For the misgovernment of this disastrous period Charles himself is principally responsible.  After the death of Buckingham, he seems to have been his own prime minister.  He had, however, two counsellors who seconded him, or went beyond him, in intolerance and lawless violence, the one a superstitious driveller, as honest as a vile temper would suffer him to be, the other a man of great valour and capacity, but licentious, faithless, corrupt, and cruel.

Never were faces more strikingly characteristic of the individuals to whom they belonged, than those of Laud and Strafford, as they still remain portrayed by the most skilful hand of that age.  The mean forehead, the pinched features, the peering eyes, of the prelate, suit admirably with his disposition.  They mark him out as a lower kind of Saint Dominic, differing from the fierce and gloomy enthusiast who founded the Inquisition, as we might imagine the familiar imp of a spiteful witch to differ from an archangel of darkness.  When we read His Grace’s judgments, when we read the report which he drew up, setting forth that he had sent some separatists to prison, and imploring the royal aid against others, we feel a movement of indignation.  We turn to his Diary, and we are at once as cool as contempt can make us.  There we learn how his picture fell down, and how fearful he was lest the fall should be an omen; how he dreamed that the Duke of Buckingham came to bed to him, that King James walked past him, that he saw Thomas Flaxney in green garments, and the Bishop of Worcester with his shoulders wrapped in linen.  In the early part of 1627, the sleep of this great ornament of the church seems to have been much disturbed.  On the fifth of January, he saw a merry old man with a wrinkled countenance, named Grove, lying on the ground.  On the fourteenth of the same memorable month, he saw the Bishop of Lincoln jump on a horse and ride away.  A day or two after this he dreamed that he gave the King drink in a silver cup, and that the King refused it, and called for glass.  Then he dreamed that he had turned Papist; of all his dreams the only one, we suspect, which came through the gate of horn.  But of these visions our favourite is that which, as he has recorded, he enjoyed on the night of Friday, the ninth of February 1627.  “I dreamed,” says he, “that I had the scurvy:  and that forthwith all my teeth became loose.  There was one in especial in my lower jaw, which I could scarcely keep in with my finger till I had called for help.”  Here was a man to have the superintendence of the opinions of a great nation!