, Constitutional
History of England (Cambridge, 1911), 165-236.
Books of large value on the period include W.
Busch, England under the Tudors, trans. by A. M.
Todd (London, 1895), the only volume of which
published covers the reign of Henry VII.; A. F.
Pollard, Henry VIII. (London, 1902 and 1905), and
England under the Protector Somerset (London,
1900); and M. Creighton, Queen Elizabeth (new ed.,
London, 1899).]

VIII. THE STUARTS: CROWN AND PARLIAMENT (p. 026)

*27. Absolutism Becomes Impracticable.*--Throughout the larger portion
of the seventeenth century the principal interest in English politics
centers in the contest which was waged between the nation represented
in Parliament and the sovereigns of the Stuart dynasty. The question,
as one writer has put it, was "at first whether government should be
by the king or by the king in parliament, afterwards whether the king
should govern or whether parliament should govern."[22] The Stuart
sovereigns brought with them to the English throne no political
principles that were new. When James I., in a speech before Parliament
March 21, 1610, declared that monarchy "is the supremest thing upon
earth," and that, "as to dispute what God may do is blasphemy, ... so
is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a King may do in the height
of his power,"[23] he was but giving expression to a conception of the
royal prerogative which had been lodged in the mind of every Tudor,
but which no Tudor had been so tactless as publicly to avow. The first
two Stuarts confidently expected to maintain the same measure of
absolutism which their Tudor predecessors had maintained--nothing
more, nothing less. There were, however, several reasons why, for
them, this was an impossibility. The first arose from their own
temperament. The bluntness, the lack of perception of the public will,
and the disposition perpetually to insist upon the minutest
definitions of prerogative, which so pre-eminently characterized the
members of the Stuart house must have operated to alienate
seventeenth-century Englishmen under even the most favorable of
circumstances. A second consideration is the fact, of which the nation
was fully cognizant, that under the changed conditions that had arisen
there was no longer the nee