proclamation, unpopular favorites, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count Gondomar

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strategy but, more importantly, by failing to distinguish properly between the good subject and the bad, the poem seems more likely to generate antipathy than empathy. It simply ignores the essential task of proclamations to enlist the help of good subjects to root out the bad. James threatens his people with being “puld vp like stinkinge weeds” if they fail to comply with his wishes, but by putting the onus of responsibility for identifying them and punishing them solely upon himself, he appears more arrogant and condescending than threatening (l.28). Thus, a few lines later, when he reflects of kings that, “The good they cherishe and advance/ and many things may come by chance”, the emphasis on the word “chance” smacks of absolutist arbitrariness, and the effect is compounded when he declares that “the choice doth rest in kings” of whom to reward and whom to punish (ll.31-2 and l.39). This seems more like the whimsy and fallibility of a mere mortal than the irreproachable judgement of God’s elected representative on earth and it is unsurprising that this answer is contemporary with what has been perceived as a decline in James’s state of mind. ⁹⁷

James’s identification of himself as legislator, judge and executioner is perhaps understandable since this is the period over which he made a concerted effort to subjugate Parliament to his personal rule; the January parliament of 1621 had been prorogued for a week by a proclamation on the 28^th of December and was then dissolved, again by proclamation, on the 6^th of January. ⁹⁸ At this time considerable sway over policy-making rested with the influential but unpopular favorites, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham and Diego Sarmiento de Acuna, Count Gondomar, the Spanish Ambassador at Court, both of whom exerted influence upon James to dissolve Parliament upon a number of

⁹⁷ See, for instance, Willson (1963), pp.428-9.
⁹⁸ ‘A Proclamation for the Prorogation of the Parliament, from the Sixteenth of Januarie Next Comming, to the Three and Twentieth of the Same Moneth’ and ‘A Proclamation Declaring his Majesties Pleasure Concerning the Dissolving of the Present Convention of Parliament’,

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