it was tyrannical and averse to changes. The King was ruled by
favorites; and these favorites were either bigots in religion, like
Archbishop Laud, or were tyrannical or unscrupulous in their efforts to
sustain the King in despotic measures and crush popular agitations, like
the Earl of Strafford, or were men of pleasure and vanity like the Duke
of Buckingham. Charles I. was detested by the Puritans even more than
his father James. They looked upon him as more than half a Papist, a
despot, utterly insincere, indifferent to the welfare of the country,
intent only on exalting himself and his throne at the expense of the
interests of the people, whose aspirations he scorned and whose rights
he trampled upon. In his eyes they had no _rights_, only _duties_; and
duties to him as an anointed sovereign, to rule as he liked, with
parliaments or without parliaments; yea, to impose taxes arbitrarily,
and grant odious monopolies: for the State was his, to be managed as a
man would manage a farm; and those who resisted this encroachment on the
liberties of the nation were to be fined, imprisoned, executed, as
pestilent disturbers of the public peace. He would form dangerous
alliances with Catholic powers, marry his children to Catholic princes,
appoint Catholics to high office, and compromise the dignity of the
nation as a Protestant State. His ministers, his judges, his high
officials were simply his tools, and perpetually insulted the nation by
their arrogance, their venality, and their shameful disregard of the
Constitution. In short, he seemed bent on imposing a tyrannical yoke,
hard to be endured, and to punish unlawfully those who resisted it, or
even murmured against it. He would shackle the press, and muzzle the
members of parliament.

Thus did this King appear to the Puritans,--at this time a large and
influential party, chiefly Presbyterian, and headed by many men of rank
and character, all of whom detested the Roman Catholic religion as the
source of all religious and political evils, and who did not scruple to
call the Papacy by the hardest names, such as the "Scarlet Mother,"
"Antichrist," and the like. They had seceded from the Established Church
in the reign of Elizabeth, and became what was then called
Non-conformists. Had they been treated wisely, had any respect been
shown to their opinions and rights,--for the right of worshipping God
according to individual conscience is the central and basal pillar of
Protestan