The prince in Madrid
When the prince and the duke arrived in Spain in March 1623, they found the lovely princess out of reach. They also saw that the Spaniards were as angry at the thought of a royal daughter marrying a young Protestant as the English were at the thought of a Catholic princess. Philip and his minister Olivares received the guests with perfect courtesy. Lope de Vega wrote a play for the festivities in their honor, Velazquez painted Charles's portrait, and Buckingham flirted with Spanish beauties as far as honor allowed.
The essential condition of the marriage was religious freedom for the Catholics of England. Charles at once, and James at last, accepted it, and the marriage treaty was drawn up. But when James asked Philip to use arms if necessary to restore Frederick, the Winter King, to the Palatinate, Philip refused to commit himself, and James ordered his son and favorite home. In a letter of 14 June 1623 to his son we see James's human side. He wrote that he was now infinitely sorry he had let him go, that he cared neither for the marriage nor for anything else, and wanted only to have him in his arms again, and he prayed God for it three times over. On parting, the Spanish princess made Charles promise to look kindly on the Catholics of England. When Charles returned, the English greeted him like a hero, since he had not brought home a bride but some paintings by Titian.
War and the end of a reign
Buckingham, who had realized that the Spaniards had mocked him (as Olivares told him), turned to a marriage between Charles and the French royal house, and arranged a betrothal to Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri IV. She was the Catholic princess whose faith would become one of the troubles of later parliaments. The impetuous minister then pushed James, by now infirm in body and spirit, into declaring war on Spain, which made Buckingham popular with the Commons. Parliament, meeting in February 1624, followed policies born of the merchants' wish to seize Spanish prizes, meaning colonies and markets. It also meant to stop Spain from helping the Catholic emperor against the German Protestants. The English, who had once called James a coward for loving peace, now called him a tyrant for drafting men into service. The regiments raised and the money collected were not enough, and James regretted having to end his quiet reign with a vain and useless war.
In his last years James was beset by illnesses. By eating and drinking to excess he had poisoned his system, and now he suffered from catarrh, swollen joints, gout, kidney stone, jaundice, diarrhea and hemorrhoids. He had himself bled daily until the slightest illness made even that useless. At the end he took no more medicine, performed the rites of the Church of England, and on 27 March 1625 died while murmuring under his breath the last consoling prayers of his faith.
A verdict on James
For all his vanity and coarseness, James was better than many men who surpassed him in strength, courage and daring. His despotism was mostly theoretical and was mixed with a timidity that often made him bow to a powerful parliament. His pretensions to theological learning did not stop him from being far more tolerant than his predecessors. His strong love of peace helped England prosper and checked both the greed of parliament and the sacrifice of his subjects for others. Flatterers called him the Solomon of England for his wisdom and prudence, while a man who failed to draw him into the quarrels of Europe called him, in the book's words, the wisest fool in Christendom. But James was neither philosopher nor fool; he was a scholar wrongly made king, a man of peace in an age that favored legend and war. The Bible translated at his command is worth more than the crown of any conquering monarch.
A new chapter: superstition
The next chapter of the book, titled in the Persian edition the call of reason (1558 to 1649), opens with a section on superstition. Are people poor because they are ignorant, or ignorant because they are poor? This question divides political thinkers: conservatives stress heredity, the innate differences in mental capacity, while reformers stress environment, the effect of upbringing and opportunity. As wealth grows and spreads in a society, science advances and superstition declines. Even so, in the most advanced country, especially among the poor and the idle rich, a forest of superstition survives: astrology, palm reading, omens, the evil eye, witchcraft, belief in jinn, spirits and demons, spells, charms, dream interpretation, fortune telling, miracles, trickery, and the belief in hidden helpful or harmful powers of minerals, plants and animals. In a society whose wealth is small or held by a few, ignorance poisons the roots of science and withers its flowers. To the intellectually and physically weak, superstition is a useful agent: it brightens their tiresome days with belief in thrilling wonders and soothes the pain of poverty with faith in magic and mysterious hopes.
Sir Thomas Browne in 1646 devoted six hundred and fifty-two pages to a brief account of the errors of his age. Nearly all these hidden sciences flourished among the English people of Elizabeth's time and the early Stuart years. In 1597 James VI published an authoritative work, the Demonology, a frightening piece of literature. In it he wrote that witches could enter houses, make men and women fall in love or become enemies, move a disease from one person to another, harm a person by burning a wax image, or raise terrible storms. He therefore held that witches, conjurers and even their clients deserved death. When he was returning from Denmark with his bride and his ship was almost wrecked in a storm, he had four suspects questioned under harsh pressure and obtained confessions that they had tried to destroy him by sorcery. One of them, John Fian, was put to death in 1590.
The Church of Scotland agreed with the king on this policy, and judges who were lenient to witches were excommunicated. According to the book, about eight thousand women were put to death in Scotland between 1560 and 1600, in a country of barely a million people. In England belief in witchcraft was nearly universal. Learned physicians such as William Harvey and Sir Thomas Browne shared it. Elizabeth herself, a hard-headed queen, allowed witchcraft to be treated as a grave crime under the laws of 1562, and eighty-one women were executed for it in her reign. After James added the English crown to the Scottish, he gave up some of his bigotry, insisted that the accused be tried fairly and false confessions and accusations exposed, and saved the lives of five women accused by an epileptic child. Under Charles I the persecution almost stopped, but it revived under the Long Parliament and reached its worst: in two years (1645 to 1647) two hundred witches, in the book's number, were put to death.
Only one man appealed to reason and logic, Reginald Scot, who despite his Scottish name was English. In 1584 he published in London a book on witchcraft (the book's title is garbled; it is almost certainly The Discoverie of Witchcraft) that matched in importance the work of Johann Weyer, whose Latin title the Persian renders only as the influence of demons. In this dangerous attempt Scot hoped to end a cruel superstition. He described the so-called witches as poor, wretched old women who could harm no one. He wrote that if the devil had entered their bodies they should be pitied rather than burned, and noted that ascribing miracles to these old women insulted the miracles of Christ. He then described the dreadful tortures that made confessions of witchcraft worthless, and exposed the irregularity and injustice of the trials and the credulity of judges and investigators. His book had no effect. In this climate science tried to grow.