Book burning -- Great Britain; Censorship -- Great Britain -- History; Prohibited books -- Great Britain -- History
But it was not for long that James had saved Cowell's life, for
the latter's death the following year, and soon after the
resignation of his professorship, is said by Fuller to have been
hastened by the trouble about his book. The King throughout
behaved with great judgment, nor is it so true that he
surrendered Cowell to his enemies, as that he saved him from
imminent personal peril. Men like Cowell and Blackwood and
Bancroft were probably more monarchical than the monarch himself;
and, though James held high notions of his own powers, and could
even hint at being a god upon earth, his subjects were far more
ready to accept his divinity than he was to force it upon them.
It was not quite for nothing that James had had for his tutor the
republican George Buchanan, one of the first opponents of
monarchical absolutism in his famous _De Jure Regni apud Scotos_;
nor did he ever quite forget the noble words in which at his
first Parliament he thus defined for ever the position of a
constitutional king: "That I am a servant it is most true, that
as I am head and governor of all the people in my dominion who
are my natural vassals and subjects, considering them in numbers
and distinct ranks: so, if we will take the whole people as one
body and mass, then, as the head is ordained for the body and not
the body for the head, so must a righteous king know himself to
be ordained for his people and not his people for him. . . . _I
will never be ashamed to confess it my principal honour to be the
great servant of the Commonwealth._"
And in this very matter of Cowell's book James not only denied
any preference for the civil over the common law, but professed
"that, although he knew how great and large a king's rights and
prerogatives were, yet that he would never affect nor seek to
extend his beyond the prescription and limits of the municipal
laws and customs of this realm."[59:1]
A few years later Sir Walter Raleigh's first volume of his
_History of the World_ was called in at the King's command,
"especially for being too saucy in censuring princes." This fate
its wonderful author took greatly to heart, as he had hoped
thereby to please the King extraordinarily;[59:2] and,
considering the terms wherewith in his preface he pointed the
contrast between James and our previous rulers, one cannot but
share his astonishment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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