He wrote a book against the system of forcing men to testify against themselves and claimed the Magna Carta itself forbade the practice. It did not, but the claim was instantly accepted, picked up, recirculated, and widely used. Like Buchanan's claim that the early kings of Scotland were elected, the historical claim fitted magnificently into the propagation of a new element in an evolving revolutionary doctrine.

---Otto Scott, James I: The Fool as King