refusing to pay. In this fatal conjuncture the duke went on an embassy
to France and brought triumphantly home with him the queen, to the joy
of the nation, but his course was soon finished by the wicked means
mentioned before. In the fourth year of the king, and the thirty-sixth
of his own age, he was assassinated at Portsmouth by Felton, who had
been a lieutenant in the army, to whom he had refused promotion.

Shortly after Buckingham's death the king promoted Dr. Laud, Bishop of
Bath and Wells, to the archibishopric of Canterbury. Unjust modes of
raising money were instituted, which caused increasing discontent,
especially the tax denominated ship-money. A writ was directed to the
sheriff of every county to provide a ship for the king's service, but
with the writ were sent instructions that, instead of a ship, he should
levy upon his county a sum of money and send it to the treasurer of the
navy for his majesty's use.

After the continued receipt of the ship-money for four years, upon the
refusal of Mr. Hampden, a private gentleman, to pay thirty shillings as
his share, the case was solemnly argued before all the judges of England
in the exchequer-chamber and the tax was adjudged lawful; which judgment
proved of more advantage and credit to the gentleman condemned than to
the king's service.

For the better support of these extraordinary ways the council-table and
star-chamber enlarged their jurisdictions to a vast extent, inflicting
fines and imprisonment, whereby the crown and state sustained deserved
reproach and infamy, and suffered damage and mischief that cannot be
expressed.

The king now resolved to make a progress into the north, and to be
solemnly crowned in his kingdom of Scotland, which he had never seen
from the time he first left it at the age of two years. The journey was
a progress of great splendour, with an excess of feasting never known
before. But the king had deeply imbibed his father's notions that an
Episcopal church was the most consistent with royal authority, and he
committed to a select number of the bishops in Scotland the framing of a
suitable liturgy for use there. But these prelates had little influence
with the people, and had not even power to reform their own cathedrals.

In 1638 Scotland assumed an attitude of determined resistance to the
imposition of the liturgy and of Episcopal church government. All the
kingdom flocked to Edinburgh, as in a general cause that concerned their