With death came, as usual, a little of that dignity that was so sadly lacking in his life. S. R. Gardiner says that he died of a fever, but it is impossible even to guess at its nature. Early in the morning of March 27th, 1625, he was so ill that he had to send for his son Prince Charles, who came running into the king’s room in a nightshirt. Seeing his son, King James tried to raise himself on his pillows and to say something; but his voice had become so weak as to be inaudible, so that even then he failed. He was understood to say “Veni, Domine Jesu,” and soon his breathing ceased; in fact, like most people, he passed painlessly into the sleep that knows no waking. He had done with all his pain and constant discomfort, and, so far as he knew, with the misunderstanding that afflicted him in his life in England and has certainly afflicted his memory ever since. Poor James did not have a chance from his infancy. It has been said that he failed because he did not understand the English people; but how could you expect him to do that when he was constantly worried by the most distressing and undignified of all ailments? And was it not also equally their duty to try to understand him? They held a post-mortem examination upon him, because there were the usual accusations of poisoning, apparently founded largely upon the swelling of his tongue. They found that his heart was enormously enlarged, and that in his left kidney, which was greatly shrunken, there reposed two stones, from which doubtless had come that gravel which had so afflicted him during his life. Possibly his enlarged heart and swollen tongue, together with his vast overeating and drinking, may have meant that King James I had chronic Bright’s disease. How far the drunken wet-nurse may have influenced his later life no one can say; but it is quite possible that the unconscious infant may have felt a disgust that went far to cause that nervousness and lack of dignity of which his subjects complained. But how could any man be dignified when he was suffering constantly from gravel and the other tormenting, itching, weakening, and ignoble trouble? But surely we have omitted the most important point in James’s supposed character: the unnatural offences of which he was suspected. Well, Sir Theodore Mayerne, who has told us so frankly all about his hawking and spitting, his diarrhœa, his gravel, his stones, and his bleeding hæmorrhoids, does not seem to know anything about the unnatural offences. The pure mind always seems to turn towards this sort of offence when it thinks of its neighbour. In 1642, according to the _American Mercury_ of April, 1924, the Puritans, hardly settled down in the American colonies, were already accusing each other of the most awful sexual offences. And before convicting James of such offences one would prefer the evidence of a level-headed doctor to that of all the seventeenth-century Puritans in the world.