uence of the men of high rank to whom the King had
deferred on his first accession. This was generally the aim of the
great rulers of that century. This had been the principal end of the
policy of Philip II of Spain during his long political life: however
the Kings and Queens of France may have differed on other points, they
were all, both Henry III and Henry IV, Mary de' Medici while she was
regent, and Lewis XIII so soon as he succeeded to the exercise of
power, at one in this endeavour. James, who was a new sovereign in one
of his kingdoms, and almost always absent from the other, had more
difficulties in his way than other monarchs. Wherever it was possible
he proceeded with energy and rigour. People were astonished when they
reckoned up the number of considerable men who served him in high
offices, and were then deprived of them. He laboured incessantly to
make way for the impartial exercise of justice in the King's name
throughout Scotland, in spite of the privileges of the great Scottish
nobles as its administrators. In his ecclesiastical arrangements in
that country, he was fond of insisting on his personal wishes: in
cases of emergency indeed he made known that all the treasures of
India were not of so much value in his eyes as the observance of his
ordinances; and he threatened the opponents of the royal will with the
King's anger, to which he then gave unbridled indulgence.[388] As he
looked upon the Church of England as the best bulwark against the
influence of the Jesuits which he feared on the one side, and that of
the Puritans which he hated on the other, it was naturally his
foremost endeavour to fortify his power, and to unite the two kingdoms
with one another by the promotion and spread of the forms of that
Church. The essential motive of his system of colonisation in Ireland
was the wish to establish the Church, by the aid of which he designed
to subjugate or to suppress hostile elements. In England he imparted
to it a character still more clerical and removed from Presbyterianism
than that which had previously distinguished it: he wished it to be as
much withdrawn as possible from the action of civil legislation. But
in proportion as he supported himself on the Church he fell out with
the Parliament, in which aristocratic tendencies and sympathies with
popular rights and with Puritanism were blended with a feeling of
independence that was hateful to him. He once said that five hundred
kings were assem