IX. 2. to Bacon. But the Puritans are deaf. 1614. Oct. 11. Dec. They fear the King even more than the Roman League. They will not give. Unable to procure grants from Parliament, James tries to raise money by a benevolence; when the lords, the bishops and archbishops, come to his aid, bringing cups, rings, and golden angels into the Jewel House of the Tower. All mayors of towns are ordered to receive such gifts as may be offered. No rate is laid; no one is forced to give; at least, so say the officers of the Crown. In loyal shires persuasion may be used to swell the lists; but where the magistrates are not loyal, the benevolence flags. Many of the Puritans, all the Papists, close their hands; those distrusting the court; these wishing well to the foe. The benevolence fares best in the Protestant shires; worst in the Catholic shires. Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Herts, Berks, Essex, and Norfolk yield an army of subscribers. Sussex sends up only three; Durham, Cumberland, Westmoreland, not one. Now, it is clear that those who oppose a Parliamentary vote may fairly decline to make a free gift. But Oliver St. John, Black Oliver his contemporaries call him from his bilious temper and dark complexion, is not content merely to decline. A man of a stormy and yet slavish spirit, he must denounce this measure of the government by voice and pen. He will not let the people give. In a public letter to the Mayor of Marlborough he declares that the King, in asking his people for a free gift of money, is violating his oath, committing a perjury more gross than that for which more than one English monarch has lost his crown! 3. It is impossible for the Privy Council to overlook such 3. Council Reg., Nov. 19, 25, Dec. 4, 9, 1614, Feb. 3, May 31, 1615; Chamberlain to Carleton, Jan. 5, Feb. 9, 1615, S. P. O.; Council to James, Feb. 8, 1615, S. P. O.; Add. MSS. 19, 402. CASE OF OLIVER ST. JOHN. 187 1614. Dec. a contempt. The lawfulness of a Benevolence may be open IX. 3. to debate; no true Englishman can doubt that St. John's letter is in the highest degree scandalous to the King, and in the highest degree injurious to the national force. Lord Campbell (who confounds this Oliver St. John with the famous Lord Chief Justice of the Commonwealth, now a boy of sixteen!) appears to regard St. John as an earlier Hampden. A closer reading of the time would show that he was one of those loud and lying politicians who are the disgrace of every cause. Instead of being the Hampden, Black Oliver was the O'Brien or the O'Connor of his time; though he had neither Smith O'Brien's abilities nor Feargus O'Connor's dash. When the Marlborough bully is cited into the Star Chamber, Coke condemns him to five thousand pounds fine and imprisonment for life. Yet even the Tower, which so often elevates a fool into a martyr, fails to make St. John appear, even to the undiscerning mob, either a wise or a brave man. When the gate of his cell creaks on its hinge he begins to whine and cry. He repents his sally, recants his words. He goes on his knees, he pledges his future fame. He begs, fawns, groans to be let out. Even those who make an idol of every one barred in the Tower turn from this pusillanimous and crouching prisoner in disgust. 4. One of St. John's letters to the King is so amazingly abject as to constitute a curiosity in literature. In England we are not used to such a style of prison supplication, for the men who go wrong generally have the merit of going wrong in good faith, and when called to the martyr's crown wear it as a crown. It may be well to give a passage from this document (now 4. Add. MSS. 19, 402, fol. 62. IX. 4. for the first time printed), that the world may note, under his own seal, what kind of hero this Oliver St. John is, whom Lord Campbell mistakes for the great Chief Justice! 1614. Dec. OLIVER ST. JOHN TO THE KING. Most High and Mighty King, my alone virtually and rightfully dread Lord and Sovereign (after God my Maker and my Saviour Jesus Christ), my hearty chief joy, love, slave, and delight! In all humbleness of soul and spirit showeth unto your sacred Majesty your poor distressed subject and faithful servant, sometimes long close prisoner in the Tower of London; that whereas it graciously pleased your said Majesty, on humble submission and petition, to consider and commiserate the lamentable condition of the poor petitioner, censured in the Star Chamber for a letter written to the Mayor of Marlborough in October 1614, and therewith showed your princely and Royal heart so moved to mercy, that as the then Lord Chancellor said you had out of your admirable and more than kingly benignity and bounty so remitted the same that I had not any more to starve, although my fine, together with my submission, remained on record. . . . But my great and brain-sick offence against your Most Excellent Majesty, my right dear Sovereign (for which phrase at your Highness's feet, my broken heart again and again most humbly and instantly asketh your most gracious pardon), forbidding me your awful presence. . . on my bended knees, in all humility of heart and spirit, [I] beseech of your great, imperial, and sacred Majesty, first gracious remission and pardon, both of the fault and pain, as also, most gracious King and my dearest liege lord, that you will further be graciously CASE OF OLIVER ST. JOHN. 189 pleased to show your most admirable goodness and mercy (if it may stand with due order of state policy) in commanding a removal or deleator of the whole record thereof; that so great an ignominy remain not on the name of him who, having been now received your Majesty's sworn servant, is still resolved ever to receive therein that fatal arrow in his breast (with loyal Hugo de St. Clara) than once admit into his heart the least disloyal thought against your sacred person, dignity, or fame; the very least of us whoso shall seek to impeach, let God from Heaven shoot sharp arrows into his heart, that all the King's enemies may fall before him. So prayeth, from his inmost heart, Your Majesty's humble, faithful, and obedient vassal, OLIVER ST. JOHN. 5. Lord Campbell, who brands the conduct of Bacon in officially aiding to silence this impudent and whining demagogue, is more than usually infelicitous in the grounds of his charge. He says that Bacon in his speech against Oliver St. John strenuously defends the raising of money by benevolences. Now, he does no such thing. He never once touches the law of these free gifts. He proves, and proves most clearly, that the particular benevolence denounced by St. John to the Mayor of Marlborough as a violation of the King's oath, has no character of a forced loan. The question tried, if one may say so to a nobleman who has been a Lord Chief Justice and is now a Lord Chancellor, was not one of law, but one of factnot whether a benevolence was, in the reign of James the First, legal, but whether St. John had been guilty of a 5. State Trials, ii. 899. IX. 4. 1614. Dec. 1614. Dec. IX. 5. grievous contempt in publishing his letter to the Mayor. The trial of John Bates for refusing to pay the taxes levied by the Book of Rates was a trial of law; the trial of Oliver St. John for calling the King forsworn was a trial of fact. St. John was condemned, not for refusing to subscribe his money, but for publishing a letter in contempt of the Crown. 6. Pass to the case of Peacham: a case which Lord Campbell has taken less pains to understand than even that of St. John. "Fine and imprisonment," he writes, "having no effect in quelling the rising murmurs of the people, it was resolved to make a more dreadful example, and Peacham, a clergyman of Somersetshire, between sixty and seventy years of age, was selected for the victim. On breaking into his study, a sermon was there found, which he had never preached, nor intended to preach, nor shown to any human being, but which contained some passages encouraging the people to resist tyranny. He was immediately arrested, and a resolution was taken to prosecute him for high treason. But Mr. Attorney, who is alone responsible for this atrocious conduct, anticipated considerable difficulties both in law and in fact before the poor old parson could be subjected to a cruel and almost ignominious death." In every line of this passage there is error; indeed, the whole passage is an error. No murmurs arose in the country on account of St. John. No one at court ever dreamt of making Peacham a victim, for no one out of Somersetshire had ever heard his name. His study was not broken into for the purpose of finding treason in it. It was not a sermon that had been found. It is 6. Peacham's Examination, Aug. 31, 1615, S. P. O. 1 |