[1090] That is, in England. In Scotland they did. It is quite clear that the Scotch disaffection dated from Charles's proposal and attempt, at the very outset of his reign, to recover the tithes that had been appropriated by the nobility. (Compare Burton, History of Scotland, v, 270; vi. 45, 75, 77-79, 84, 225; Burnet, Own Time, bk. i, ed. 1838, p. 11; Gardiner, History of England, 1603-1642, vii, 278; Laing, History of Scotland, 2nd ed. iii, 91; Sir James Balfour, Annals of the Stuart Kings, ii, 128; Sir Roger Manley, History of the Rebellions, 1691. p. 7.) This scheme, though dropped, was naturally never renounced in the king's counsels; and the Church riots of 1637, which are specially embalmed in the egregious myth of Jenny Geddes, are explicitly recorded to have been planned by outsiders. See Guthry's Memoirs, 2nd ed. 1747, p. 23. Burton (vi, 153) rejects this testimony on astonishingly fallacious grounds. Of course, the resentment of English interference with Scotch affairs counted for a great deal.
[1091] It is to be remembered, as explaining Charles's sacrifice of Strafford, that the latter was generally detested even at Court (Hallam, ii, 108-10). And at the outset the general hatred of the nobility to Laud was the great cause of Charles's weakness (id. ii, 86). In France, soon afterwards, the aristocratic hatred to Mazarin set up the civil war of the Fronde.
[1092] Hallam, Const. Hist. ii, 7.
[1093] Id. ii, 10-11.
[1094] Id. p. 25. Cp. p. 35.
[1095] As to which see Hallam, ii, 81-82.
[1096] Cunningham, English Industry and Commerce, ii, 219.
[1097] Hallam makes an excellent generalisation of Charles's two contrasted characteristics of obstinacy and pliability. "He was tenacious of ends, and irresolute as to means; better fitted to reason than to act; never swerving from a few main principles, but diffident of his own judgment in its application to the course of affairs" (as cited, ii, 229). He had cause to be so diffident. Hallam more than once observes how bad his judgment generally was.
[1098] It is an error to assert, as is often done, that before Carlyle's panegyric the normal English estimate of Cromwell was utterly hostile. Burnet, and even Clarendon and Hume, mixed high praise with their blame; and Macaulay was eloquently panegyrical long before Carlyle. The subject is discussed in the author's article on "Cromwell and the Historians" in Essays in Sociology, vol. 2.
[1099] It is to be noted that while he was trampling down all the constitutional safeguards for which he had professed to fight, he kept the English universities on relatively as sound a footing as the army. He thus wrought for the advance of reason in the next generation. But he had his share in the Puritan work of destroying the artistic taste and practice of the nation.