James I. died in 1625, at Theobalds, having removed thither from Whitehall shortly before. His son Charles I. succeeded him, and for the first years of his reign lived in the old royal apartments on the Thames’ bank. The omens observed at the time were all against the new King. Had his reign been prosperous we should have heard nothing about them. First of all, it was remarked that the breath was hardly out of King James’s body when the Knight Marshal, in proclaiming his successor at the gate of Theobalds, made a bad blunder. He said Charles was the late King’s rightful and _dubitable_ heir. He meant to have said “indubitable.” When the news came to Whitehall, Bishop Laud was in the middle of his sermon, for it was a Sunday, and broke off in order to let Charles be proclaimed, nor did he afterwards conclude, so that the new King and the congregation went away without a blessing. At the coronation, in February, 1626, it was similarly noticed that no procession through the City from the Tower to Westminster could take place, because the plague was raging. Several still more ominous accidents marked the day. The wing broke off the golden dove which formed part of the regalia. The Bishop of Carlisle, Richard Senhouse, by an inexcusable blunder, took for the text of his coronation sermon, “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,” from the Revelation. This was much remarked upon then and afterwards, and it is very possible that Charles alluded to the sermon in the last words he ever uttered. But another circumstance was most remarked upon that dark February day in the gloom of the old Abbey. For some unexplained reason, Charles was dressed, not in purple, like the kings before him, but in white satin. Later on this gained for Charles the name of “The White King,” and at his burial, in February, 1649, at Windsor, in a snow-storm, as the flakes fell upon the coffin, there were some present who remembered the omen of twenty-three years before. Finally, as if to crown all, that day was marked in the memories of many by a shock of earthquake.