home:  and besides the vain enterprises abroad, wherein it is thought that he consumed more treasure than all our victorious kings did in their several conquests; what causeless and cruel wars did he make upon his own nephew King James the First?  What laws and wills did he devise to cut off, and cut down those branches, which sprang from the same root that himself did?  And in the end (notwithstanding these his so many irreligious provisions) it pleased God to take away all his own, without increase; though, for themselves in their several kinds, all princes of eminent virtue.  For these words of Samuel to Agag King of the Amalekites, have been verified upon many others:  “As thy sword hath made other women childless, so shall thy mother be childless among other women.”  And that blood which the same King Henry affirmed, that the cold air of Scotland had frozen up in the North, God hath diffused by the sunshine of his grace:  from whence his Majesty now living, and long to live, is descended.  Of whom I may say it truly, “That if all the malice of the world were infused into one eye:  yet could it not discern in his life, even to this day, any one of these foul spots, by which the consciences of all the forenamed princes (in effect) have been defiled; nor any drop of that innocent blood on the sword of his justice, with which the most that fore-went him have stained both their hands and fame.”  And for this Crown of England; it may truly he avowed:  that he hath received it even from the hand of God, and hath stayed the time of putting it on, howsoever he were provoked to hasten it:  that he never took revenge of any man, that sought to put him beside it:  that he refused the assistance of Her enemies, that wore it long, with as great glory as ever princess did:  that his Majesty entered not by a breach, nor by blood; but by the ordinary gate, which his own right set open; and into which, by a general love and obedience, he was received.  And howsoever his Majesty’s preceding title to this Kingdom was preferred by many princes (witness the Treaty at Cambray in the year 1559) yet he never pleased to dispute it, during the life of that renowned lady his predecessor; no, notwithstanding the injury of not being declared heir, in all the time of her long reign.

Neither ought we to forget, or neglect our thankfulness to God for the uniting of the northern parts of Britain to the south, to wit, of Scotland to England, which though they were severed but by small brooks and banks, yet by reason of the long continued war, and the cruelties exercised upon each other, in the affections of the nations, they were infinitely severed.  This I say is not the least of God’s blessings which his Majesty hath brought with him unto this land:  no, put all our petty grievances together, and heap them up to their height, they will appear but as a molehill compared with the mountain of this concord.  And if all the historians since then have acknowledged the uniting of the Red Rose, and the White, for the