Although, thus early in the reign of Charles, a court insult was inflicted upon Sir Robert Cotton, after a fashion the extreme silliness of which rather serves to set off the intended malignity than to cloke it, only a few months passed before his advice was called for in presence of the Council Board, on an important question of home policy. The question raised was that of an alteration of the coinage. The Privy Council was divided in opinion. There was a desire for the advice of statesmen who were not at the Board, but who were known to have studied a subject beset with many difficulties. Among these, Sir Robert Cotton was consulted. He appeared at the Council Table on the 2nd of September, 1626, and we have a report of his speech to the Lords, which from several points of view is notable. |MS. Lansd., ff. 141–152. (B. M.)^[13]| |Council Registers, James I, vols. v and vi, passim. (C. O.)| But a preliminary word or two needs to be said on what may seem the singularity that a man who, in 1625, was fighting zealously beside the Parliamentary patriots, should, in 1626, be speaking at the Council Table as a quasi-councillor of the Crown.

It might be sufficient to point attention to the obvious difference between questions affecting the liberty of the subject, and questions of mere administration, were this the only occasion—or were it a fair sample of the only class of occasions—in which Cotton appears as an unofficial Councillor. But the fact is otherwise. And it is best to be explained, partly, by the unsettled character of party connection during the political strife of Charles’ reign, as well as long afterwards, and partly by peculiarities belonging to the man himself. |Life of Sir John Eliot, vol. i, p 468.| There are not many statesmen, even of that period, of whom it could be said as the able biographer of Sir John Eliot says of Sir Robert Cotton: ‘He acted warmly with Eliot and with the patriots in the first Parliament of Charles. At the opening of the third, he was tendering counsel to the King, of which the obsequious forms have yet left no impression unfavourable to his uprightness and honour.’ The result is unusual. How came it to pass?

Perhaps the preceding pages may have already suggested to the reader’s mind more than one possible and plausible answer to this question. Here it may suffice to say that while Sir Robert Cotton was plainly at one with the Parliamentarian leaders in the main points of their civil policy, he never went to the extreme lengths of the puritanic faith, either in things secular, or in matters pertaining to Religion. On some religious questions he differed from them widely. In secular matters, a tyrannic Parliament would have been as little to his liking as a despotic king. Neither friend nor enemy—Gondomar excepted—ever called him a Puritan (or pretended-Puritan) in his lifetime, any more than they would have called him a Republican. His ultimate divergence was not cloaked. It was no bar to the entire respect, or to the love and close fellowship, of men like Eliot, just because it was frankly avowed, and had no selfish aim. Cotton,—had he lived long enough,—would probably have ranged himself, at last, with the Cavaliers, rather than with the Roundheads. He would have had Falkland’s misgivings, and Falkland’s sorrow, but I think he would not have lacked Falkland’s self-devotion also.

And, in another point, he resembled Lord Falkland. Both would have advised Charles to yield much of so-called ‘prerogative.’ Neither of them would have bade him to yield a grain of true royal honour. In later years, some words which Cotton wrote,—in 1627,—for the King’s eye may well have come back painfully into Charles’ memory:—‘To expiate the passion of the People,’ said Sir Robert, ‘with sacrifice of any of His Majesty’s servants, I have ever found to be no less fatal to the Master than to the Minister, in the end.’

The question of the Coinage, on which he was called into Council in September 1626, had caused no small measure of discussion whilst James was still on the throne. |The Advice given by Sir R. Cotton on Mint Affairs.| Many merchants of London had raised the old and hacknied cry of complaint against an alleged ‘vast transportation of gold and silver from England’ to the Continent. Others said that the complaint, if not groundless, was misdirected. The following Minute of the Privy Council will shew how the question stood in that early stage. It was drawn up in November, 1618.

‘Being by Your Majesty’s commandment to take into our consideration the state of the Mint and to advise of the way or means how to bring bullion more plentifully into the Kingdom, and to be coined there, as also how to stop the great exportation of treasure out of the Realm,—a matter of which the State hath been jealous: For our better information and Your Majesty’s satisfaction we thought it fit first to know from the Office of your Mint what quantity of gold and silver hath been there coined in the last seven years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth and the seven years last past of Your Majesty. And we find that in the said seven years of the Queen there was coined in gold and silver of all sorts £948,713 sterling, whereas in the seven late years of Your Majesty’s reign there hath been coined of all sorts, in gold and silver, £1,603,998. So as, comparing the one with the other, there hath been coined of both species in the said seven years of Your Majesty’s reign £655,285 sterling, more than in the seven years aforesaid of the Queen, the difference being almost three parts to one. Next we required a certificate from the Goldsmiths of London of the Plate that hath been made in those years within the City of London; and it appeareth that there was made and stamped in their hall the last seven years of Queen Elizabeth of silver plate the worth of £22,187 more than in the seven later years of Your Majesty’s reign. But upon the whole matter we cannot find and do humbly certify the same unto Your Majesty as our opinion that there hath been of late any such vast transportation of gold and silver into France and the Low Countries as was supposed; neither that there is any such notorious diminution of treasure generally in the Kingdom—at the least of gold—since it is apparent that there hath been a far greater quantity in the total coined within these seven years last past than in the last seven years of the late Queen. Besides Your Majesty may be pleased to observe that the making of so much silver plate cannot be the principal cause of the decay of the Mint since there was more plate made in London [in] those last seven years of the Queen,—when there came more silver to be coined in the Mint,—than there hath been used of late years, when silver in the Mint hath been so scarce though Gold more plentiful.... In the mean time we do humbly offer ... that there is no necessity ... to raise your coin, either in the one kind or in the other. |Registers of Privy Council, as above, p. 46. (C. O.)| But rather that the same may draw with it many inconveniences; and because the noise thereof through the City of London and from thence to other parts of the Realm, as we understand, hath already done hurt and in some measure interrupted and distracted the course of general commerce, we think it very requisite ... that some signification be forthwith made from this Table time to raise your coins.’

The course thus recommended—and in the recommendation the Council seems to have been well nigh unanimous—was precisely the course James did not wish to take. The Council Books abound with proof how hard it was to dissuade the King from adopting this ‘intended project of enhancing the coin [i. e. by debasing the standard], though, as Cotton afterwards said at the Council Table, to do so would trench, both into the honour, the justice, and the profit’ [i. e. the real and ultimate profit] ‘of my royal Master very far.’

In his address at the Board, Sir Robert made an almost exhaustive examination of the history of the English Mint. He did it with much brevity and pith. His views about foreign trade are, of course, not free from the fallacies which were accepted as aphorisms by very nearly every statesman then living. But his advice on the immediate question at issue is marked by sound common sense, by insight and practical wisdom. |MS. Lansd., 811, ff. 148–152 (B. M.) [Compare the Report of Proceedings in the House of Commons, Feby. 1621. (Parl. Hist., vol. i, c. 1188–1194).]| His speech told, and he followed it up by framing, as Chairman of a Committee, (1) an Answer to the Propositions delivered by some Officers of the Mint; and (2) Certain General Rules collected concerning Money and Bullion out of the late Consultation at Court. Copies of both exist amongst the Harleian and Lansdowne MSS., and both, together with the Speech, are printed in the Posthuma (although not without some of the Editor’s characteristic inaccuracies).

The next question which it was Sir Robert’s task to discuss before the Privy Council was a much more momentous question than that of the Coinage. It was, potentially, both to Sovereign and to people, an issue of life or death.

In January, 1628 [N. S.], he delivered, at the Board, the substance of the remarkable Discourse which has been more than once printed under the title, ‘The Danger wherein this Kingdom now Standeth, and the Remedy.’ |Discourse on the Calling of a Parliament. 1628. Jany.| The courtliness of its tone no more detracts from its incisiveness of stroke, than a jewelled hilt would detract from the cleaving sweep of a Damascus blade, when wielded by well-knit sinews. It led instantly to the calling of the Parliament. |MS. Lansd., 254, ff. 258, seqq.| But neither its essential and true loyalty to the King, nor the opportune service which it rendered to the country was to make the fortunes of its author any exception to those which—sooner or later—befell every councillor of Charles the First, who, in substance if not in form, was wont to put Country before King.

In that third Parliament of Charles Sir Robert himself had no seat. In the Parliament which preceded it he sat for Old Sarum, having lost his seat for Huntingdonshire. But he continued to be the active ally and the influential councillor of the leaders of opposition to strained prerogatives. When the Parliament assailed Bishops Neile and Laud, the inculpated prelates, it is said, threw upon Cotton as much of their anger as they well could have done had he led the assault in person.

The opportunity was not very far to seek. |The ‘Proposition to bridle Parliaments.’ 1629. October.| Not long after the dissolution in March, 1629, of that Parliament of the assembling of which Sir Robert Cotton’s patriotic effort had been the immediate occasion, and to some of the effective blows of which he had helped to give vigour, some courtier or other brought to Charles’ hands a political tract, in manuscript, and told him that copies of it were in the possession of several statesmen. Those—with one exception—who were then named to the King were men wont to be held in greater regard in the country than at Court. The pamphlet bore for its title: ‘The Proposicion for Your Majesties Service ... to secure your Estate and to bridle the impertinencie of Parliaments.’

The consequences of this small incident were destined to prove of large moment. The earliest mention we have of it occurs in a letter written by the Archbishop of York—himself a Privy Councillor—to Sir Henry Vane, in November, 1629: ‘The Vice-Chancellor,’ says Archbishop Harsnet, ‘was sent to Sir Robert Cotton to seal up his library, and to bring himself before the Lords of the Council.’ |Domest. Corresp., Charles I, vol. cli, § 24. (R. H.)| In the words that follow the Archbishop is evidently speaking from what he had been told, not from his personal knowledge. ‘There was found,’ he proceeds to say, ‘in his custody a pestilential tractate which he had fostered as a child, containing a project how a Prince may make himself an absolute tyrant. |Ib.| This pernicious device he had communicated to divers Lords.’

Charles was presently in intense excitement about the matter. Its next stage cannot be better or more briefly told, than in the words which the King himself addressed to his assembled Councillors—in unusual array, for they were twenty-one in number—and afterwards caused to be entered upon the Council Book:

‘This day His Majestie, sitting in Counsell, was pleased to imparte to the whole Boarde the cause for which the |[Council Register, vol. v, p. 495.]| Erles of Clare, Somerset, and Bedforde, Sir Robert Cotton, and sundry other persons of inferior qualitie, had bene lately restrained and examined by a speciall Committee appointed by him for that purpose, which cause was this:—

‘His Majestie declared that there came to his handes, by meere accedent, the coppie of a certain “Discourse” or “The Proposicion” (which was then, by his commandement, read at the Boarde), pretended to be written “for His Majesties service,” and bearing this title—”The Proposicion for Your Majestie’s Service conteineth twoe partes: |Proceedings against Sir Robert Cotton in the Privy Council.| The one to secure your Estate, and to bridle the impertinencie of Parlements; the other to encrease Your Majestie’s Revenue much more then it is.”

‘Now the meanes propounded in this Discourse for the effecting thereof are such as are fitter to be practised in a Turkish State then amongst Christians, being contrarie to the justice and mildnesse of His Majestie’s Government, and the synceritie of his intentions, and therefore cannot be otherwise taken then for a most scandalous invention, proceding from a pernitious dessein, both against His Majestie and the State, which, notwithstanding, the aforesaid persons had not onely read—and concealed the same from His Majestie and his Counsell—but also communicated and divulged it to others.

‘Whereupon His Majestie did farther declare that it is his pleasure that the aforesaid three Erles, and Sir Robert Cotton, shall answere this their offense in the Court of Star Chamber, to which ende they had alreadie bene summoned, and that now they shoulde be discharged and freed from their restraint and permitted to retourne to their severall houses, to the ende that they mighte have the better meanes to prepare themselves for their answere and defense.

‘And, lastly, he commanded that this his pleasure should be signified by the bearer unto them, who were then attending without,—having, for that purpose, bene sent for. His Majestie, having given this Order and direccion, rose from the Boarde, and when he was gone, the three Erles were called in severally and the Lorde Keeper signified to each of them His Majestie’s pleasure in that behalfe; shewing them, with all, how gratiously he had bene pleased to deale with them, both in the maner of the restraint, which was only during the time of the examination of the cause (a thing usuall and requisite specially in cases of that consequence), and in that they had bene committed to the custodie of eminent and honorable persons by whom they were treated according to their qualities; and lykewise in the discharge of them now from their restraint that they may have the better convenience and meanes to prepare themselves for the defense of their cause in that legall coursse by which His Majestie had thought fit to call them to an account and tryall.

‘The like was also signified by his Lordship to Sir Robert Cotton, who was further tolde that although it was His Majestie’s pleasure that his Studies’ [meaning, that is, his Library and Museum,] ‘shoulde, as yett, remaine shut up, yet he might enter into them and take such writtings wherof he shoulde have use, provided that he did it in the presence of a Clerke of the Counsell; |Council Register, Chas. I, vol. v, ff. 495, 496 (C. O.).| and whereas the Clerke attending hath the keyes of two of his Studies he might put a seconde lock on either of them so that neither dores might be opened, but by him and the said Clerke both together.’

A reader who now looks back on this singular transaction—and who has therefore the advantage of looking at it by the stern-lights of history,—will be likely to believe that the chief offence of the pamphlet lay (in a certain sense,) in its truth. |Character and Authorship of the ‘Proposition to bridle Parliaments.’| It was the much too frank exposition of a policy which clung very close to Charles’ heart, though he could ill afford—in 1629—to have it openly avowed. The undeniable fact that this ‘Proposition for Your Majesty’s Service’ was indeed fitter for the latitude of Constantinople, than for that of London, sounds but awkwardly on the royal lips, when connected with an assertion (in the same breath,) of the ‘justice and mildness’ of the King’s own government. The indictment which his Parliament brought against Charles,—and which History has endorsed,—could hardly be packed into briefer words than those which the King himself used that day at the Council Board. His notions of kingly rule, like his father’s, were in truth much better suited for the government of Turkey than for the government of England.

Sir Robert Cotton, however, had no more to do with the authorship of the ‘Proposition’ than had Charles himself. The author was Sir Robert Dudley. The time of its composition was at least fifteen years before the date of the imprisonment of Cotton and his companions in disfavour. The place of its birth was Florence. It cannot even be proved that Cotton had any personal knowledge of the fact that the offensive tract had been found in his own library. He had recently read it, indeed,—in common with Bedford, Clare, and Oliver Saint-John, and no doubt, like them, had read it with many surging thoughts,—but he had read it in a recent transcript, written by a clerk.

Of Robert Dudley’s motive in writing his ‘Proposition’ we have also no proof. But the presumptive and internal evidence is so strong, as to make proof almost superfluous. The tract bears witness, between the lines, that it was composed to win the favour—or at least to arrest the despoiling hand—of King James. And there is hardly a suggestion in it which might not be backed by some parallel passage in the writings, or the speeches, of James himself, when expatiating on kingly prerogatives in some mood of mind a little more foolish than usual, or when striving—only too successfully—to train up his successor to follow in his own path. It seems like an irony of Fate to find that (in all probability,—for here again the proof is not quite clinching,) the King’s informer, against Cotton and the other offenders, was Wentworth, who, not many years after 1629, was to sum up views of policy much akin to Robert Dudley’s in the memorable word ‘Thorough.’

Cotton himself believed that this apparently trivial incident cost him his life. He said not long before his death,—‘It has killed me.’ We shall probably never know whether Dudley’s tract had anything to do with bringing about in the mind of Wentworth that eventful change of political views which is known to have passed over it (about the time when the incriminated manuscript was sent so eagerly from hand to hand), and which, in a few years more, was to work his death also. But one can hardly avoid, in passing, a momentary thought on the curious possibility that a pamphlet, written at Florence, in the hope that it might save, for the writer, some wreck or remnant of a despoiled inheritance,—may have proved fatal alike to the close political friend of Eliot, and to the close political friend of Laud. A tract of such potency may well claim a few words about its contents. They bear in every line the stamp of mental energy, and also the stamp of moral recklessness.

Sir Robert Dudley knew well enough that a rooted dislike of Parliaments was, in James’s mind, combined with a besetting dread of them. He knew that, between hate and fear, a Parliament was like a nightmare, for ever crouching behind the royal pillow. It is the purpose of his tract to tell the King how to drive the nightmare away. He recommends, amongst other and minor measures, the erection of a strong fortress in all the chief towns of the Kingdom, to be manned by trained bands, and to be placed in such situations as shall command the high roads. In addition to these measures, your Majesty, he says, must set up a strict system of passports, for travellers. Nor is all this merely a new and more elaborate version of the old story of belling the cat. The writer of this counsel knows, perfectly, that already the King’s poverty is the Parliament’s power; and that to build fortresses and array soldiers needs a full purse, not an exhausted one. But he says,—as Wentworth said after him,—that soldiers can be set to work upon good hopes of the pay to come. A resolute King, he thinks, with resolute troops at his back, could do in England what had so often been done in Italy. He could tithe men’s estates. He could make salt and some other things of prime necessity a royal monopoly. He could set a tariff on dignities of honour. He could establish sumptuary laws, such as should make the vanity and jealousy of thriving nobodies—men with full pockets and blank pedigrees—willing contributors to the King’s Exchequer. He could buy up improvident leases of Crown lands, and resell them at a large profit.

The shortsightedness of such advice as this is now obvious enough. But advice quite as shortsighted and far less plausibly couched,—for the eyes that were to read it,—had been fruitful of result, when offered to Stuarts. Nor was the man who now offered it to Charles a mere clever talker. He was a man who had already acquitted himself with conspicuous ability in several spheres of action, lying widely apart.

Sir Robert Dudley possessed many splendid accomplishments. He had been educated by the same ripe scholar who afterwards became tutor to Prince Henry. At the age of one and twenty, he had put himself into the lists with Ralegh, as navigator and discoverer, by heading an expedition to the Oronoco. |The career of Sir Robert Dudley.| In the course of that expedition he had captured nine Spanish ships; one of them of twice his own strength. At three and twenty, he had fought, side by side with Ralegh, in the naval battle in the bay of Cadiz; had handled his ship with an ability which won the praise of his rivals; and had then fought, in the land attack, side by side with Essex. When his own unbridled passions and resentments gave a fatal opening for the equally unbridled cupidity of James, and of James’s courtiers, to despoil him of a great estate, and to drive him into exile, he showed that he knew how to snatch honour out of defeat. He laid the foundation of a new English trade with Italy and created—it is not saying too much—the maritime prosperity of Leghorn. He drained vast Italian marshes, and made corn to grow where corn had never grown before. The man who, in early life, had won fame at once as a navigator full of pluck and resource, and as an able soldier by sea and land:—and who, on attaining full manhood, had shown himself both a clever diplomatist and a great engineer;—did not go to his foreign grave before he had won literary fame with the pen, and scientific fame at the furnace of the chemist. He had, in its fullest measure, the versatility and the energy of his race. English family biography, I suppose, can scarcely show a stranger group of lives than the successive lives of the last four Dudleys of that line:—Edmund, the Minister of Henry VII, and author of The Tree of the Commonwealth; Northumberland, the subduer of Edward VI, and the murderer of Jane Grey; Leicester, the Favourite of Elizabeth; Sir Robert, the self-made exile, and the maker of Leghorn. Whilst English history, in its long course, can scarcely match the fatality which seems to have foredoomed powers of mind and strength of will, such as are rarely repeated in four successive generations, to teem with evil instead of good for England.

Such, in few words, was the career of the man, the forgotten production of whose pen was to shorten the life of a statesman whose only connection with it—so far as the evidence goes—lay in the fact that a copy chanced to turn up in his library; fell under the keen eye of a lawyer who thought that something might be made of it; and was then copied—probably by some clerk, who was in the habit of making transcripts for students to whom money was less precious than time.^[14] In some points of the story there is still considerable uncertainty. But so much as this seems to be established. How the tract came, at the first, into Sir Robert Cotton’s library there is no evidence whatever to shew.

It is not the least curious point in this transaction that the Earl of Somerset should have been mixed up with it. He had been released from the Tower almost eight years before (namely, on the 28th of January, 1622), but was prohibited from living near the Court. At first, he was ordered to restrict himself to one or other of two old mansions in Oxfordshire—Caversham and Grey’s Court. |Council Registers, James I, vol. v, pp. 230, 425 (C. O.).| Afterwards, his option was enlarged, by including, in the license, Aldenham, in Hertfordshire. It is evident that, after Buckingham’s death, he began to hope that a political career might be still possible for him. And statesmen like Bedford and Clare—as well as Cotton—kept up with him a correspondence.

More than once or twice, coming events had cast their preliminary shadows over Sir Robert, in relation to the very matter which so vexed his heart in the winter of 1629. ‘Sir Robert Cotton’s Library is threatened to be sealed up’ is a sentence which made its occasional appearance in news-letters, long before King Charles hurried down to the Council Chamber to vent his indignation on the handing about of Dudley’s ‘Proposition to bridle Parliaments.’

One cause of the rumour lay doubtless in the known enmity between Buckingham and the great antiquary. This enmity, on one occasion, brought Ben Jonson into peril. Ben was fond of visiting Cotton House. He liked the master, and he liked the table; and he was wont to meet at it men with whom he could exchange genial talk. On one such occasion, just a year before the Florence pamphlet incident, some verses went round the table at Cotton House, with the dessert. They began, ‘Enjoy thy bondage,’ and ended with the words ‘England’s ransom here doth lie.’ Only two months had then passed since Buckingham’s assassination, and these verses were, or were supposed to be, addressed to Felton. We can now imagine more than one reason why such lines may have been curiously glanced at, over Sir Robert’s table, without assuming that there was any triumphing over a fallen enemy; still less any approval of murder. But there seems to have been present one guest too many. |Domestic Corresp. Charles I, vol. cxix, § 33.| Some informer told the story at Whitehall, and Jonson found himself accused of being the author of the obnoxious verses. He cleared himself; but not, it seems, without some difficulty and annoyance.

The release from immediate restraint of the prisoner of November ’29 was no concession to any prompting of Charles’ own better nature. Fortunately for Sir Robert Cotton, his companions in the offence were peers. Their fellow-peers shewed, quietly but significantly, that continued restraint would need to be preceded by some open declaration of its cause. During the course of the proceedings which followed their release it was asserted—I do not know by whom—that not only had the ‘Proposition’ been copied, but that an ‘Answer’ to it had been either written, or drafted. And that the reply, like the original tract, would be found in Sir Robert’s library.

This somewhat inexplicable circumstance in the story is nowhere mentioned, I think, except in a Minute of the Privy Council. The Minute runs thus:—

‘A Warrant directed to Thomas Mewtas, Esq. ... and Laurence Whitaker, Esq. [Clerks of Council] autorising them to accompanie Sir Robert Cotton, Knight, to his house and assist him in searching amongst the papers in his studie or elsewhere, for certaine notes or draughtes for an answer to a “Proposicion” pretended to be made “for His Majesties Service” touching the securing of His Estate, and also to seeke diligently amongst his papers, and lykewise the trunkes and chambers of Mr. James, and [of] Flood, Sir Robert Cotton’s servant, as well for anie such notes, as also for coppies of the said “Proposicion,” and for other wrytings, of that nature, which may import prejudice to the government and His Majestie’s service.’ |Council Registers, Charles I; vol. 5, pp. 493, 495. 1629. Nov. 10. Whitehall. (C. O.).| The new search, it seems, had not the desired, or any important, result.

A year passed away. The proceedings in the Star Chamber proved to be almost as fruitless, as had been the vain, but repeated, searches which wearied the legs and perplexed the minds of Clerks of Council and of Messengers of the Secretary’s office. |Domestic Corresp. Chas. I, clxvii, § 65, seqq. (R. H.)| But the locks and seals were still kept on the Cottonian Library. Sir Robert and his son (afterwards Sir Thomas) petitioned the King over and over again. But Charles had set his face as a flint, and would not listen. In vain he was told that the Manuscripts were perishing by neglect; and that, as they occupied some of the best rooms, the continued locking up made their owner to be like a prisoner, in his own house. In order to go into any one of them he had to send to Whitehall, to request the presence of a Clerk of the Council.