Omniana/Volume 2/James I

by Robert Southey

221. James I.

James I. has often been ridiculed for his Demonologie, but with great injustice, because he only erred in common with the age, and because he had not only the sagacity at last to discover his error, but the honesty to confess it. "His reign, (says Fuller,^[1]) was scattered over with cheaters in this kind, but the King, remembering what Solomon saith,..It is the honour of a King to search out a matter,..was no less dexterous than desirous to make discovery of these deceits. Various were his waies in detecting them, awing some into confession with his presence, perswading others by promise of pardon and fair usage. He ordered it so, that a proper courtier made love to one of these bewitched maids, and quickly Cupid his arrows drave out the pretended darts of the devil. Another there was, the tides of whose possession did so ebbe and flow that punctually they observed one hour, till the King came to visit her. The maid, loath to be so unmannerly as to make His Majesty attend her time, antedated her fits many hours, and instantly ran through the whole zodiack of tricks which she used to play. A third, strangely affected when the first verse of St. John's Gospel was read unto her in our translation, was tame and quiet whilst the same was pronounced in Greek, her English devil, belike, understanding no other language. The frequency of such forged possessions, wrought such an alteration upon the judgement of King James, that he, receding from what he had written in his Demonologie, grew first diffident of, and then flatly to deny the working of witches and devils, as but falsehoods and delusions."

The manners of Charles the Second's reign began under James the First. "Divers sects and particular titles past unpunished, nor regarded, as the sect of the Roaring Boys, Boneventors, Bravadors, Quarterors, and such like, being persons prodigall, and of great expence, who having runne themselves into debt, were constrained to run into factions to defend themselves from danger of the law; these received maintenance from divers of the nobility, and not a little, as was suspected, from the Earl of Northampton, which persons, although of themselves they were not able to attempt any enterprise, yet faith, honesty, and other good acts were little set by, and the citizens through lasciviousness consuming their estates, it was like that their number would rather increase than diminish, and under these pretences they entered into many desperate enterprises, and scarce any durst walk the streets after nine at night."

Truth brought to Light by Time, p. 3.

 

1. Church History, Book X. p. 74.