She died; and the kingdom passed to one who was, in his own opinion, the greatest master of king-craft that ever lived, but who was, in truth, one of those kings whom God seems to send for the express purpose of hastening revolutions.  Of all the enemies of liberty whom Britain has produced, he was at once the most harmless and the most provoking.  His office resembled that of the man who, in a Spanish bull-fight, goads the torpid savage to fury, by shaking a red rag in the air, and by now and then throwing a dart, sharp enough to sting, but too small to injure.  The policy of wise tyrants has always been to cover their violent acts with popular forms.  James was always obtruding his despotic theories on his subjects without the slightest necessity.  His foolish talk exasperated them infinitely more than forced loans or benevolences would have done.  Yet, in practice, no king ever held his prerogatives less tenaciously.  He neither gave way gracefully to the advancing spirit of liberty nor took vigorous measures to stop it, but retreated before it with ludicrous haste, blustering and insulting as he retreated.  The English people had been governed during near a hundred and fifty years by Princes who, whatever might be their frailties or their vices, had all possessed great force of character, and who, whether beloved or hated, had always been feared.  Now, at length, for the first time since the day when the sceptre of Henry the Fourth dropped from the hand of his lethargic grandson, England had a king whom she despised.

The follies and vices of the man increased the contempt which was produced by the feeble policy of the sovereign.  The indecorous gallantries of the Court, the habits of gross intoxication in which even the ladies indulged, were alone sufficient to disgust a people whose manners were beginning to be strongly tinctured with austerity.  But these were trifles.  Crimes of the most frightful kind had been discovered; others were suspected.  The strange story of the Gowries was not forgotten.  The ignominious fondness of the King for his minions, the perjuries, the sorceries, the poisonings, which his chief favourites had planned within the walls of his palace, the pardon which, in direct violation of his duty and of his word, he had granted to the mysterious threats of a murderer, made him an object of loathing to many of his subjects.  What opinion grave and moral persons residing at a distance from the Court entertained respecting him, we learn from Mrs. Hutchinson’s Memoirs.  England was no place, the seventeenth century no time, for Sporus and Locusta.

This was not all.  The most ridiculous weaknesses seemed to meet in the wretched Solomon of Whitehall, pedantry, buffoonery, garrulity, low curiosity, the most contemptible personal cowardice.  Nature and education had done their best to produce a finished specimen of all that a king ought not to be.  His awkward figure, his rolling eye, his rickety walk, his nervous tremblings, his slobbering mouth, his broad Scotch accent, were imperfections which might have been found in the best and greatest man.  Their effect, however, was to make James and his office objects of contempt, and to dissolve those associations which had been created by the noble bearing of preceding monarchs, and which were in themselves no inconsiderable fence to royalty.