So prodigal was the display made for him that James might almost have thought the country tired of Elizabeth's long rule, and glad to welcome a new monarch. He conferred titles with a lavish hand as he went, and knights-bachelors sprouted up in every town and village like mustard-and-cress after a dewy evening. He came across the Border mild enough, but by degrees rid himself of the humility proper to a King of Scots, and as King of England assumed an imperious air not even inferior to that of Henry the Eighth himself. Such an air sat ill upon James, at once constitutionally weak in body and simultaneously timid and braggart in disposition. The "British Solomon" his toadies called him, and indeed he was in many ways the Superior Person. Educated in all the 'ologies, and accounting himself in especial a master of theology and demonology, he was learned and superstitious at once. Witchcraft he firmly believed possible, and made it a capital offence, and was thus the prime cause of many an ill-favoured old woman or eccentric person being cruelly put to death as warlocks and wizards. The Duke of Sully, better informed than James's satellites, or more candid, pronounced him "the wisest fool in Europe." At no place was the new monarch so lavishly entertained as at Theobalds, the princely residence of Lord Burleigh, whose estates bordered the road between Waltham Cross and Cheshunt. Who was the original owner of Theobalds, history does not tell us. Doubtless some Saxon notable, Theobald by name, thus immortalised in unilluminative fashion. In the late Elizabeth's time it had been acquired by the great Cecil, dead some six years before the coming of this northern light. Cecil's son, only less great than his father, now ruled, and received James right nobly in those magnificent halls his sire had added, where Elizabeth herself had been royally entertained. Four days he stayed, hunting and feasting, and left with so profound an admiration of the place that he never rested until he had exchanged the Royal Palace of Hatfield for it. Cecil made no bad bargain in the transfer, and in addition secured much favour and many added dignities, ending as Earl of Salisbury. James's passion for the chase explains his eagerness to secure Theobalds, surrounded in those times by far-reaching and ancient woodlands. Epping Forest and the woods of Waltham lay for miles to the east, and the green alleys of Enfield Chase and Northaw (really "north holt," _i.e._ north wood) to the south and the north-west.