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. James was capable of almost any crime or
baseness; but in the matter of poisoning his eldest son he is entitled
to the Scotch verdict of _Not Proven_.

Whether James killed his son or not, it is certain that the Prince's
death was a matter of extreme importance. Henry was one of those
characters who are capable of giving history a twist that shall
last forever. He had a fondness for active life, was very partial
to military pursuits, and was friendly to those opinions which
the bigoted chiefs of Austria and Bavaria were soon to combine to
suppress. Henry would have come to the throne in 1625, had he lived,
and there seems no reason to doubt that he would have anticipated the
part which Gustavus Adolphus played a few years later. He would have
made himself the champion of Protestantism, and not the less readily
because his sister, the Electress-Palatine and Winter-Queen of
Bohemia, would have been benefited by his successes in war. Bohemia