THE KING'S IDEA OF THE ROYAL PREROGATIVE. WHEN James asserted that a king is above the laws, he did not understand this in the popular sense; nor was he the inventor or the reviver of similar doctrines. In all his mysterious flights on the nature of "The Prerogative Royal," James only maintained what Elizabeth and all the Tudors had, as jealously, but more energetically exercised.* Elizabeth left to her successor the royal prerogative strained to its highest pitch, with no means to support a throne which in the succeeding reign was found to be baseless. The king employed the style of absolute power, and, as Harris says, "entertained notions of his prerogative amazingly great, and bordering on impiety." It never occurred to his calumniators, who are always writing, without throwing themselves back into the age of their inquiries, that all the political reveries, the abstract notions, and the metaphysical fancies of James I. arose from his studious desire of being an English sovereign, according to the English constitution-for from thence he derived those very ideas. THE LAWYERS' IDEA OF THE ROYAL PREROGATIVE. THE truth is, that lawyers, in their anxiety to define, or to defend the shadowy limits of the royal prerogative, had contrived some strange and clumsy fictions to describe its powers; their flatteries of the imaginary being, whom they called the sovereign, are more monstrous than all the harmless abstractions of James I. They describe an English sovereign as a mysterious being, invested with absolute perfection, and a fabulous immortality, whose person was inviolable by its sacredness. A king of England is not subject to death, since the sovereign is a * In Sir Symund D'Ewes's "Journals of the Parliament," and in Townshend's "Historical Collections," we trace in some degree Elizabeth's arbitrary power concealed in her prerogative, which she always considered as the dissolving charm in the magical circle of our constitution. But I possess two letters of the French ambassador to Charles IX., written from our court in her reign; who, by means of his secret intercourse with those about her person, details a curious narrative of a royal interview granted to some deputies of the parliament, at that moment refractory, strongly depicting the exalted notions this great sovereign entertained of the prerogative, and which she asserted in stamping her foot. corporation, expressed by the awful plural the OUR and the WE. His majesty is always of full age, though in infancy; and so unlike mortality, the king can do no wrong. Such his ubiquity, that he acts at the same moment in different places; and such the force of his testimony, that whatever the sovereign declares to have passed in his presence, becomes instantly a perpetual record; he serves for his own witness, by the simple subscription of Teste me ipso; and he is so absolute in power, beyond the laws, that he quashes them by his negative voice.* Such was the origin of the theoretical prerogative of an ideal sovereign which James I. had formed: it was a mere curious abstraction of the schools in the spirit of the age, which was perpetually referring to the mysteries of state and the secrets of empires, and not a principle he was practising to the detriment of the subject. James I. while he held for his first principle that a sovereign is only accountable to God for the sins of his government, an harmless and even a noble principle in a religious prince, at various times acknowledged that "a king is ordained for procuring the prosperity of his people." In his speech, 1603, he says, "If you be rich I cannot be poor; if you be happy I cannot but be fortunate. My worldly felicity consists in your prosperity. And that I am a servant is most true, as I am a head and governour of all the people in my dominions. If we take the people as one body, then as the head is ordained for the body and not the body for the head, so must a righteous king know himself to be ordained for his people, and not his people for him.” The truth is always concealed by those writers who are cloaking their antipathy against monarchy, in their declamations against the writings of James I. Authors, who are so often influenced by the opinions of their age, have the melancholy privilege of perpetuating them, and of being cited as authorities for those very opinions, however erroneous. At this time the true principles of popular liberty, hidden *Such are the descriptions of the British sovereign, to be found in Cowell's curious book, entitled "The Interpreter." The reader may further trace the modern genius of Blackstone, with an awful reverence, dignifying the venerable nonsense--and the commentator on Blackstone sometimes labouring to explain the explanations of his master; so obscure, so abstract, and so delicate is the phantom which our ancient lawyers conjured up, and which the moderns cannot lay. in the constitution, were yet obscure and contested; involved in contradiction, in assertion and recantation ;* and they have been established as much by the blood as by the ink of our patriots. Some noble spirits in the Commons were then struggling to fix the vacillating principles of our government; but often their private passions were infused into their public feelings; James, who was apt to imagine that these individuals were instigated by a personal enmity in aiming at his mysterious prerogative, and at the same time found their rivals with equal weight opposing the novel opinions, retreated still farther into the depths and arcana of the constitution. Modern writers have viewed the political fancies of this monarch through optical instruments not invented in his days. When Sir Edward Coke declared that the king's royal prerogative being unlimited and undefined, "was a great overgrown monster;" and, on one occasion, when Coke said before the king, that "his Majesty was defended by the laws," -James, in anger, told him he spoke foolishly, and he said he was not defended by the laws, but by God (alluding to his “divine right"); and sharply reprimanded him for having: spoken irreverently of Sir Thomas Crompton, a civilian; asserting, that Crompton was as good a man as Coke. The fact is, there then existed a rivalry between the civil and the · common lawyers. Coke declared that the common law of England was in imminent danger of being perverted; that law which he has enthusiastically described as the perfection of all sense and experience. Coke was strenuously opposed by Lord Bacon and by the civilians, and was at length committed to the Tower (according to a MS. letter of the day, for the cause is obscure in our history), "charged with speaking so in parliament as tended to stir up the subjects' hearts against their sovereign."+ Yet in all this we must not وو * Cowell, equally learned and honest, involved himself in contradictory positions, and was alike prosecuted by the King and the Commons, on cpposite principles. The overbearing Coke seems to have aimed at his life, which the lenity of James saved. His work is a testimony of the unsettled principles of liberty at that time; Cowell was compelled to appeal to one: part of his book to save himself from the other. The following anecdotes of Lord Chief Justice Coke have not been published. They are extracts from manuscript letters of the times on that occasion, at first, the patriot did not conduct himself with the firmness of a great spirit. Nov. 19, 1616. "The thunderbolt hath fallen on the Lord Coke, which hath overthrown him from the very roots. The supersedeas was carried to him by Sir regard James as the despot he is represented: he acted as Elizabeth would have acted, for the sacredness of his own person, and the integrity of the constitution. In the same manuscript letter I find that, when at Theobalds, the king, with his usual openness, was discoursing how he designed to govern; and as he would sometimes, like the wits of all nations and times, compress an argument into a play on words, -the king said, "I will govern according to the good of the common-weal, but not according to the common-will!” George Coppin, who, at the presenting of it, received it with dejection and tears. Tremor et successio non cadunt in fortem et constantem. I send you a distich on the Lord Coke Jus condere Cocus potuit, sed condere jure Non potuit; potuit condere jura cocis." It happened that the name of Coke, or rather Cook, admitted of being punned on, both in Latin and in English: for he was lodged in the Tower, in a room that had once been a kitchen, and as soon as he arrived, one had written on the door, which he read at his entrance "This room has long wanted a Cook." "The Prince interceding lately for Edward Coke, his Majesty answered, He knew no such man.' When the Prince interceded by the name of Mr. Coke, his Majesty still answered, 'He knew none of that name neither; but he knew there was one Captain Coke, the leader of the faction in parliament.' In another letter, Coke appears with greater dignity. When Lord Arundel was sent by the king to Coke, a prisoner in the Tower, to inform him that his Majesty would allow him to consult with eight of the best learned in the law to advise him for his cause, Coke thanked the king, but he knew himself to be accounted to have as much skill in the law as any man in England, and therefore needed no such help, nor feared to be judged by the law. He knew his Majesty might easily find, in such a one as he, whereby to take away his head; but for this he feared not what could be said. "I have heard you affirm," said Lord Arundel, "that by law, he that should go about to withdraw the subjects' hearts from their king was a traitor." Sir Edward answered, "That he held him an arch-traitor." James I. said of Coke, "That he had so many shifts that, throw him where you would, he still fell upon his legs." This affair ended with putting Sir Edward Coke on his knees before the council-table, with an order to retire to a private life, to correct his book of Reports, and occasionally to consult the king himself. This part of Coke's history is fully opened in Mr. Alexander Chalmers's "Biographical Dictionary." THE KING'S ELEVATED CONCEPTION OF THE KINGLY CHARACTER. BUT what were the real thoughts and feelings of this presumed despot concerning the duties of a sovereign? His Platonic conceptions inspired the most exalted feelings; but his gentle nature never led to one act of unfeeling despotism. His sceptre was wreathed with the roses of his fancy: the iron of arbitrary power only struck into the heart in the succeeding reign. James only menaced with an abstract notion; or, in anger, with his own hand would tear out a protestation from the journals of the Commons: and, when he considered a man as past forgiveness, he condemned him to a slight imprisonment; or removed him to a distant employment; or, if an author, like Coke and Cowell, sent him into retirement to correct his works. In a great court of judicature, when the interference of the royal authority was ardently solicited, the magnanimous monarch replied: : 66 Kings ruled by their laws, as God did by the laws of nature; and ought as rarely to put in use their supreme authority as God does his power of working miracles." Notwithstanding his abstract principles, his knowledge and reflection showed him that there is a crisis in monarchies and a period in empires; and in discriminating between a king and a tyrant, he tells the prince "A tyranne's miserable and infamous life armeth in end his own subjects to become his burreaux; and although this rebellion be ever unlawful on their part, yet is the world so wearied of him, that his fall is little meaned (minded) by the rest of his subiects, and smiled at by his neighbours." And he desires that the prince, his son, should so perform his royal duties, that, "In case ye fall in the highway, yet it should be with the honourable report and just regret of all honest men." In the dedicatory sonnet to Prince Henry of the "Basilicon Doron," in verses not without elevation, James admonishes the prince to Represse the proud, maintaining aye the right; Who guards the godly, plaguing the prophane. The poems of James I. are the versifications of a man of learning and meditation. Such an one could not fail of pro |