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CHAP. II

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KING AND PARLIAMENT Commons defied both letter and spirit. Charles was not an Englishman by birth, training, or temper, but he showed himself at the outset as much a legalist in method and argument as Coke, Selden, St. John, or any Englishman among them. It was in its worst sense that he thus from first to last played the formalist, and if to be a pedant is to insist on applying a stiff theory to fluid fact, no man ever deserved the name better.

Both king and Commons, however, were well aware that the vital questions of the future could be decided by no appeals to an obscure and disputable past. The manifest issue was whether prerogative was to be the basis of the government of England. Charles held that it had been always so, and made up his mind that so it should remain. He had seen the court of Paris, he had lived for several months in the court of Madrid, and he knew no reason why the absolutism of France and of Spain should not flourish at Whitehall. More certain than vague influences such as these was the rising tide of royalism in high places in the church.

If this was the mind of Charles, Pym and Hampden and their patriot friends were equally resolved that the base of government should be in the parliament and in the Commons branch of the parliament. They claimed for parliament a general competence in making laws, granting money, levying taxes, supervising the application of their grants, restricting abuses of executive power, and holding the king's servants answerable for what they did or failed to do. Beyond all this vast field of activity and power, they entered upon the domain of the king as head of the church, and England found herself plunged into the vortex of that religious excitement which for a whole century and almost without a break had torn the Christian world, and distracted Europe with bloodshed and clamour that shook thrones,

principalities, powers, and stirred the souls of men to their depths.

This double and deep-reaching quarrel, partly religious, partly political, Charles did not create. He inherited it in all its sharpness along with the royal crown. In nearly every country in Europe the same battle between monarch and assembly had been fought, and in nearly every case the possession of concentrated authority and military force, sometimes at the expense of the nobles, sometimes of the burghers, had left the monarch victorious. Queen Elizabeth of famous memory-" we need not be ashamed to call her so," said Cromwell-carried prerogative at its highest. In the five-and-forty years of her reign only thirteen sessions of parliament were held, and it was not until near the close of her life that she heard accents of serious complaint. Constitutional history in Elizabeth's time-the momentous institution of the Church of England alone excepted-is a blank chapter. Yet in spite of the subservient language that was natural toward so puissant and successful a ruler as Elizabeth, signs were not even then wanting that, when the stress of national peril should be relaxed, arbitrary power would no longer go unquestioned. The reign of James was one long conflict. The struggle went on for twenty years, and for every one of the most obnoxious pretensions and principles that were afterward sought to be established by King Charles, a precedent had been set by his father.

Neither the temperament with which Charles I. was born, nor the political climate in which he was reared, promised any good deliverance from so dangerous a situation. In the royal councilchamber, in the church, from the judicial bench,these three great centres of organised government, -in all he saw prevailing the same favour for arbitrary power, and from all he learned the same oblique lessons of practical statecraft. On the side

CHAP. II

KING AND PARLIAMENT

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of religion his subjects noted things of dubious omen. His mother, Anne of Denmark, though her first interests were those of taste and pleasure, was probably at heart a catholic. His grandmother, Mary Queen of Scots, had been the renowned representative and champion of the catholic party in the two kingdoms. From her and her mother, Mary of Guise, Charles had in his veins the blood of that potent house of Lorraine who were in church and state the standard-bearers of the catholic cause in France. A few weeks after his accession he married (May 1625) the sister of the King of France and daughter of Henry of Navarre. His wife, a girl of fifteen at the time of her marriage, was a Bourbon on one side and a Medici on the other, an ardent catholic, and a devoted servant of the Holy See. That Charles was ever near to a change of faith there is no reason whatever to suppose. But he played with the great controversy when the papal emissaries round the queen drew him into argument, and he was as bitterly averse from the puritanic ideas, feelings, and aspirations of either England or Scotland, as Mary Stuart had ever been from the doctrines and discourses of John Knox.

It has been said that antagonism between Charles and his parliament broke out at once as an historical necessity. The vast question may stand over, how far the working of historical necessity is shaped by character and motive in given individuals. Suppose that Charles had been endowed with the qualities of Oliver, his strong will, his active courage, his powerful comprehension, above all his perception of immovable facts,-how might things have gone? Or suppose Oliver the son of King James, and that he had inherited such a situation as confronted Charles? In either case the English constitution, and the imitations of it all over the globe, might have been run in another mould. As it was, Charles had neither vision nor grasp. It is not enough to

say that he was undone by his duplicity. There are unluckily far too many awkward cases in history where duplicity has come off triumphant. Charles was double, as a man of inferior understanding would be double who had much studied Bacon's essay on Simulation and Dissimulation, without digesting it or ever deeply marking its first sentence, that dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy or wisdom, for it asketh a strong wit and a strong heart to know when to tell truth and to do it; therefore it is the worst sort of politicians that are the great dissemblers. This pregnant truth Charles never took to heart. His fault-and no statesman can have a worse-was that he never saw things as they were. He had taste, imagination, logic, but he was a dreamer, an idealist, and a theoriser, in whom there might have been good rather than evil if only his dreams, theories, and ideals had not been out of relation with the hard duties of a day of storm. He was gifted with a fine taste for pictures, and he had an unaffected passion for good literature. When he was a captive he devoted hours daily not only to Bishop Andrewes and the Ecclesiastical Polity of Hooker, but to Tasso, Ariosto, the Faerie Queene, and above all to Shakespeare.

He was not without the more mechanical qualities of a good ruler: he was attentive to business, methodical, decorous, as dignified as a man can be without indwelling moral dignity, and a thrifty economist meaning well by his people. His manners if not actually ungracious were ungenial and disobliging. "He was so constituted by nature," said the Venetian ambassador, "that he never obliges anybody either by word or by act." In other words, he was the royal egotist without the mask. Of gratitude for service, of sympathy, of courage in friendship, he never showed a spark. He had one ardent and constant sentiment, his devotion to his consort.

CHAP. II

HENRIETTA MARIA

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One of the glories of literature is the discourse in which the mightiest of French divines commemorates the strange vicissitudes of fortune-the glittering exaltation, the miseries, the daring, the fortitude, and the unshaken faith of the queen of Charles I. As the delineation of an individual it is exaggerated and rhetorical, but the rhetoric is splendid and profound. Bossuet, more than a divine, was moralist, statesman, philosopher, exploring with no mere abstract speculative eye the thread of continuous purpose in the history of mankind, but using knowledge, eloquence, and art to mould the wills of men. His defence of established order has been called the great spectacle of the seventeenth century. It certainly was one of them, and all save narrow minds will choose to hear how the spectacle in England moved this commanding genius.

Taking a text that was ever present to him, “ Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: be instructed, ye judges of the earth," Bossuet treated that chapter of history in which the life of Henrietta Maria was an episode, as a lofty drama with many morals of its own. “I am not a historian," he says, "to unfold the secrets of cabinets, or the ordering of battlefields, or the interests of parties; it is for me to raise myself above man, to make every creature tremble under the judgments of Almighty God." Not content with the majestic commonplaces so eternally true, so inexorably apt, yet so incredulously heard, about the nothingness of human pomp and earthly grandeur, he extracts special lessons from the calamities of the particular daughter of St. Louis whose lot inspired his meditations. What had drawn these misfortunes on the royal house in England? Was it inborn libertinism in English character that brought the rebellion about? Nay, he cries; when we look at the incredible facility with which religion was first overthrown in that country, then restored, then overthrown again, by

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