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 Spain), but also, in spite of Spanish jealousy, with Spanish America, the West and East Indies, and the Colonies which were now beginning to be founded in North America (as I will tell you later on at p. 166). Our ‘East India Company’, which began to build for us our Indian Empire of to-day, had been founded at the end of Elizabeth's reign.

Besides the ‘Customs’, there were lots of other little sources of income, many of them quite against the law, and altogether Charles had a revenue of about a million pounds a year, which certainly enabled him to live as long as he could keep the peace. Perhaps he might never have called a Parliament again if he had not quarrelled about religion with his subjects in Scotland. His Archbishop of Canterbury was William Laud, an honourable but narrow-minded man, who set himself to weed out the Puritan party in the Church of England, and to make every one conform to the services of the Prayer Book. All Puritan England was already growling deeply at this, when it occurred to Laud to try to enforce the same services and ceremonies on Presbyterian Scotland. Some steps in this direction had been begun by King James, but had met with very little success; there were, however, already some sort of restored bishops in Scotland, though they had no power. Suddenly, in 1637, Charles resolved to force upon Scotland a Prayer Book like the English one, as a first step towards making the Church quite uniform in the two kingdoms.

Scotland, poor, proud, and intensely patriotic, had for long felt sore and neglected since its native kings had gone from Edinburgh to London. At this ‘English’ insult it simply rose and slammed the door in the faces of the King and his Archbishop. A ‘Covenant’ was