Ch. 31 - James the First

'OUR cousin of Scotland' was ugly, awkward, and shuffling both in
mind and person. His tongue was much too large for his mouth, his
legs were much too weak for his body, and his dull goggle-eyes
stared and rolled like an idiot's. He was cunning, covetous,
wasteful, idle, drunken, greedy, dirty, cowardly, a great swearer,
and the most conceited man on earth. His figure - what is commonly
called rickety from his birth - presented a most ridiculous
appearance, dressed in thick padded clothes, as a safeguard against
being stabbed (of which he lived in continual fear), of a grass-
green colour from head to foot, with a hunting-horn dangling at his
side instead of a sword, and his hat and feather sticking over one
eye, or hanging on the back of his head, as he happened to toss it
on. He used to loll on the necks of his favourite courtiers, and
slobber their faces, and kiss and pinch their cheeks; and the
greatest favourite he ever had, used to sign himself in his letters
to his royal master, His Majesty's 'dog and slave,' and used to
address his majesty as 'his Sowship.' His majesty was the worst
rider ever seen, and thought himself the best. He was one of the
most impertinent talkers (in the broadest Scotch) ever heard, and
boasted of being unanswerable in all manner of argument. He wrote
some of the most wearisome treatises ever read - among others, a
book upon witchcraft, in which he was a devout believer - and
thought himself a prodigy of authorship. He thought, and wrote,
and said, that a king had a right to make and unmake what laws he
pleased, and ought to be accountable to nobody on earth. This is
the plain, true character of the personage whom the greatest men
about the court praised and flattered to that degree, that I doubt
if there be anything much more shameful in the annals of human
nature.

He came to the English throne with great ease. The miseries of a
disputed succession had been felt so long, and so dreadfully, that
he was proclaimed within a few hours of Elizabeth's death, and was
accepted by the nation, even without being asked to give any pledge
that he would govern well, or that he would redress crying
grievances. He took a month to come from Edinburgh to London; and,
by way of exercising his new power, hanged a pickpocket on the
journey without any trial, and knighted everybody he could lay hold
of. He made two hundred knights before he got to his palace in
London, and seven hundred before he had been in it three months.
He also shovelled sixty-two new peers into the House of Lords - and
there was a pretty large sprinkling of Scotchmen among them, you
may believe.

His Sowship's prime Minister, CECIL (for I cannot do better than
call his majesty what his favourite