assisting in averting its consequences, and comforting the afflicted metropolitan, thought it an opportunity of raising himself to the highest ecclesiastical as well as civil dignity, and wrote the following mean and cunning letter to be laid before the King:

"My Lord's Grace, upon this accident, is, by the common law of England, to forfeit all his estate to his Majesty, and by the canon law, which is in force with us, 'irregular' ipso facto, and so suspended from all ecclesiastical function, until he be again restored by his superior, which, I take it, is the King's Majesty in this rank and order of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. I wish, with all my heart, his Majesty would be as merciful as ever he was in all his life. But yet I hold it my duty to let his Majesty know, that his Majesty is fallen upon a matter of great advice and deliberation. To add affliction to the afflicted, as no doubt he is in mind, is against the King's nature. To leave a man of blood, Primate and Patriarch of all his churches, is a thing that sounds very harsh in the old councils and canons of the Church. The Papists will not spare to descant upon the one and the other. I leave the knot to his Majesty's deep wisdom to advise and resolve upon.”

The Archbishop's friends quoted the maxims, "Actus non facit reum, nisi mens sit rea," and "omne peccatum in tantum est peccatum in quantum est voluntarium ;" and it being argued against him, that if one acting in indebitâ materiá kills a man involuntarily, it is to be gathered that God gave him up to that mischance, that he might be disciplined by the censure of the church, they replied, that hunting was no unpriestly sport by the laws of England,-for every peer in the higher House of Parliament, as well Lords spiritual as temporal, hath permission by the Charta de Foresta, when, after summons, he is on his journey to parliament, and travels through the King's forests, to cause a horn to be sounded, and to kill a brace of bucks for his sustentation.

To decide this knotty point, a commission was directed to ten Bishops, common-law Judges, and civilians-the Lord Keeper being chief commissioner. They were equally divided on the question, "whether the Archbishop was irregular' by the fact of involuntary homicide?" But a majority held that "the act might tend to a scandal in a churchman," the Lord Keeper, on both questions, voting against the Archbishop.

This intrigue was counteracted by the general sympathy in favour of the Archbishop,-and the King, in due form, "assoiled him from all irregularity, scandal, or infamation, pro

A.D. 1623.

HIS LETTER TO THE PRINCE IN SPAIN.

171

nouncing him to be capable to use all metropolitical authority as if that sinistrous contingency of spilling blood had never happened."

The Lord Keeper's consecration as Bishop of Lincoln had been delayed by these proceedings,--and now, from disappointment and spleen, under pretence that the efficacy of the Archbishop's ministration might still be questioned, he obtained a licence from the King that he might be consecrated by the Bishops of London, Worcester, Ely, Oxford, and Llandaff.*

The following year was memorable by the romantic journey of the Prince and Buckingham to Spain. While at A.D. 1623. Madrid, Charles, to please his mistress and the Spanish

Court, wrote a letter to the Lord Keeper, praying that he would do all in his power to mitigate the execution of the penal laws against Roman Catholics, to which the following courtly answer was returned :

"I would I had any abilities to serve your Highness in this place wherein you have set me, and your grace and favour have countenanced and encouraged me. To observe your Highness's commands, I am sure the Spanish ambassador resiant must testify, that since your Highness's departure he hath been denied no one request for expedition of justice or care of Catholics, although I usually hear from him twice or thrice a week; which I observe the more superstitiously, that he might take knowledge how sensible we are of any honour done to your Highness. And yet, in the relaxation of the Roman Catholic penalties, I keep off the King from appearing in it as much as I can, and take all upon myself, as I believe every servant of his ought to do in such negotiations, the events whereof be hazardous and uncertain."

* 2 St. Tr. 1160.

The high church party afterwards invented a story that at this time the Lord Keeper wished to be reconciled to the Church of Rome, and through Buckingham's interest at the Court of Spain to be made a cardinal. In the autograph MS. of Robert Earl of Leicester, preserved in the British Museum, there is the following entry:-" Att Yorke, 29th Aprill, 1639. Being at dinner, at Sir John Melton's, where I lay, Ld Chamberlain, the Earle of Holland present (but I thinke he heard it not), Mr. Endymion Porter, Groome of ye Bedchamber, told me that he knewe the Bp. of Lincolne, Williams, since ArchbP of Yorke (then in trouble), when he was in favour, and Ld Keeper, wd have bin a Car

dinall, and made all the meanes he could to attaine unto it, by my Lorde of Buckingham's power, during the treaty of the match with Spaine; at which time Porter was the D. of Buckingham's servant, and in greate favour with him. This,' sayd Porter, 'is true upon my knowledge, or else God refuse me! and I wish this piece of bread may choke me, which I hope you believe I would not say if I did not know it!' One may see by this what an excellent conscience that Byshop hath, who wd have bin a Cardinall; while he was in favour nothing els would satisfie his ambition; and, being in disgrace, he betakes himself to the Puritan party."-Blencowe's Sydney Papers, p. 261.

The town was meanwhile amused by a call of Serjeants, a memorable event in those days. No fewer than thirteen jointly received the honour of the coif, and the Lord Keeper addressed them in a very long and tedious speech, which he thus sought to enliven: "Your great and sumptuous feast is like that of a King's coronation, at which you entertain the ambassadors of foreign Kings now resident about the city, and the prime officers and nobility of this realm. King Henry VII., in his own person, did grace the Serjeants' feast, held then at Ely Place, in Holborn. I should be too long if I should speak of the ornament of your head, your pure linen coif, which evidences that you are candidates of higher honour. So likewise your librata magna, your abundance of cloth and liveries, your purple habits belonging anciently to great senators, yea, to emperors; all these and more are but as so many flags and ensigns to call up those young students that fight in the valleys, to those hills and mountains of honour which you by your merits have now achieved.

Ꮓ

-"Neque enim virtutem amplectimur ipsam, Præmia si tollas.'"

But more serious scenes were at hand. On Buckingham's return from Spain, he found that the Lord Keeper and Cranfield the Lord Treasurer, created Earl of Middlesex, had been intriguing against him in his absence, and had been trying to supplant him in the King's favour. Having re-established his ascendency he vowed revenge, and trusting to the popularity he contrived to gather from breaking off the Spanish match, he resolved to call a parliament, and he managed to get a number of petitions ready to be presented to the two Houses, charging the Treasurer and Lord Keeper respectively with malversation in their offices. Williams, excessively alarmed, eagerly sought for a reconciliation with Buckingham, solicited the intercession of the Prince before parliament actually assembled, made his submission in person to the haughty chief, and received this cold yet consolatory answer, "I will not seek your ruin, though I shall cease to study your fortune."

The meeting of parliament was postponed for a week, by the sudden death of the Duke of Lennox, the Lord Steward. As the royal procession was about to move from Whitehall to the

z On which Jekyll made the following epigram:

"The serjeants are a grateful race,

Their dress and speeches show it,

Their purple robes from Tyre we trace,
Their arguments go to it."

A.D. 1624.

HIS SPEECH TO THE TWO HOUSES.

173

House of Peers, "The King looked round and missed him," says Bishop Hacket: "he was absent indeed; absent from the body, and present with God." The Lord Keeper preached his funeral sermon to the admiration of the Court, from the text, Zabud, the son of Nathan, was principal officer, and the King's friend."

66

" a

Feb. 1624.

At last on the 19th of February, 1624, the King, seated on his throne, delivered a long speech to the two Houses, explaining to them what had happened during the two years when there had been no parliament, particularly respecting the Palatinate and his son's marriage,-desiring them, in the words of St. Paul, to "beware of genealogies and curious questions, and not to let any stir them up to law questions, debates, quirks, tricks, and jerks."

b

According to the usage of the age, the Lord Keeper ought to have followed in the same strain; but he thus excused himself: "A Lacedemonian being invited to hear a man that could counterfeit very well the notes of a nightingale, put him off with these words, aurns nкovoa, I have heard the nightingale herself. And why should you be troubled with the croaking of a Chancellor that have heard the loving expressions of a most eloquent King? And indeed, for me to gloss upon his Majesty's speech were nothing else than it is in the Satyr, Annulum aureum ferreis stellis ferruminare, to enamel a ring of pure gold with stars of iron. I know his Majesty's grave and weighty sentences have left, as Eschines's orations were wont to do, To KεYTρov, a kind of freck or sting in the hearts and minds of all the hearers. It is not fit that, with my rude fumbling, I should unsettle or discompose his elegancies. For, as Pliny observes of Nerva, that when he had adopted the Emperor Trajan, he was taken away forthwith, and never did any public act after it, ne post illud divinum et immortale factum aliquid mortale faceret, lest, after so transcendent and divine an act, he should commit any thing might relish of mortality so it is fit that the judicious ears of these noble hearers be no further troubled this day, nequid post illud divinum et immortale dictum mortale audirent." He therefore confined himself to desiring the Commons to retire and choose a Speaker.c

a 1 Kings, iv. 5. This union of duties reminds me of a question put to Mr. Justice Buller, who used often to sit for Lord Chancellor Thurlow: "When do you preach for the Archbishop of Canterbury?"-Thurlow

used to say, "Buller knows no more of equity than a horse, but he gets through the causes, and I hear no more of them."

b 1 Parl. Hist. 1373.

c 1 Parl. Hist. 1378. Hacket, i. 175.

Serjeant Crewe being presented as Speaker on a subsequent day, and having disqualified himself, the Lord Keeper said "His Majesty doth observe that in you, which Gorgias the philosopher did in Plato, quod in oratoribus irridendis ipse esse

"d

orator summus videbatur."

The Speaker then delivered a very long speech to the King, and the Lord Keeper, after having conferred a quarter of an hour with his Majesty, answered it at equal length, saying, among many things equally fine, "You have heard his Majesty's simile touching a skilful horseman, which in Zechariah is God's simile. Kings are like riders; the commonwealth is the horse, and the law is the bridle, which must be held always with a sure hand, not always with a hard hand; but aliquando remittit ferire eques, non amittat habenas. Yet if Hagar grow insolent, cast out the bondswoman and her son;' his Majesty's resolution is, that the son of the bondswoman shall never inherit with the son of the free.' He concludes with a compliment to Buckingham, the Lord High Admiral, whom he feared much more than him he so profanely likened to the Divinity. "The wooden walls of this kingdom, the navy, are truly his Majesty's special care; and as the carver who beautified Diana's temple, though it was at the costs of other men, yet was allowed in divers places to stamp his own name, so it cannot be denied but that noble Lord who has now spent seven years' study, and has become a master in that art, may grave his name upon his works, yet a fitting distance from his master's." e

The petitions against the Lord Keeper as well as against the Lord Treasurer were presented; but the former by the great zeal he displayed both in a committee and in the full House in supporting Buckingham about the negotiations with Spain, earned and received forgiveness,--although a suspicion of his fidelity remained which led to his dismissal early in the next reign. Middlesex being more stubborn, and foolishly trusting in his own innocence, was made a present victim to the resentment of the favourite.

He was impeached on charges of peculation and corruption,' which were very imperfectly established, and he was not allowed the benefit of counsel, although several eminent lawyers, members of the House of Commons, conducted the

d "Swift for the ANCIENTS has reason'd so well,

'Tis apparent from hence that the MoDERNS excel."

e 1 Parl. Hist. 1379.

f 2 St. Tr. 1184. 1245.