most fatal of
all his blunders; for in the marriage with Henrietta Maria lay the doom
of his race. It was the fierce and despotic temper of the Frenchwoman
that was to nerve Charles more than all to his fatal struggle against
English liberty. It was her bigotry--as the Commons foresaw--that
undermined the Protestantism of her sons. It was when the religious and
the political temper of Henrietta mounted the throne in James the Second
that the full import of the French marriage was seen in the downfall of
the Stuarts.

CHAPTER V

CHARLES I. AND THE PARLIAMENT

1625-1629

[Sidenote: Charles the First.]

Had Charles mounted the throne on his return from Spain his accession
would have been welcomed by a passionate burst of enthusiasm. He had
aired himself as a staunch Protestant who had withstood Catholic
seductions, and had come to nerve his father to a policy at one with the
interests of religion and with the national will. But the few months
that had passed since the last session of Parliament had broken the
spell of this heroic attitude. The real character of the part which
Charles had played in Spain was gradually becoming known. It was seen
that he had been as faithless to Protestantism as his revenge had made
him faithless to the Infanta. Nor had he shown less perfidy in dealing
with England itself. In common with his father, he had promised that his
marriage with a princess of France should in no case be made conditional
on the relaxation of the penal laws against the Catholics. It was
suspected, and the suspicion was soon to be changed into certainty, that
in spite of this promise such a relaxation had been stipulated, and that
a foreign power had again been given the right of intermeddling in the
civil affairs of the realm. The general distrust of the new king was
intensified by the conduct of the war. In granting its subsidies the
Parliament of 1624 had restricted them to the purposes of a naval war,
and that a war with Spain. It had done this after discussing and
rejecting the wider schemes of the favourite for an intervention of
England by land in the war of the Palatinate. But the grants once made,
Buckingham's plans had gone on without a check. Alliances had been
formed, subsidies promised to Denmark, and twelve thousand men actually
despatched to join the armies on the Rhine. It was plain that the policy
of the Crown was to be as unswayed by the will of the nation as in the
days of King James.