d
could not manage a compromise: he tried instead to split hairs, and
seemed merely to break promises. Yet he might safely have been far more
inconsistent if he had been a little hearty and hazy; but he was of the
sort that sees everything in black and white; and it is therefore
remembered--especially the black. From the first he fenced with his
Parliament as with a mere foe; perhaps he almost felt it as a foreigner.
The issue is familiar, and we need not be so careful as the gentleman
who wished to finish the chapter in order to find out what happened to
Charles I. His minister, the great Strafford, was foiled in an attempt
to make him strong in the fashion of a French king, and perished on the
scaffold, a frustrated Richelieu. The Parliament claiming the power of
the purse, Charles appealed to the power of the sword, and at first
carried all before him; but success passed to the wealth of the
Parliamentary class, the discipline of the new army, and the patience
and genius of Cromwell; and Charles died the same death as his great
servant.

Historically, the quarrel resolved itself, through ramifications
generally followed perhaps in more detail than they deserve, into the
great modern query of whether a King can raise taxes without the consent
of his Parliament. The test case was that of Hampden, the great
Buckinghamshire magnate, who challenged the legality of a tax which
Charles imposed, professedly for a national navy. As even innovators
always of necessity seek for sanctity in the past, the Puritan squires
made a legend of the mediaeval Magna Carta; and they were so far in a
true tradition that the concession of John had really been, as we have
already noted, anti-despotic without being democratic. These two truths
cover two parts of the problem of the Stuart fall, which are of very
different certainty, and should be considered separately.

For the first point about democracy, no candid person, in face of the
facts, can really consider it at all. It is quite possible to hold that
the seventeenth-century Parliament was fighting for the truth; it is not
possible to hold that it was fighting for the populace. After the autumn
of the Middle Ages Parliament was always actively aristocratic and
actively anti-popular. The institution which forbade Charles I. to raise
Ship Money was the same institution which previously forbade Richard II.
to free the serfs. The group which claimed coal and minerals from
Charles I. was t