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THE KING’S PRIVATE LIFE IN HIS OCCASIONAL RETIREMENTS.

The king’s occasional retirements to Royston and Newmarket have even been surmised to have borne some analogy to the horrid Capraea of Tiberius; but a witness has accidentally detailed the king’s uniform life in these occasional seclusions.  James I. withdrew at times from public life, but not from public affairs; and hunting, to which he then gave alternate days, was the cheap amusement and requisite exercise of his sedentary habits:  but the chase only occupied a few hours.  A part of the day was spent by the king in his private studies; another at his dinners, where he had a reader, and was perpetually sending to Cambridge for books of reference:  state affairs were transacted at night; for it was observed, at the time, that his secretaries sat up later at night, in those occasional retirements, than when they were at London.[A] I have noticed, that the state papers were composed by himself; that he wrote letters on important occasions without consulting any one; and that he derived little aid from his secretaries.  James was probably never indolent; but the uniform life and sedentary habits of literary men usually incur this reproach from those real idlers who bustle in a life of nothingness.  While no one loved more the still-life of peace than this studious monarch, whose habits formed an agreeable combination of the contemplative and the active life, study and business—­no king more zealously tried to keep down the growing abuses of his government, by personally concerning himself in the protection of the subject.[B]

[Footnote A:  Hacket’s Scrinia Reserata, Part I. p. 27.]

[Footnote B:  As evidences of this zeal for reform, I throw into this note some extracts from the MS. letters of contemporaries.—­Of the king’s interference between the judges of two courts about prohibitions, Sir Dudley Carleton gives this account:—­“The king played the best part in collecting arguments on both sides, and concluded that he saw much endeavour to draw water to their several mills; and advised them to take moderate courses, whereby the good of the subject might be more respected than their particular jurisdictions.  The king sat also at the Admiralty, to look himself into certain disorders of government there; he told the lawyers ’he would leave hunting of hares, and hunt them in their quirks and subtilities, with which the subject had been too long abused.’”—­MS. Letter of Sir Dudley Carleton.

In “Winwood’s Memorials of State” there is a letter from Lord Northampton, who was present at one of these strict examinations of the king; and his language is warm with admiration:  the letter being a private one, can hardly be suspected of court flattery.  “His Majesty hath in person, with the greatest dexterity of wit and strength of argument that mine ears ever heard, compounded between the parties of the civil and ecclesiastical courts, who begin to comply, by the king’s sweet temper, on points that were held to be incompatible.”—­Winwood’s Mem. iii. p. 54.