Yet his conduct may have been a refinement of
hypocrisy, and, though a coward in the common acceptation of the word,
James had much of that peculiar kind of hardihood which enables its
possessor to treat commonly received ideas with contempt. His conduct
in "The Great Oyer of Poisoning" was most extraordinary, it must
be allowed, and is not reconcilable with innocence; but it does not
follow that the guilt which the great criminals in that business could
have established as against James related only to the death of Henry.
It bore harder upon the King than even that crime could have borne,
and must have concerned his conduct in matters that are peculiarly
shocking to the ears of Northern peoples, though Southern races have
ears that are less delicate. It was in Somerset's power to
explain James's conduct respecting some things that puzzled his
contemporaries, and which have continued to puzzle their descendants;
but the explanation would have ruined the monarch in the estimation of
even the most vicious portion of his subjects, and probably would have
given an impetus to the growing power of the Puritans that might have
led to their ascendency thirty years earlier than it came to pass
in the reign of his son.
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