Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/83

 Many members of the house who had shared in the disturbance were imprisoned. Charles' indignation was against Eliot, who led the attack upon Buckingham as well as opposition to the king. Charles personally interfered to settle the mode of proceeding, and when Eliot with Rolles and Valentine were imprisoned in the kings bench, upon their refusal to pay the fine to which they were sentenced, Charles practically hastened Eliot's end by leaving him in an unhealthy cell in the Tower after he was attacked by consumption.

For a long time Charles's main difficulty was financial. In 1629 he made peace with France, and in 1630 with Spain. He enforced the payment of tonnage and poundage, and he considerable sum by demanding money from those who had omitted to apply for knighthood being in possession of 40l a year, a proceeding which, if liable to many objections, was at least legal. In this way he nearly made both ends meet, his revenue in 1635 being in round numbers 618,000l., while his expenditure was 636,000l. A deficit of 18,000l. might easily be met from temporary sources, but the financial position thus created by Charles would not allow him to play an important part in foreign politics. Yet Charles with that fatuous belief in his own importance which attended him through life, imagined that he would gain the object which he aimed at, the restoration of the Palatinate first to his brother-in-law Frederick, and after Frederick's death to his nephew, Charles Louis, by offering his worthless alliance sometimes to the emperor and the king of Spain, sometimes to the king of France or to Gustavus Adolphus. From none of these potentates did he ever receive more than verbal assurances of friendship. No one would undergo a sacrifice to help a man who was unable to help himself.

The discredit into which Charles fell with foreign powers might ultimately be injurious to him; but France and Spain were too much occupied with their own quarrels to make it likely that he would be exposed to immediate danger in consequence of anything that they were likely to do. The offence which he was giving by his ecclesiastical policy at home was much more perilous. The church problem of his day was indeed much more complex than either he or his opponents were aware. As a result of the struggle against the papal power, backed by the king of Spain, a Calvinistic creed, combined with a dislike of any ceremonial which bore the slightest resemblance to the forms of worship prevailing in the Roman church, had obtained a strong hold upon religious Englishmen, Then had come a reaction in favour of a broader religious thought, combined with a certain amount of ceremonialism; a reaction which was in the main a return to the old lines of the culture of the renaissance, and which, so far from being really reactionary, was in the way of progress towards the intellectual and scientific achievements which marked the close of the century.

Mediation between the two schools of thought could only be successfully achieved by conciliating that part of the population which is sufficiently intelligent to take interest in matters of the mind, hut which is not inclined to admit the absolute predominance of thorough partisans on either side. To do this it would be necessary to sympathise with the better side of the new school, with its dislike of dogmatism and its intellectual reasonableness, While refusing at least to lend it help in establishing a ceremonial uniformity by compulsion. Unhappily Charles's sympathies were in the wrong direction. He was not a man of thought to be attracted by intellectual force. He was a man of cultivated æsthetic perceptions, loving music and painting and the drama, but as a connoisseur not as an artist. He could tell when he saw a picture who the painter was, he could suggest an incident to be the centre of a dramatic plot, but he could not paint a picture or write a play. In his own life he instinctively turned to that which was orderly and decorous. He had never been unfaithful to his wife, even in the days when there had been no love between the married pair, and after Buckingham's death his affection for Henrietta Maria was that of a warm and tender lover, Such a man was certain to share Laud’s view of the true way of dealing with church controversies—so different from that of Bacon—and, having thought to settle theological disputes by enjoining silence on both parties, to endeavour to reach unity by the enforcement of uniformity in obedience to church law without considering the shock which his action would cause in a generation habituated to its disuse.

For some time his efforts in this direction were crowned only by partial success. In 1633 Laud became archbishop of Canterbury, and by the close of 1637, when Laud's metropolitical visitation came to an end, the ceremonial of the church had been reduced to the ideal which Charles had accepted from Laud, with the result of driving the mass of moderate protestants into the arms of the puritans [see ].

At the same time that Charles was alienating so many religious men, he was giving offence to thousands who cared for the