that England experienced a foreign rule. Foreign
notions of religion, foreign maxims of state, foreign conceptions of the
attitude of the people or the nobles towards the Crown, foreign notions
of the relation of the Crown to the people, formed the policy of James
as of his successors. For the Stuarts remained foreigners to the last.
Their line filled the English throne for more than eighty years; but
like the Bourbons they forgot nothing and they learned nothing. To all
influences indeed save English influences they were accessible enough.
As James was steeped in the traditions of Scotland, so Charles the First
was open to the traditions of Spain. The second Charles and the second
James reflected in very different ways the temper of France. But what no
Stuart seemed able to imbibe or to reflect was the temper of England.
The strange medley of contradictory qualities which blended in the
English character, its love of liberty and its love of order, its
prejudice and open-mindedness, its religious enthusiasm and its cool
good sense, remained alike unintelligible to them. And as they failed to
understand England, so in many ways England failed to understand them.
It underrated their ability, nor did it do justice to their aims. Its
insular temper found no hold on a policy which was far more European
than insular. Its practical sense recoiled from the unpractical
cleverness that, while it seldom said a foolish thing, yet never did a
wise one.

[Sidenote: The new policy.]

From the first this severance between English feeling and the feeling of
the king was sharply marked. If war and taxation had dimmed the
popularity of Elizabeth in her later years, England had still a
reverence for the Queen who had made her great. But James was hardly
over the Border when he was heard expressing his scorn of the character
and statecraft of his predecessor. Her policy, whether at home or
abroad, he came resolved to undo. Men who had fought side by side with
Dutchman and Huguenot against Spaniard and Leaguer heard angrily that
the new king was seeking for peace with Spain, that he was negotiating
with the Papacy, while he met the advances of France with a marked
coolness, and denounced the Hollanders as rebels against their king. It
was with scarcely less anger that they saw the stern system of
repression which had prevailed through the close of Elizabeth's reign
relaxed in favour of the Catholics, and recusants released from the
paymen