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 Roundheads: each party went to extremes, through the spite and fury of mutual opposition. The Cavaliers affected a recklessness and dissoluteness greater than they really felt to be right, in order to differ most widely from those purists who, urged by analogous motives, decried all amusements as evil. Each party repelled the other to the extreme of opposition.
RELIGIOUS EXTREMES.--Loyalty was opposed by radicalism, and the invectives of both were bitter in the extreme. The system and ceremonial of a gorgeous worship restored by Laud, and accused by its opposers of formalism and idolatry, were attacked by a spirit of excess, which, to religionize daily life, took the words of Scripture, and especially those of the Old Testament, as the language of common intercourse, which issued them from a gloomy countenance, with a nasal twang, and often with a false interpretation.