ar, everything, of
course, save the control of the sword; and this, if the King could have
been trusted, was not immediately urgent, and would necessarily have
followed the control of the purse. "If the King could have been
trusted!" In these words the key to the whole situation is to be found.
The Parliamentary leaders could not, did not, dared not, trust the
King: hence the power of the sword had to be wrested from his grasp. It
was this that made the Civil War inevitable. It was this that rendered
constitutional government, government by discussion, government by
compromise, impossible. It was this well-grounded and repeatedly
confirmed distrust of the King that, after years of war and repeated and
sincere negotiations, negotiations which only served still further to
reveal his duplicity, made the execution of the King unavoidable. As the
judicial Gardiner well says,[30:1] in summing up the causes which led to
this most solemn, impressive, and instructive event in the whole history
of England--"The situation, complicated enough already, had been still
further complicated by Charles' duplicity. Men who would have been
willing to come to terms with him, despaired of any constitutional
arrangement in which he was to be a factor; and men who had long been
alienated from him were irritated into active hostility. By these he was
regarded with increasing intensity as the one disturbing force with
which no understanding was possible and no settled order consistent. To
remove him out of the way appeared, even to those who had no thought of
punishing him for past offences, to be the only possible road to peace
for the troubled nation."

The religious issues of the great struggle, however, were by no means so
simple. Episcopacy, as it had existed, had few supporters in England
outside the ranks of the bishops. The Laudian coercion had not only
reawakened slumbering animosities and given renewed vigour to the
Puritan dislike of the forms and ceremonies of the Anglican Church, but
had served to fill men's minds with a healthy, vigorous, and deep-rooted
distrust of ecclesiastical government in any form. To any claims,
whether of kings or of bishops or of presbyters, to rule by Divine
right, the ear of the nation was temporarily closed. If Protestants of
all shades of opinions had learned to distrust Episcopacy, intellectual
men of all shades of religious beliefs, and of none, equally distrusted
Presbyterianism, and feared that the