The Evolution of an Empire: A Brief Historical Sketch of England by Parmele, Mary Platt, 1843-1911

[Sidenote: Francis Bacon.]

England was great and glorious. The revolution, religious, social and political, had ploughed and harrowed the surface which had been fertilized with the "New Learning," and the harvest was rich. While all Europe was devastated by religious wars there arose in Protestant England such an era of peace and prosperity, with all the conditions of living so improved that the dreams of Sir Thomas More's "Utopia" seemed almost realized. The new culture was everywhere. England was garlanded with poetry, and lighted by genius, such as the world has not seen since, and may never see again. The name of Francis Bacon was sufficient to adorn an age, and that of Shakespeare alone, enough to illumine a century. Elizabeth did not create the glory of the "Elizabethan Age," but she did create the peace and social order from which it sprang.

If this Queen ever loved any one it was the Earl of Leicester, the man who sent his lovely wife, Amy Robsart, to a cruel death in the delusive hope of marrying a Queen. We are unwilling to harbor the suspicion that she was accessory to this deed; and yet we cannot forget that she was the daughter of Henry VIII.!--and sometimes wonder if the memory of a crime as black as Mary's haunted her sad old age, when sated with pleasures and triumphs, lovers no more whispering adulation in her ears, and mirrors banished from her presence, she silently waited for the end.

She died in the year 1603, and succumbing to the irony of fate, named the son of Mary Stuart--James VI. of Scotland--her successor.

CHAPTER VIII.

[Sidenote: House of Stuart, 1603-1714.]

The House of Stuart had peacefully reached the long coveted throne of England in the person of a most unkingly King. Gross in appearance and vulgar in manners, James had none of the royal attributes of his mother. A great deal of knowledge had been crammed into a very small mind. Conceited, vain, pedantic, headstrong, he set to work with the confidence of ignorance to carry out his undigested views upon all subjects, reversing at almost every point the policy of his great predecessor. Where she with supreme tact had loosened the screws so that the great authority vested in her might not press too heavily upon the nation, he tightened them. Where she bowed her imperious will to that of the Commons, this puny tyrant insolently defied it, and swelling with sense of his own greatness, claimed, "Divine right" for Kingship and demanded that his people should say "the King can do no wrong," "to question his authority is to question that of God." If he ardently supported the Church of England, it was because he was its head. The Catholic who would have turned the Church authority over again to the Pope, and the "Puritans" who resisted the "Popish practices" of the Reformed Church of England, were equally hateful to him, for one and the same reason; they were each aiming to diminish _his_ authority.

[Sidenote: First English Colony in New England]