Page:The Queens of England.djvu/482

434 THE QUEENS OF ENGLAND. worship as the fountain 'of honor. Visions of leveling clergy and factious nobles, such as had haunted him his whole life long, now passed from his aching sight forever. He turned to his Scotch followers, and told them they had at last arrived in the land of promise. But he had yet to see the most important man in this prom- ised land. He was awaiting his royal advent at his seat of Theobalds, within a few miles of London, on the 3rd of May ; and strange must have been the first meeting, at the gate of that splendid mansion, between the broad, shambling, shuffling, grotesque monarch, and the small, keen, deformed crook-backed, capable minister ; between the son of Mary queen of Scots, and the son of her chief executioner. It is hardly too much to say that Robert Cecil had secured James his throne. He exer- cised, no doubt, the wise discretion of a statesman in the unhesitating course he took ; he satisfied the national desire, and he brought under one crown two kingdoms that could not separately exist ; but it remains forever a reproach upon his name, that he let slip the occasion of obtaining for the people constitutional guarantees which could not then have been refused, and might have saved half a century of bloodshed. None such were proposed to James. He was allowed to seize a prerogative which for upwards of fifty years had been strained to a higher pitch than at any previous period of the English history ; and his clumsy grasp closed on it without a sign of question or remonstrance from the leading statesmen of England. "Do I mak the judges? do I mak the bishops?" he exclaimed, as the powers of his new dominion dawned on his delighted sense. "Then, Godis wauns ! I mak Avhat likes me, law and gospel." It was even so. Cecil suffered him to make law and gospel as he listed ; left him, by whatever modes best pleased him, to incur contempt and sow rebellion at home ; and contented himself, by a resolute and sagacious policy abroad, with keeping England* still respected and feared in her place amid foreign nations. No one served the king so ably, or, there is reason to believe, despised him so much. In her latter years Elizabeth had exacted of her ministers that they should address her kneeling, and some one congratulated Cecil that those degrading conditions were passed away. "Would to God," he replied, "I yet spake upon my knees!" Not a fortnight after he had received James, indeed, he tells his friend Harrington how heavily it goes with him ; how dull