one. He came
flushed with a triumph over Calvinism and democracy, but embittered by
the humiliations he had endured from them, and dreading them as the
deadly enemies of his crown. Raised at last to a greatness of which he
had hardly dreamed, he was little likely to yield to a pressure, whether
religious or political, against which in his hour of weakness he had
fought so hard. Hopes of ecclesiastical change found no echo in a king
whose ears were still thrilling with the defiance of Melville and his
fellow ministers, and who among all the charms that England presented to
him saw none so attractive as its ordered and obedient Church, its
synods that met but at the royal will, its courts that carried out the
royal ordinances, its bishops that held themselves to be royal officers.
Nor were the hopes of political progress likely to meet with a warmer
welcome. Politics with a Stuart meant simply a long struggle for the
exaltation of the Crown. It was a struggle where success had been won
not by a reverence for law or a people's support, but by sheer personal
energy, by a blind faith in monarchy and the rights of monarchy, by an
unscrupulous use of every weapon which a king possessed. Craft had been
met by craft, violence by violence. Justice had been degraded into a
weapon in the royal hand. The sacredness of law had disappeared in a
strife where all seemed lawful for the preservation of the Crown. By
means such as these feudalism had been humbled and the long strife with
the baronage brought at last to a close. Strife with the people had yet
to be waged. But in whatever forms it might present itself, whether in
his new land or his old, it would be waged by James as by his successors
in the same temper and with the same belief, a belief that the welfare
of the nation lay in the unchecked supremacy of the Crown, and a temper
that held all means lawful for the establishment of such a supremacy.

CHAPTER III

THE BREAK WITH THE PARLIAMENT

1603-1611

[Sidenote: James the First.]

On the sixth of May 1603, after a stately progress through his new
dominions, King James entered London. In outer appearance no sovereign
could have jarred more utterly against the conception of an English
ruler which had grown up under Plantagenet or Tudor. His big head, his
slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs stood out in as
grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry or Elizabeth as
his gabble and rho