[1085] Cp. Froude, History of England, ed. 1875, x, 500, 507, 508, 512, xi, 197; Spenser's View of the Present State of Ireland, Globe ed. of Works, p. 654; Lecky's History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, i, 8; Gardiner, History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 363, 427, 429, 430; J.A. Fox, Key to the Irish Question, 1890, ch. xxix; and the author's The Saxon and the Celt, pp. 148-54.
[1086] Compare the very just appreciation of Green, ch. vi, § 4, p. 311.
[1087] See Isaac Disraeli's study, "The Psychological Character of Sir Thomas More," in the Amenities of Literature.
[1088] Compared with Henry VIII, More might be pronounced a specifically "Celtic" as opposed to an aggressively "Saxon" type. Henry seems a typical English beef-eater. Yet he too was of Welsh descent!
Chapter II
THE REBELLION AND THE COMMONWEALTH
§ 1
Nearly all the conceivable materials of disaffection, save personal misconduct on the king's part,[1089] went to prepare the Great Rebellion. Religious antipathies, indeed, no longer rested on the naked ground of lands taken and in danger of being re-taken;[1090] but there had been developed an intense animus of Protestant against Catholic, the instinct of strife running the more violently in that channel because so few others were open, relatively to the store of restless brute force in the country. Perhaps, indeed, Presbyterians hated Episcopalians and Arminians, at bottom, nearly as much as they did Catholics; but the chronic panics, from the time of Elizabeth onwards, the mythology of the Marian period, and the story of the massacres of Alva and of St. Bartholomew's Day, served to unite Protestants in this one point of anti-Papalism, and had set up as it were a new human passion in the sphere of English politics. And to this passion James and Charles in turn ran counter with an infatuated persistence. James, who was so much more annoyed by Puritans than by Papists, planned for his son, with an eye to a dowry, the Spanish marriage, which of all possible matches would most offend the English people; and when that fell through, another Catholic bride was found in the daughter of the King of France. The pledges, so natural in the circumstances, to "tolerate" Catholics in England, were a standing ground of panic to the intolerant Protestants, even though unfulfilled; and the new king stood in the sinister position of sheltering in his household the religion for which he dared not claim freedom in the country. Such a ground of unpopularity could be balanced only by some signal grounds of favour; but James and Charles alike chose unpopular grounds of war, and failed badly to boot. To crown all, they exhibited to the full the hereditary unwisdom of their dynasty in the choice of favourites;[1091] and the almost unexampled animosity incurred by Buckingham could not but reflect somewhat towards Charles, whose refined and artistic tastes, besides, made him the natural enemy of the text-worshipping and mostly art-hating Puritans.
Thus everything made for friction between king and subjects; and when Charles, to raise necessary funds, resorted to measures of no abnormal oppressiveness as compared with those of the Tudors, he was doggedly resisted by Parliaments professedly standing on law, but really actuated by a fixed suspicion of all his aims. Teeth were on edge all round. When a merchant, mulcted in a heavy customs duty, happened to be a Puritan, he resisted with a special zest; and one such declared before the Privy Council that "in no part of the world, not even in Turkey, were the merchants so screwed and wrung as in England."[1092] The King, unhappily for himself, conciliated nobody. Not content with alienating nobles by imposing huge fines in revival of the forest laws, he incensed the Corporation of London by confiscating their estates in Ulster, conferred by his father, and levying a fine of £70,000 to boot, for alleged breaches of Charter.[1093] Besides selling many trade monopolies, he passed vexatious sumptuary laws, fixing the prices of poultry, butter, and coals, and insisting on the incorporation of all tradesmen and artificers.[1094] The friction was well-nigh universal; and but for the remarkable prosperity built up by the long peace,[1095] the trouble might have come much sooner. But it is idle to keep up the pretence that what was at stake was the principle of freedom. The first demand of the Parliamentary Opposition was for the more thorough persecution of the Catholics. Parliamentarians such as Eliot were more oppressive in religious matters than Laud himself. He sought only uniformity of worship, they uniformity of doctrine; and they punished for heresy more unpardonably than did the Star Chamber for gross libel.