Page:A School History of England (1911).djvu/167

 old friends, the Protestant Dutch. So at last men were unwilling to serve in such a navy; and had to be ‘impressed’, that is, compelled to serve. And when King Charles, in 1635–6–7, asked for a tax called ‘Ship-money’, to maintain the Navy, men began to say ‘No’, ‘not without consent of Parliament’, and so on.

It was the same story with the Army, or rather with the old ‘militia’ of ‘every man armed in his county’, which did duty for an army. The Tudors had not been very successful in their efforts to make this force a real one. Men hated the service and shirked it when they could; they talked nonsense about ‘England not wanting an army when she had got such a fine navy’. You will often hear the same sort of nonsense talked nowadays; don't believe it! King James, towards the end of his reign, had a fine opportunity of showing that England could bite by land as well as by sea; for a frightful war broke out in Germany between and Protestants, which was to last for thirty years; and all good Protestants in England and Scotland were eager to go and help their brothers in Germany. But James couldn't make his mind up: he talked big and sent messengers flying about to the Kings of Europe, but act he would not; and so nothing was done except that a great many volunteers went, both from England and Scotland, and learned soldiering to some purpose, as James's son, King Charles I, was to find out one day. Till that day there was no real army in England, although Charles, when he came to the throne, tried to establish a general right of ‘impressing’ soldiers, and quarrelled with his Parliaments at once about it. Lastly, James dismissed all his Parliaments in anger, and used rude language in doing so. When he died in 1625, nearly all the seeds of the future civil war had been sowed.