[Footnote A:  Stowe’s Annals, p. 845.]

[Footnote B:  See Sir Edward Walker’s “Hist.  Discourses,” p. 321; and Barrington’s “Observ. on the Statutes,” who says, “For this he deserves the highest praise and commendation from a nation of islanders.”]

[Footnote C:  Harl.  MSS. 646.]

Another contemporary author, Wilson, has not ill-traced the generations of this continued peace—­“peace begot plenty, plenty begot ease and wantonness, and ease and wantonness begot poetry, and poetry swelled out into that bulk in this king’s time which begot monstrous satyrs.”  Such were the laseivious times, which dissolving the ranks of society in a general corruption, created on one part the imaginary and unlimited wants of prosperity; and on the other produced the riotous children of indolence, and the turbulent adventurers of want.  The rank luxuriance of this reign was a steaming hot-bed of peace, which proved to be the seed-plot of that revolution which was reserved for the unfortunate son.

In the subsequent reign a poet seems to have taken a retrospective view of the age of peace of James I. contemplating on its results in his own disastrous times—­

                      —­States that never know
  A change but in their growth, which a long peace
  Hath brought unto perfection, are like steel,
  Which being neglected will consume itself
  With its own rust; so doth Security
  Eat through the hearts of states, while they are sleeping
  And lulled into false quiet.

NABB’S Hannibal and Scipio.

* * * * *

SUMMARY OF HIS CHARACTER.

Thus the continued peace of James I. had calamities of its own!  Are we to attribute them to the king?  It has been usual with us, in the solemn expiations of our history, to convert the sovereign into the scape-goat for the people; the historian, like the priest of the Hebrews, laying his hands on Azazel,[A] the curses of the multitude are heaped on that devoted head.  And thus the historian conveniently solves all ambiguous events.

[Footnote A:  The Hebrew name, which Calmet translates Bouc Emissaire, and we Scape Goat, or rather Escape Goat.]

The character of James I. is a moral phenomenon, a singularity of a complex nature.  We see that we cannot trust to those modern writers who have passed their censures upon him, however just may be those very censures; for when we look narrowly into their representations, as surely we find, perhaps without an exception, that an invective never closes without some unexpected mitigating circumstance, or qualifying abatement.  At the moment of inflicting the censure, some recollection in opposition to what is asserted passes in the mind, and to approximate to Truth, they offer a discrepancy, a self-contradiction.  James must always be condemned on a system, while his apology is only allowed the benefit of a parenthesis.