history must introduce him to our reader. Upon
the death of Queen Elizabeth, in 1603, James I. ascended the throne with
the highest notions of kingly prerogative and of a church establishment;
but the progress of the English people in education and intelligence, the
advance in arts and letters which had been made, were vastly injurious to
the autocratic and aristocratic system which James had received from his
predecessor. His foolish arrogance and contempt for popular rights
incensed the people thus enlightened as to their own position and
importance. They soon began to feel that he was not only unjust, but
ungrateful: he had come from a rustic throne in Scotland, where he had
received L5,000 per annum, with occasional presents of fruits, grain, and
poultry, to the greatest throne in Europe; and, besides, the Stuart
family, according to Thackeray, "as regards mere lineage, were no better
than a dozen English and Scottish houses that could be named."

They resisted his illegal taxes and forced loans; they clamored against
the unconstitutional Court of High Commission; they despised his arrogant
favorites; and what they might have patiently borne from a gallant,
energetic, and handsome monarch, they found it hard to bear from a
pedantic, timid, uncouth, and rickety man, who gave them neither glory nor
comfort. His eldest son, Prince Henry, the universal favorite of the
nation, had died in 1612, before he was eighteen.

CHARLES I.--When, after a series of struggles with the parliament, which
he had reluctantly convened, James died in 1625, Charles I. came to an
inheritance of error and misfortune. Imbued with the principles of his
father, he, too, insisted upon "governing the people of England in the
seventeenth century as they had been governed in the sixteenth," while in
reality they had made a century of progress. The cloud increased in
blackness and portent; he dissolved the parliament, and ruled without one;
he imposed and collected illegal and doubtful taxes; he made forced loans,
as his father had done; he was artful, capricious, winding and doubling in
his policy; he made promises without intending to perform them; and found
himself, finally, at direct issue with his parliament and his people.
First at war with the political principles of the court, the nation soon
found itself in antagonism with the religion and morals of the court.
Before the final rupture, the two parties were well defined, as Cavaliers
and