could not, did not, dared not, trust the King:  hence the power of the sword had to be wrested from his grasp.  It was this that made the Civil War inevitable.  It was this that rendered constitutional government, government by discussion, government by compromise, impossible.  It was this well-grounded and repeatedly confirmed distrust of the King that, after years of war and repeated and sincere negotiations, negotiations which only served still further to reveal his duplicity, made the execution of the King unavoidable.  As the judicial Gardiner well says,[30:1] in summing up the causes which led to this most solemn, impressive, and instructive event in the whole history of England—­“The situation, complicated enough already, had been still further complicated by Charles’ duplicity.  Men who would have been willing to come to terms with him, despaired of any constitutional arrangement in which he was to be a factor; and men who had long been alienated from him were irritated into active hostility.  By these he was regarded with increasing intensity as the one disturbing force with which no understanding was possible and no settled order consistent.  To remove him out of the way appeared, even to those who had no thought of punishing him for past offences, to be the only possible road to peace for the troubled nation.”

The religious issues of the great struggle, however, were by no means so simple.  Episcopacy, as it had existed, had few supporters in England outside the ranks of the bishops.  The Laudian coercion had not only reawakened slumbering animosities and given renewed vigour to the Puritan dislike of the forms and ceremonies of the Anglican Church, but had served to fill men’s minds with a healthy, vigorous, and deep-rooted distrust of ecclesiastical government in any form.  To any claims, whether of kings or of bishops or of presbyters, to rule by Divine right, the ear of the nation was temporarily closed.  If Protestants of all shades of opinions had learned to distrust Episcopacy, intellectual men of all shades of religious beliefs, and of none, equally distrusted Presbyterianism, and feared that the free play of intellectual life would be as much endangered by the rule of the presbyters as by the rule of the bishops.  We should, however, do well to remember that at the outbreak of the war most of the great Parliamentary leaders, including Pym, Hampden, and even Cromwell, had no deep-rooted objection to Episcopacy as a form of Church government, provided only that it was controlled by Parliament, and allowed the fullest possible liberty of conscience.  They all shared Pym’s expressed conviction that “the greatest liberty of the kingdom is religion,” and seemed to have inclined toward the ideal of Chillingworth, a full liberty of thought maintained within the unity of the Church.  It was their necessity, not their will, the necessity to gain the cordial co-operation of the Scotch, that later compelled them to commit themselves to Presbyterianism, of their profound distrust of which they gave repeated proof.  And it is worthy of special note that even in the time of their greatest need the English Parliament, to use Gardiner’s words,[31:1] “was as disinclined as the Tudor kings had ever been to allow the establishment in England of a Church system claiming to exist by Divine right, or by any right whatever independent of the State.”