of aristocracy rendered them despotically disposed, because the Scotch aristocracy had been the most lawless of mankind, so did they become attached to the Church of England because of the tyranny they had seen displayed by the Church of Scotland, the most illiberal ecclesiastical body, in those times, that men had ever seen, borne with, or suffered from.  James I. and his grandson Charles II. had their whole conduct colored, and dyed in the wool, too, by their recollections of the odious treatment to which they had been subjected by a harsh and intolerant clergy.  They had not the magnanimity to overlook, in the day of their power, what they had suffered in the day of their weakness.

James I. undoubtedly disliked his eldest son, and was jealous of him; but it is by no means clear that he killed him, or caused him to be killed.  He used to say of him, “What! will he bury me alive?” He ordered that the court should not go into mourning for Henry, a circumstance that makes in his favor, as murderers are apt to affect all kinds of hypocrisy in regard to their victims, and to weep in weeds very copiously.  Yet his conduct may have been a refinement of hypocrisy, and, though a coward in the common acceptation of the word, James had much of that peculiar kind of hardihood which enables its possessor to treat commonly received ideas with contempt.  His conduct in “The Great Oyer of Poisoning” was most extraordinary, it must be allowed, and is not reconcilable with innocence; but it does not follow that the guilt which the great criminals in that business could have established as against James related only to the death of Henry.  It bore harder upon the King than even that crime could have borne, and must have concerned his conduct in matters that are peculiarly shocking to the ears of Northern peoples, though Southern races have ears that are less delicate.  It was in Somerset’s power to explain James’s conduct respecting some things that puzzled his contemporaries, and which have continued to puzzle their descendants; but the explanation would have ruined the monarch in the estimation of even the most vicious portion of his subjects, and probably would have given an impetus to the growing power of the Puritans that might have led to their ascendency thirty years earlier than it came to pass in the reign of his son.  James was capable of almost any crime or baseness; but in the matter of poisoning his eldest son he is entitled to the Scotch verdict of Not Proven.

Whether James killed his son or not, it is certain that the Prince’s death was a matter of extreme importance.  Henry was one of those characters who are capable of giving history a twist that shall last forever.  He had a fondness for active life, was very partial to military pursuits, and was friendly to those opinions which the bigoted chiefs of Austria and Bavaria were soon to combine to suppress.  Henry would have come to the throne in 1625, had he lived, and there seems no reason to doubt that he