This son was a friend of Raleigh’s (would, maybe, have saved that great man from the scaffold, if he had lived), a friend, too, of all the high-minded, far-seeing ones who best represented Elizabethan enterprise; but he died, poor fellow, at nineteen, leaving the heirship to that Charles I. whose dismal history you know. James had also a daughter--Elizabeth--a high-spirited maiden, who, amid brilliant fêtes made in her honor, married that Frederic, Elector Palatine, who received his bride in the magnificent old castle, you will remember at Heidelberg. There they show still the great gateway of the Princess Elizabeth, clad in ivy, and the Elizabeth gardens. ’Twas said that her ambition and high spirit pushed the poor Elector into political complications that ruined him, and that made the once owner of that princely château an outcast, and almost a beggar. The King, too, by his vanities, his indifference, and cowardice, helped largely the discomfiture of this branch of his family, as he did by his wretched bringing up of Charles pave the way for that monarch’s march into the gulf of ruin. In foreign politics this weak king coquetted in a childish way--sometimes with the Catholic powers; sometimes with the Protestant powers of Middle Europe; and at home, with a ridiculous sense of his own importance, he angered the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Puritans of England by his perpetual interferences. He provoked the emigration that was planting, year by year, a New England west of the Atlantic; he harried the House of Commons into an antagonism which, by its growth and earnestness was, by and by, to upset his throne and family together. His power was the power of a blister that keeps irritating--and not like Elizabeth’s--the power of a bludgeon that thwacks and makes an end. And in losing respect this King gained no love. Courtiers could depend on his promises as little as kingdoms. He chose his favorites for a fine coat, or a fine face, and thereafter, from sheer indolence yielded to them in everything. In personal habits, too, he grew more and more unbearable; his doublets were all dirtier; his wigs shabbier; his coarse jokes coarser; his tipsiness frequenter. A foulness grew up in the court which tempted such men as Fletcher and Massinger to fouler ways of speech, and which lured such creatures as Lady Essex to ruin. A pretty sort of King was this to preach against tobacco!