THE PERSONAL GOVERNMENT

1629-1635

[Sidenote: The policy of Charles.]

At the opening of his third Parliament Charles had hinted in ominous
words that the continuance of Parliament at all depended on its
compliance with his will. "If you do not your duty," said the king,
"mine would then order me to use those other means which God has put
into my hand." When the threat failed to break the resistance of the
Commons the ominous words passed into a settled policy. "We have
showed," said a proclamation which followed on the dissolution of the
Houses, on the tenth of March, "by our frequent meeting our people our
love to the use of Parliament. Yet the late abuse having for the present
drawn us unwillingly out of that course, we shall account it presumption
for any to prescribe any time unto us for Parliament."

No Parliament in fact met for eleven years. But it would be unfair to
charge the king at the outset of this period with any definite scheme
of establishing a tyranny, or of changing what he conceived to be the
older constitution of the realm. He "hated the very name of
Parliaments"; but in spite of his hate he had as yet no purpose of
abolishing them. His belief was that England would in time recover its
senses, and that then Parliament might reassemble without inconvenience
to the Crown. In the interval, however long it might be, he proposed to
govern single-handed by the use of "those means which God had put into
his hands." Resistance indeed he was resolved to put down. The leaders
of the country party in the last Parliament were thrown into prison; and
Eliot died, the first martyr of English liberty, in the Tower. Men were
forbidden to speak of the reassembling of a Parliament. But here the
king stopped. The opportunity which might have suggested dreams of
organized despotism to a Richelieu suggested only means of filling his
exchequer to Charles. He had in truth neither the grander nor the meaner
instincts of a born tyrant. He did not seek to gain an absolute power
over his people, because he believed that his absolute power was already
a part of the constitution of the country. He set up no standing army to
secure it, partly because he was poor, but yet more because his faith in
his position was such that he never dreamed of any effectual resistance.
He believed implicitly in his own prerogative, and he never doubted
that his subjects would in the end come to believe in it too. His system
rested not on