se king than his father, had none of
his insight. When, after the Petition of Right, he governed without a
parliament, the problem is whether he did it for the sake of power or
for the sake of religion. It resembles the problem of the American
Civil War, whether the confederates were fighting for State rights or
for slavery. We call him the martyr of Anglicanism. But there is one
moment in his career when, at the price of unparliamentary monarchy,
he could have saved Episcopacy. He was in the hands of Strafford and
of Laud, and they were strong men. When Charles had to think and act
for himself, it may be that his thoughts were not always clear. He
was attached to the English Church, but the religious controversy
puzzled him. There was a very able man among the queen's chaplains
who held that the Thirty-nine Articles might be interpreted favourably
to Rome. "The religion of Rome and ours," said Laud, "is all one." It
is not strange, perhaps, that he should have been suspected, when so
many of the king's ministers--Windebanke, Cottington, Weston--became
Catholics, and the same thing was whispered of others. After
Worcester, when the Earl of Derby was being taken to Newark to be
executed, a strange horseman joined the cavalcade, and rode for a time
by the prisoners side. It was said that this was a priest, who
received him, and absolved him, in the hour of death. Although the
Roman emissaries who negotiated with the archbishop, and offered him
the red hat of a cardinal, never quite understood him, and could not
explain why he who was so near was yet so far, they had no hopes of
bringing him over. There was even a time when they reported more
promising things of Ussher.

But for the religious question, the political opposition could not
have carried the country with it. The Roman agents and nuncios were
part of the religious question, and it is not prelacy alone that was
at stake. In considering the old charge of a design to carry over
England to Rome, we must remember this, that the art of understanding
adversaries is an innovation of the present century, characteristic of
the historic age. Formerly, a man was exhausted by the effort of
making out his own meaning, with the help of his friends. The
definition and comparison of systems which occupy so much of our
recent literature, were unknown, and everybody who was wrong was
supposed to be very wrong indeed.

We cannot avoid the question whether the th