Stuart king was popular, and Parliament was in the end more successful than were the monarchs in winning the adherence of the unrepresented masses.

With the coming of the Stuarts there were injected into English politics distinct and conflicting theories of government. This is the one great contribution of the Stuarts to the modern Constitution. Without this theo

rizing, what we now know as the English Constitution could never have been. If the Tudors ever theorized about abstract rights of the Crown and Parliament, they kept their theories to themselves. They occupied their energies in governing, and in settling the various difficulties as they arose. It is conceivable that a free and harmonious Constitution might have been developed in this way, but it would have been a totally different Constitution from that which now prevails. Philosophers and jurists would undoubtedly have theorized in any case, but the unique feature of English politics from this time. on is found in the fact that the entire body politic has been accustomed to contend over conflicting theories of government. The peasant as well as the philosopher is called upon to profess a belief in an almost incomprehensible theory of the government.

We have already seen that a nucleus of the parliamentary party with a well-defined theory of the powers and privileges of the House of Commons was already formed. when James came to the throne. Elizabeth put forward no conflicting theory, but she took care if possible to have her own way. She scolded and she reproved her refractory Commons, but she set forth no abstruse theories. James, on the other hand, answered the theory of the Commons by a precise theory of the Crown. According to the theory of the Commons the Parliament - consisting of King, Lords, and Commons is the sole agency for making laws, and the House of Commons is the sole

agency for originating a vote of supplies. The King must act through ministers and officers, all of whom are liable to be punished for violating the laws. The government is a government of law, and Parliament is the only agency capable of changing the law. James came to the throne of England with a well-defined theory of the powers and duties of the monarch. James was not a fool. Had he remained in Scotland, he must have been accounted a wise ruler. He had a nervous dread of swords, but he was far from being a coward. He was a worthy representative of a race of monarchs whose high mission it was to break the power of feudal faction in Scotland and give a chance to order and civilization. His boyhood and early manhood were spent in times of ecclesiastical contests and the fiercest conflicts between rival political factions. As a young ruler he had coped with all the enemies of the Crown and had apparently overcome them. He had subdued the factious lords. The Presbyterian

Church included the great body of the Scottish nation; it possessed a form of organization well fitted for purposes of civil government, and had for a time exercised the controlling power in the government; yet the young King successfully withstood the Kirk. It was only when he was subjected to the restraining hand of Elizabeth that he was compelled to submit to its sway. As soon as the foreign restraint was removed, James set up an episcopacy and brought the Presbyterian Assembly under the control of the Crown.1 Flushed with victory over the last and most formidable of his enemies in his Scottish dominion, he was called to the English throne.

James was already an experienced king, and it is not therefore strange that he held definite views of kingcraft. While sitting in his Scottish council, he had literally felt the heavy hand of a sturdy follower of Knox who told

1 Greene's History of the English People, Vol. III., pp. 50-54.

the King to his teeth, "There are two kings and two kingdoms in Scotland. There is Christ Jesus, the King, and His kingdom, the Kirk, whose subject James the Sixth is, and of that kingdom not a king, nor a lord, nor a head, but a member." Christ, he declared, had given full power to His Church, and it was the duty of a king to assist those whom Christ had set over His Church, not to control them. But James was as much a Calvinist as were the followers of Knox. He, too, accepted the Bible as the voice of God. If we follow appearances, we are bound to say that he was as honest and as sincere in this as were the Presbyterians. Before he became an English king, he had received a sign in which the Presbyterians were lacking. He had been exalted while his enemies had been abased.

There was no thought of separating religion from government either on the part of James or on that of the Presbyterians. Toleration was not dreamed of by either. The Presbyterian theory made all men equal before God, and it made an elected assembly of the clergy the visible expression of God's government on earth. James's theory made the King the head of the Kingdom of God on earth. In his view, to abandon his office as king was treason against Jehovah; it was to invite the return of violence and barbarism which it was the high mission of his House to banish from Scotland. It was quite reasonable for him to say at an early conference held in his new kingdom, "The Presbytery agreeth as well with monarchy as God with the devil." Episcopacy, as then seen in England, agreed entirely with monarchy, because the bishops under the Tudor monarchs were subservient to the kings. In James's view the bishops. were an essential part of divinely ordained kingship. James felt sure that he could govern Scotland, and it was but natural that he should expect to govern England

with comparative ease. The Tudor monarchy in England had been the example and the inspiration to Stuart monarchs in their desperate efforts to bring order out of chaos in Scotland. James's theory of government did not seem to be at all out of harmony with the past or the present government of England. He had no more objection to government by means of Parliaments than he had to government by means of bishops. He simply expected Parliaments to work in harmony with the Sovereign as did the bishops and as had mainly been the habit of Parliaments both in England and in Scotland. A Parliament without the Monarch was no Parliament. If at any time one of the fractions of a Parliament had been made a tool of the King's enemies in the State, the circumstances had been such as to give no support to the view that such a fraction was in itself a thing to be dreaded by mighty kings.

The arguments of the lawyers who contended for the power of the Commons must have struck James as singularly feeble and incoherent compared with the arguments of the members of the Presbyterian Assembly who had been drilled in the school of John Knox. These lawyers conceded that James rightly held in his hands the agencies of government; they simply insisted that he should act in accordance with what they deemed to be the law. To James this seemed a weak sort of exhortation or preaching, and one who had withstood the preaching of Knox in the days of his youth was not likely to be greatly affected by such exhortations in his mature manhood. When this fraction of a Parliament (the House of Commons) virtually claimed that it was the true representative of the English nation; that it was practically the sole source of both law and supply; that in defiance of the known will of the King it could determine the policy of the government; that

the King as well as his ministers was but the servant of the law; and that, the House of Commons being the chief source of law, the King and his ministers were but servants of this fraction of a Parliament, it was but natural that he should think, if he did not say, "Such a House of Commons agreeth as well with monarchy as God with the devil." Such a claim James was prepared to resist to the last. Rather than yield to such a claim the son of James chose to die.

Some modern historians have hit upon the theory that at some time or other before the Tudors there had been a golden era of parliamentary rule, and have comforted us with the notion that the parliamentary party in the time of the Stuarts was sustained by the remembrance of that past age. It is certainly true that some of the members of the party used language which is fitted to suggest a belief in the ancient high powers of Parliament. But they drew support from events in the time of the Tudors as well as from the earlier history. They ransacked all history for arguments.

Any one who takes the trouble to give attention to the ordinary method of political argument will clearly perceive that it is not at all necessary that history should be true in order to be useful. The uninterrupted existence of something that can be called Parliament, with such acts as in the nature of the case became associated with such an institution, was just as useful to the parliamentary party of the Stuart period as would have been the most conclusive proofs of the high powers of Parliament in the remote past. It is an egregious blunder to assume that in such a contest the chief motive for action ever comes from a theory of the remote past.

The lawyers, merchants, and country gentlemen were in many ways made to feel that since the Crown, the higher nobility, and the bishops were at one, they were

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