Excerpt from History of England, Vol. 1 of 2: The Accession of James I; The Disgrace of Chief-Justice Coke; 1603 1616 I have said on this subject as having any pretensions to be more than a mere hypothesis, and to ask them to suspend their judgment till the Archives of Simancas have been ransacked, and the day has come, which Dr. Birch was hoping for in the middle of the last century, when the treasures of the Hatfield Library shall be accessible. I have contented myself, in general, with merely indi cating my authorities. To have quoted them at length would have added enormously to the bulk of the book; and, after all, experience has taught me that no quotations are sufficient to save an honest inquirer from the trouble of looking into the original documents. The question of the truth and falsehood of any statement often de pends quite as much upon the silence of one witness as upon the assertion of another. Many a well-known anecdote will be missed from these pages. The great mass of the anecdote-mongers, with Weldon at their head, are so thoroughly untrustworthy that the total omission of all such stories, however amusing, excepting when they can be authenticated from some other source, seems the preferable course. Of all these offenders Weldon is incomparably the worst. I believe there is not a single instance in which his asser tions can be in any way tested, in which they cannot be shown to be, if not downright lies, at least recollections so distorted as to be utterly worthless for the purposes of history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.