1608. Νον.

VIII. 4. to be known in the days of James. Charles the First gave a new aim to the Court, perverting the power created by Henry and fostered by Elizabeth as a defence of the national sentiment and national faith, into instruments of attack upon them; then, indeed, but not till then, the Court of Wales fell under public odium, and was swept away in the revolutionary storm. But the men who destroyed it under Charles were not the men who complained of it under James. The Crofts, Hoptons, Pakingtons, Sandys, Lees, Sheldons, Blounts, and Corbets who contested the authority of Lord Eure, were afterwards no less hot on the other side, voting and fighting against popular rights under Charles.

5. To Sir John, and to country gentlemen like Sir John, the Court of Wales is not so much a national grievance as a personal offence. It takes from his place and dignity; and he instructs his under-sheriff to refuse obedience to the precepts of such a Court. The gentry of Herefordshire are up in arms; but people in the southern and middle shires suspect, as proves to be the fact ere long, that these loud cries against the Court of Wales come mainly from a wish on the part of a few magistrates to get rid of a popular and successful local power which curbs for the common good their private feuds, and keeps a bright eye on the movements of their missionary priests. Many of those who cry loudest against the Court are said to find reasons for their discontent in the commands of their confessors. Most of them are Papists, open or concealed. Sir Herbert Crofts, long passing for a firm Protestant, has within the year avowed himself a convert to the

5. Eure to Salisbury, Jan. 26, 1608, S. P. O.; Eure to Pakington, Jan. 3, 1608, S. P. O.; Pakington to Eure, Jan. 17, 1608, S. P. O.; Council Reg., Nov. 2, 1613.

1608.

Nov.

Church of Rome. Sir John adheres to the Church, but VIII. 5. his near kinsman, Humphrey Pakington, is an active and dangerous recusant, whose name is constantly before the Privy Council. Lord Eure complains to Sir John. Sir John flatly refuses to obey his precepts. Eure writes to Lord Salisbury that his powers must be preserved in full, or he shall feel it a duty to resign his place.

6. Cecil consults Bacon, now become chief adviser of the Crown in all affairs of law, and finds his opinion on the jurisdiction of the Court of Wales, as in most things, the reverse of that pronounced by Coke. Coke is against Eure. A dry, stiff formalist, wanting the warmth of heart, the large round of sympathies which enable his illustrious rival at the bar to see into political questions with the eyes of a poet and a statesman, Coke can only treat a constituted court as a thing of words, dates, readings, and decisions; not as a living fact in close relation to other living facts, and having in itself the germs of growth and change. A point of law is taken for debate before the judges, when Bacon appears in opposition to Sir John and his friends, and pronounces that argument on The Jurisdiction of the Marches which is printed in his works. After this hearing a proclamation from the King announces the confirmed authority of the Court of Wales; but the magistrates of the four shires continue their opposition, and the case drags on for nine or ten years, until these magistrates drop the agitation in presence of more solemn facts.

7. In no History of America, in no Life of Bacon, have I 1609. found one word to connect him with the plantation of that May 23.

6. Dom. Papers James the First, xxxvii. 53, 54, 56, S. P. O.; Bacon's Works, vii. 587; Proclamation for the Continuance of the Authority and Jurisdiction of the Presidencies of the North and of Wales [Nov. 1608]. 7. Virginia Charter Book, May 23, 1609, S. P. O.

VIII. 7. great Republic. Yet, like Raleigh and Delaware, he takes an active share in the labours, a conspicuous part in the sacrifices, through which the foundations of Virginia and the Carolinas are first laid.

1609.

May 23.

Like men of far less note, who have received far higher honours in America, Bacon pays his money into the great Company, and takes office in its management as one of the Council. To his other glories, therefore, must be added that of a Founder of New States.

8. The causes which lead Bacon, with most of his parliamentary and patriotic colleagues, to join the Virginia Company with person and purse, are the same causes which move him to fight for the Union and the Subsidies. The plantation of Virginia is a branch of the great contest with Spain.

England and Spain have long been rivals in plantation and discovery. Neither may claim for itself the wide continents of America by the happy exercise of native genius; for while a Genoese gave the south to Spain, a Venetian conferred the north on England. Frobisher and Gilbert followed in the wake of Cabot, though in a different spirit and working to another end. Inflamed by tales of the Incas' shining palaces, Frobisher went forth in search of mines and gold; Gilbert, who revived the spirit of the Great Discoverer, sailed to the far west and gallantly gave his life, not for the rewards of wealth and fame, but solely in the hope of extending English power and of converting souls to God. When he sank in the Golden Hind he left these tasks to his young half-brother,

8. Fernando Gorges' Brief Relation, 3, 10; Charters of Virginia, April 10, 1606, Mar. 9, 1607, May 23, 1609, S. P. O.

Sir Walter Raleigh, who lived to be the true Founder of VIII. 8. the United States.

Raleigh, trained to politics under the eyes of Elizabeth, saw that the battle-field of the two maritime powers lay in the waters and along the shores of the New World. Europe was peopled. But the prairie and the savannah, the forest and the lake of America were virgin fields, the homes of an expanding race, the seats of a mighty empire in the time to come. Who shall occupy this splendid scene? Shall the New World become mainly English or mainly Spanish? Shall the original type and seed of her institutions be a Free Press or a Holy Office? Such questions throb and thrill in the veins of Englishmen of every rank.

9. They answer with one voice. While the Queen lived and Raleigh was free to spend his genius and his fortune on the work of discovery and plantation, it never flagged. But when James came in, and, with his dread of heroism and adventure, flung the explorer of Guiana, the founder of Virginia, into the Tower, as a first step towards receiving the Spanish ambassador Velasco with proposals for a shameful peace, the old English spirit appeared to droop. Velasco for a time said little of Virginia, for the fires of the Armada and of Nieuport burned in many hearts; but Lerma, in his letters to the King, reserved an exclusive right of the Spanish crown, based on a Papal bull, to all the soil of the New World from Canada to Cape Horn. When his agents in London found their season they made this claim; when his admirals in the

9. Smith's History, 88, 90; Nova Britannia, 1609; Jourdan's Discovery of the Barmudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels, by Sir T. Gates, Sir G. Sommers, and Captain Newport, with divers others, 1610.

1609.

May 23.

VIII. 9. Gulf of Mexico felt their strength they chased the English from those seas as pirates. If the Spanish cruisers caught an English crew, they either slung them to the yard-arm or sent them prisoners to Spain.

1609. May 23.

7

Ruled by a corporation of adventurers, tormented by these Spanish cruisers, unprotected by the royal fleets, the settlement on the James River falls to grief. A man of genius, Captain John Smith, more than once snatches it from the jaws of death. But the planters fight among themselves, depose Smith from power, and send back nothing to the Company save miserable complaints and heaps of glittering dust. The colony is on the verge of failure, when a threat from Spain to descend on the Chesapeake shoots new life into the drooping cause. All generous spirits rush to the defence of Virginia. Bacon joins the Company with purse and voice. Montgomery, Pembroke, and Southampton, the noble friends of Shakespeare, join it. Nor is the Church less zealous. The ardent Abbott, the learned Hackluyt, lend their names. Money pours in. A fleet, commanded by Gates and Somers, sails from the Thames, to meet on its voyage at sea those singular and poetic storms and trials which add the Bermudas to our empire and The Tempest to our literature.

10. One hundred and seventy-five years after Walter Raleigh laid down his life in Palace Yard for America, his illustrious blood paid for by Gondomar in Spanish gold, the citizens of Carolina, framing for themselves a free constitution, remembered the man to whose genius they owed their existence as a state. They called the capital of their country Raleigh. The United States can also claim among

10. Statutes of North Carolina, c. xiv.