CHAP. $5. Buckingham and Prince Charles. § 6. War policy of vain hope that this act of courtesy would induce the king of Spain, not merely to make over the Infanta to him without exacting unreasonable conditions, but also to place himself on the side of England, in opposition to the House of Austria on the Continent. As might have been expected, the Prince found that the policy of a great state was not to be changed by acts of personal courtesy, and he returned to England to stir up the national feeling of antagonism against Spain. In such an effort, Buckingham and Charles were easily successful. With the help of the new parliament which met in 1624, they found little difficulty in bearing down the old king with his love of inactivity and peace. They did not see that the monarchy was discredited as well as the monarch, and that it could only regain its ancient splendour by the display of ability and wisdom, in which the heir to the throne was still more deficient than its occupant. Of energy, Buckingham-for he, and not Charles, was the ruling spirit of the government—had enough and to spare. But he had neither great abilities nor sound discretion. He rushed into treaties for military action which made the highest demands upon the purse of the nation, whilst he offended its religious instincts by the concessions which he made to the Roman Catholics as a consequence of the marriage between Charles and the sister of the king of France. When James died in 1625, Buckingham became, if Charles I. possible, more completely master of England than he had been before. He would take no counsel which was not in accordance with his own wishes. In the first two years of the reign of Charles I., a war with France was added to the war with Spain; whilst expedition after expedition was sent forth to the Low Countries, to Cadiz, and to Rhé, each one to a disaster more ignominious than the last. The House of Commons, stirred to action by the incapacity of the government, demanded under Eliot's leadership that the honour of England should no longer be committed to hands so rash. Charles stood by his friend, struggled to carry on the war by questionable, if not by illegal means, by forced loans, by imprisonment of those who refused to pay them, and by all the machinery of despotic government. He succeeded in stripping himself of all the authority which Elizabeth had derived from her position as representative of the nation. When Buckingham was murdered in 1628, that authority had passed irrevocably into the hands of the House of Commons, which had just driven the king to renounce, by his assent to the Petition of Right, his claim to levy taxes without its consent, and to imprison without the consent of the judges. CHAP. VII. House of Commons Church. Inspired with the feeling of its greatness, the House §7. The of Commons addressed itself to the settlement of those Church questions which Elizabeth had so carefully kept and the for her own decision. A representative assembly is not indeed well fitted to decide questions of theology or science. Composed of a large number of persons, the natural tendencies of such a body are towards the acceptance of opinions already in vogue, and the proscription of ideas which, whether true or not, are new and unheard of. It was therefore a happy circumstance that the Commons had not been allowed to settle the English Church in the reign of Elizabeth, and it is impossible to deny that in 1629 the danger was not entirely at an end. The Commons declared boldly against toleration. The Calvinistic doctrines which they themselves had learnt in their infancy were to be handed down unquestioned to their descendants. No man who taught the contrary was to be allowed to hold a benefice, or to open his mouth in the pulpit. Yet, mistaken as the Commons were, the evil which they encouraged was not so great as the evil СНАР. VII. § 8. The King without Parliament. which they combated. Those persons who questioned the received doctrinal teaching were also advocates of ceremonial observances which had in most places fallen into disuse. They did not ask simply for liberty for themselves, as the Puritans had asked at Hampton Court. With their leader, William Laud, they declared their doctrines to be the only true doctrines, and their ceremonies to be the only true ceremonies of the Church of England. To this view Charles was ready practically to give his support, and they, in turn, were ready to advocate his assumption of almost uncontrolled authority. In Church and State the wishes of the nation were to be no longer consulted. The authorities in both domains of human action separated themselves entirely from that body of which they were but the active members. Officials were to be everything, the nation was to be nothing. A quarrel with the House of Commons, which spoke in the name of the nation, was the natural consequence, and in 1629 began a period of eleven years in which parliament was not allowed to meet. The separation between the king and the representative House was fatal to the efficiency of the monarchy. The authority of the Crown withered as a plant withers which has been cut off from the soil from which it derives its nourishment. It ceased to exercise the functions of controlling by superior intelligence and experience, because it believed itself called upon to combat rather than to foster and to train the instincts of the nation. Charles's idea of government was like the idea of an engineer in possession of a steam-engine who should set himself the task of keeping the machinery in motion whilst he scrupulously excludes the admission of steam. His object was to manage Englishmen as he thought best, not to help them to manage themselves better than they knew how to do without assistance. In the State, he provided a fleet for the defence of the country, not by rousing the patriotic feelings of Englishmen, but by levying shipmoney by his own authority. In the Church, he enforced obnoxious rites and ceremonies, in the hope that England would be brought to entertain religious opinions which he approved, but which the country bitterly detested. In all things, as far as he was concerned, external and visible control took the place of the spontaneous vigour of Elizabethan England. With Laud, the greatest ecclesiastic of his court, correctness of gesture and outward form went far to constitute the test of churchmanship. With Wentworth, the greatest statesman of his court, a due administration of reward and punishment became the highest method of acquiring political influence. The decadence of the courtly literature of the time was the index to the decadence of moral and intellectual strength. The remaining dramatists of the Elizabethan school died, leaving no successors but the sweet and honey-tongued singers of a world of grace and beauty, where earnestness of heart counted for nothing,-the Herricks, the Carews, the Sucklings, who could tell of the loveliness of soft glances and warm kisses, but who knew nothing of the fidelity of Imogen or the bright womanliness of Rosalind. Literature, in the person of Milton, passed to the side of the opposition. CHAP. VII. Puritan That opposition grew stronger every day, because, §9. The like Elizabeth's government, it harmonised the aspira- Oppotions of men of various minds. To that standard all sition. gathered who reverenced the unseen objects of thought above the visible objects of sense. First, of course, came the Puritan strictly so called, who either objected to the ceremonies of the Church as a whole, or who objected, like the men of Hampton Court, to some special ceremonies which reminded him of the pretensions of the Church of Rome. Towards these ad СНАР. $10. The Constitutional Opposi tion. vanced another and far more numerous band, who would have been content if Charles had left Church arrangements as he found them, but who were irritated by the order to transfer the position of the communion-table from the centre of the church to the east end, and by other accompanying ceremonial changes. They saw in these things an indication that the king and Archbishop Laud were, if not actually preparing the way for the restoration of the Roman Church, at least furthering a state of things in which the cardinal principle of Protestantism-the direct individual dependence of each man upon God without the intervention of priests and external observances-was to be set at nought in favour of a system in which man was to be called on to approach his Maker in ways settled without his approbation, and through official persons with whom he wished to have nothing to do. So thoroughly were these men, loyal as they were to the Church as it stood in the days of their boyhood, alarmed by Laud's proceedings, that the barrier which divided the Elizabethan Puritan from the merely Protestant churchman was broken down, and the name of Puritan became applicable to both classes alike. The other great wing of the opposition was composed of lawyers. Lawyers indeed were to be found in plenty on the king's side, for there were many who were content to fall back upon his authority for the maintenance of order. But for the higher class of minds this was impossible. For them there was need of a conception of law, which would ultimately rest on something better than mere precedents and decisions leading up in all unsettled cases to the arbitrary will of a single man. They preferred to give the right of settling such cases to Parliament as the embodiment of the wisdom of the nation. No doubt there was a danger here. If Parliament was to rule instead of the king, it might very well |