ht
about lessened the weight which a peer had drawn from his special and
unique position in the realm. Such a policy fell in with the needs of
his treasury. Not only could he degrade the peerage by lavishing its
honours, but he could degrade it yet more by putting them up to sale. Of
the forty-five lay peers whom he added to the Upper House during his
reign, a large number were created by sheer bargaining. Baronies were
sold to bidders at ten thousand pounds apiece. Ten nobles were created
in a batch. Peerages were given to the Scotch dependants whom James
brought with him, to Hume and Hay, and Bruce and Ramsay, as well as to
his favourites Carr and Villiers. Robartes, of Cornwall, a man who had
risen to great wealth through the Cornish mines, complained that he had
been forced to take a baronage, for which he had to pay ten thousand
pounds to a favourite's use.

[Sidenote: The dismissal of Coke.]

That this profuse creation of peers was more than the result of passing
embarrassment was shown by its continuance under James's successors.
Charles the First bestowed no less than fifty-six peerages; Charles the
Second forty-eight. But in its immediate application it was no doubt
little more than one of those financial shifts by which the king put off
from day to day the necessity of again facing the one body which could
permanently arrest his effort after despotic rule. There still however
remained a body whose tradition was strong enough, if not to arrest, at
any rate to check it. The lawyers had been subservient beyond all other
classes to the Crown. Their narrow pedantry bent slavishly then, as now,
before isolated precedents, while then, as now, their ignorance of
general history hindered them from realizing the conditions under which
these precedents had been framed, and to which they owed their very
varying value. It was thus that the judges had been brought to support
James in his case of the Post-Nati or in the levy of impositions. But
beyond precedents even the judges refused to go. They had done their
best in a case that came before them to restrict the jurisdiction of the
ecclesiastical courts within legal and definite bounds, and their effort
at once brought down on them the wrath of the king. All that affected
the spiritual jurisdiction affected, he said, his prerogative; and
whenever any case which affected his prerogative came before a court of
justice he asserted that the king possessed an inherent right to