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.

As opposed to the genuflections of Laud and the pomp of his ritual, the land swarmed with unauthorized preachers; then came out from among the Presbyterians the Independents; the fifth-monarchy men, shouting for King Jesus; the Seekers, the Antinomians, who, like Trusty Tomkins, were elect by the fore-knowledge of God, who were not under the law but under grace, and who might therefore gratify every lust, and give the rein to every passion, because they were sealed to a certain salvation.  Even in the army sprang up the Levellers, who wished to abolish monarchy and aristocracy, and to level all ranks to one.  To each religious party, there was a political character, ranging from High Church and the divine right of kings, to absolute levellers in Church and State.  This disintegrating process threatened not only civil war, with well-defined parties, but entire anarchy in the realm of England.  It was long resisted by the conservative men of all opinions.  At length the issue came:  the king was a prisoner, without a shadow of power.

The parliament was still firm, and would have treated with the king by a considerable majority; but Colonel Pride surrounded it with two regiments, excluded more than two hundred of the Presbyterians and moderate men; and the parliament, thus purged, appointed the High Court of Justice to try the king for treason.