ower over him, when the concerns of his
Church stood in the way: He was a gentle Master, and was very easy to
all who came near him: yet he was not so apt to pardon, as one ought
to be, that is the Vicegerent of that God, who is slow to anger, and
ready to forgive: He had no personal Vices but of one sort: He was
still wandring from one Amour to another, yet he had a real sense of
Sin, and was ashamed of it: But Priests know how to engage Princes
more entirely into their interests, by making them compound for their
Sins, by a great zeal for Holy Church, as they call it. In a word, if
it had not been for his Popery, he would have been, if not a great
yet a good Prince. By what I once knew of him, and by what I saw him
afterwards carried to, I grew more confirmed in the very bad opinion,
which I was always apt to have, of the Intrigues of the Popish Clergy,
and of the Confessors of Kings: He was undone by them, and was their
Martyr, so that they ought to bear the chief load of all the errors
of his inglorious Reign, and of its fatal Catastrophe. He had the
Funeral which he himself had desired, private, and without any sort of
Ceremony.

NOTES

1.

The History of Great Britain, Being the Life and Reign of King James
The First, Relating To what passed from his first Accesse to the
Crown, till his Death. By Arthur Wilson, Esq. London, 1653. (pp.
289-90.)

Arthur Wilson (1595-1652) was a gentleman-in-waiting to Robert
Devereux, third Earl of Essex, during James's reign, and was
afterwards in the service of Robert Rich, second Earl of Essex. The
_History_ was written towards the end of his life, and published the
year after his death. He was the author also of an autobiography,
_Observations of God's Providence in the Tract of my Life_ (first
printed in Francis Peck's _Desiderata Curiosa_, 1735, Lib. XII, pp.
6-34), and of three plays, _The Swisser_ (performed at Blackfriars,
1633, first printed in 1904, ed. Albert Feuillerat, from the MS.
in the British Museum), _The Corporall_ (performed, 1633, but not
extant), and _The Inconstant Lady_ (first printed in 1814, ed. Philip
Bliss, from the MS. in the Bodleian Library). The three plays were
entered in the Registers of the Stationers' Company, September 4,
1646, and September 9, 1653. But nothing he wrote appears to have been
published during his life.

Page 2, l. 24. _Peace begot Plenty_. An adaptation of the wellknown
saying which Puttenham in his _Arte of Engli