e
Second. But in the very difficulty of believing this lay half the king's
strength. He had in fact no taste whatever for the despotism of the
Stuarts who had gone before him. His shrewdness laughed his
grandfather's theories of Divine Right down the wind, while his
indolence made such a personal administration as that which his father
delighted in burthensome to him. He was too humorous a man to care for
the pomp and show of power, and too good-natured a man to play the
tyrant. But he believed as firmly as his father or his grandfather had
believed in his right to a full possession of the older prerogatives of
the Crown. He looked on Parliaments as they had looked on them with
suspicion and jealousy. He clung as they had clung to the dream of a
dispensing power over the execution of the laws. He regarded
ecclesiastical affairs as lying within his own personal control, and
viewed the interference of the two Houses with church matters as a sheer
usurpation. Above all he detested the notion of ministerial
responsibility to any but the king, or of a Parliamentary right to
interfere in any way with the actual administration of public affairs.
"He told Lord Essex," Burnet says, "that he did not wish to be like a
Grand Signior, with some mutes about him, and bags of bowstrings to
strangle men; but he did not think he was a king so long as a company of
fellows were looking into his actions, and examining his ministers as
well as his accounts." "A king," he thought, "who might be checked, and
have his ministers called to an account, was but a king in name."

[Sidenote: The king's Policy.]

In other words Charles had no settled plan of tyranny, but he meant to
rule as independently as he could, and from the beginning to the end of
his reign there never was a moment when he was not doing something to
carry out his aim. But he carried it out in a tentative, irregular
fashion which it was as hard to detect as to meet. Whenever there was
any strong opposition he gave way. If popular feeling demanded the
dismissal of his ministers, he dismissed them. If it protested against
his declaration of religious indulgence, he recalled it. If it cried for
victims in the frenzy of the Popish Plot, he gave it victims till the
frenzy was at an end. It was easy for Charles to yield and to wait, and
just as easy for him to take up the thread of his purpose afresh the
moment the pressure was over. There was one fixed resolve in fact which
overrode