“If you aim at a Scottish Presbytery, it agreeth as well with monarchy as God and the devil.  Then Jack, and Tom, and Will, and Dick, shall meet, and at their pleasure censure me and my council, and all our proceedings; then Will shall stand up and say, It must be thus; then Dick shall reply, Nay, marry, but we will have it thus.  And therefore here I must once more reiterate my former speech, Le Roy s’avisera. Stay, I pray you, for one seven years before you demand that of me, and if then you find me pursy and fat, I may hearken to you; for let that government once be up, I am sure I shall be kept in breath; then shall we all of us have work enough:  but, Dr. Reynolds, till you find that I grow lazy, let that alone.”

The king added,

“I will tell you a tale:—­Knox flattered the queen-regent of Scotland that she was supreme head of all the church, if she suppressed the popish prelates.  But how long, trow ye, did this continue?  Even so long, till, by her authority, the popish bishops were repressed, and he himself, and his adherents, were brought in and well settled.  Then, lo! they began to make small account of her authority, and took the cause into their own hands.”

This was a pointed political tale, appropriately told in the person of a monarch.

The king was never deficient in the force and quickness of his arguments.  Even Neale, the great historian of the Puritans, complaining that Dean Barlow has cut off some of the king’s speeches, is reluctantly compelled to tax himself with a high commendation of the monarch, who, he acknowledges, on one of the days of this conference, spoke against the corruptions of the church, and the practices of the prelates, insomuch that Dr. Andrews, then dean of the chapel, said that his majesty did that day wonderfully play the Puritan.[A] The king, indeed, was seriously inclined to an union of parties.  More than once he silenced the angry tongue of Bancroft, and tempered the zeal of others; and even commended when he could Dr. Reynolds, the chief of the Puritans; the king consented to the only two important articles that side suggested; a new catechism adapted to the people—­“Let the weak be informed and the wilful be punished,” said the king; and that new translation of the Bible which forms our present version.  “But,” added the king, “it must be without marginal notes, for the Geneva Bible is the worst for them, full of seditious conceits; Asa is censured for only deposing his mother for idolatry, and not killing her.”  Thus early the dark spirit of Machiavel had lighted on that of the ruthless Calvin.  The grievances of our first dissenters were futile—­their innovations interminable; and we discover the king’s notions, at the close of a proclamation issued after this conference:  “Such is the desultory levity of some people, that they are always languishing after change and novelty, insomuch that were they humoured in their inconstancy, they would expose the public management, and make the administration ridiculous.”  Such is the vigorous style of James the First in his proclamations; and such is the political truth, which will not die away with the conference at Hampton Court.