in this family quarrel, and to countenance Yelverton, the attorney-general, in filing an information in the star-chamber against Coke, for the means which he had taken to recover his daughter, strictly legal as they unquestionably were. He also wrote two letters, to the king and to his patron Buckingham, respecting this marriage,pieces which throw too much light both on his own character

VOL. II.

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