Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 3.djvu/260

 178 STATESMEN AND SAGES The nation's joy was speedily dashed by his betrothal to the French princess, Henrietta Maria (1609-69) ; for the marriage articles pledged him, in violation of solemn engagements to Parliament, to permit her and all her domestics the free exercise of the Catholic religion, and to give her the up-bringing of their children till the age of thirteen. On March 27, 1625, Charles succeeded his father, James I. ; on June I3th he welcomed his little bright-eyed queen at Dover, having married her by proxy six weeks earlier. Barely a twelvemonth was over when he packed off her trouble- some retinue to France a bishop and 29 priests, with 410 more male and fe- male attendants. Thenceforth their domestic life was a happy one ; and during the twelve years following the murder of Buckingham (1592-1628), in whose hands he had been a mere tool, Charles gradually came to yield himself up to her unwise influence not wholly indeed, but more than to that of Stafford even, or Laud. Little meddlesome Laud, made archbishop in 1633, proceeded to war against the dominant Puritanism, to preach passive obedience, and uphold the divine right of kings ; while great Stafford, from championing the Petition of Right (1628), passed over to the king's service, and entered on that policy of " Thorough " whose aim was to make his master absolute. Three Parliaments were summoned and dissolved in the first four years of the reign ; then for eleven years Charles ruled with but one, in its stead, with subservient judges, and the courts of Star Chamber and High Commission. In 1627 he had blundered into an inglorious French war ; but with France he concluded peace in 1629, with Spain in 1630. Peace, economy, and arbitrary taxation were to solve the great problem of his policy, how to get money, yet not account for it. Not that Charles cared for money in itself, or had far-reaching projects of tyranny (he failed to enter into Stafford's scheme) ; but he had inherited a boundless ego- ism, and content with his own petty self, had little sympathy with the dead hero- ism of the Tudor age, none at all with the nascent ardor of democracy. The ex- tension of the ship-tax to the inland counties was met by Hampden's passive resistance (1637) ; Laud's attempt to Anglicize the Scottish Church, by the act- ive resistance of the whole northern nation. Once more Charles had to call a Parliament ; two met in 1640 the Short Parliament, which lasted but three weeks, and the Long, which outlasted Charles. It met to pronounce Stafford's doom ; and his plot with the army detected, Charles basely sacrificed his loyal servitor, his own kingly word, to fears for the queen's safety ; no act weighed heavier on him afterward. The same signature that sent Stafford to the block gave assent to a second bill, by which the existing Parliament might not be dissolved without its own consent. That pledge, as ex- torted by force, Charles purposed to disregard ; and during his visit to Edinburgh, in the autumn of 1641, he trusted by lavish concessions to bring over the Scots to his side. Instead, he got entangled in dark suspicions of plotting the murder of the covenanting lords, of connivance even in the Ulster massacre. Still, his re- turn to London was welcomed with some enthusiasm, and a party was forming in the Commons itself, of men who revolted from the sweeping changes that