ch he had created and led. The marshal shook his
head, and replied that the German army was a terrible burden on the
country, but that the long Russian frontier made it a necessity.

James, who had been helpless at home against the nobles and the Kirk,
conceived high notions of authority, high ideals of what a monarch may
legitimately do for his country, acting by his own lights, his own
will, his own conscience, not as flotsam on the changing and uncertain
wave of opinion. And he came to England expecting that its wealth and
civilisation, and its intellectual culture, which reached just then
its culminating point, would afford a more favourable field for
advanced theories of State. The Stuarts owed something to each of the
two strongest and most obvious currents of political thought in their
time. From Machiavelli they took the idea of the State ruling itself,
for its own ends, through experts, not depending on the forces of
society or the wishes of men uninformed upon complex problems of
international policy, military administration, economy and law. And
they adopted from Luther his new and admired dogma of the divine right
of kings. They consistently rejected an opposite theory, well known
to James from his teacher Buchanan, derived from Knox and his medieval
masters, and wrongly imputed to Calvin--the theory of revolution.
They had the judges with them, that is, the laws of England. They had
the Established Church, the keepers of conscience and consecrated
expounders of the divine will. They had the successful example of the
Tudors, showing that a government may be absolute and at the same time
popular, and that liberty was not the supreme desire of English
hearts. And they had the general drift and concurrence of Europe, as
well as of the intellectual world at home, of Hooker, of Shakespeare,
and of Bacon. The best philosophers, the most learned divines, many
even of the most consummate jurists in the universe sustained their
cause. They were not bound to believe that idle squires or provincial
busybodies understood the national interest and the reason of State
better than trained administrators, and claimed to be trusted in the
executive as they were in the judiciary. Their strength was in the
clergy, and the Anglican clergy professed legitimacy and passive
obedience, in indignant opposition to the Jesuits and their votaries.
The king could not be less monarchical than the divines; he could not
renounc