previously done. As monarchy after this period was again introduced and continued, it becomes absolutely necessary to treat of the portion of history including this great revolution at its termination, that we may contemplate as a whole its character and effects, not only immediate, but as operating under the revived form of monarchy, and continuing to operate as yet. We shall then have cleared the ground, and can start afresh, under regal institutions, more perspicuously.
In detailing the events of the reigns of James and Charles, and of the commonwealth itself, we have taken the opportunity to state our views of the characters of the chief actors in them, and the motives and causes which led to and effected such stupendous changes, so that our review may be the more brief and general.
The contests betwixt the crown and the aristocracy have occupied a prominent part of this history for the great period of the monarchy. During that long period of more than four hundred years, the people presented a comparatively unimportant feature in the nation. Their wishes were little regarded, their interests were scarcely recognised. Occasionally they rose in their strength, and reminded the higher classes that they were a power, if they were fully aware of it; but their soon sank again with the concession of their demands in quiescence, and an immense toleration of exactions and oppressions. But as the nobility declined, not only monarchy, but the people acquired additional importance. The distribution of the property of the church and of confiscated estates, and the progress of trade and general intelligence, rapidly raised the people into a visible third estate, and the commons in Elizabeth's reign assumed a position of considerable dignity and force, which even that high-spirited queen was compelled to bow to. But it was not merely the national benefits which the reformation brought to the people which developed their importance, it was the dissemination of the Bible, and its reading for themselves, which opened up to the general mass of the population a new idea of the great moral laws. In that august treasury of divine principles they saw the rights of the human race written in luminous and incontrovertible characters, and the whole framework of social polity became reversed in their minds. They perceived that the race was not made for the rulers, but the rulers for the race. That mankind was the great object of the divine intentions, the mere institution of kings and nobles were accidents which had grown out of the ascendency of physical power in barbarous times, and which had been invested with splendour, ceremony, and etiquette, by state-craft, to give them pre-eminence over the ignorant multitudes. This once discovered and reflected upon, men rose in the conscious dignity of their own nature, and very soon in England and Scotland, the third estate, as it was called, became in reality the first estate, for it was now perfectly aware that out of it proceeded the life-blood of the government, the supplies for all its exigencies, and that it had but to raise its voice to be heard throughout every department of the state, every corner of the realm.
The expression of this power did not become so apparent during the reign of the Tudors as the Stuarts; but under that haughty and dictatorial dynasty, the sentiment itself was growing and ripening rapidly, like seeds swelling and generating in the earth, though not yet emerged from it; and the whole was the more fervent and indomitable because it sprung from the same source, and grew with the same growth as the new discoveries in religion. These newly recognised rights were perceived to be the rights proclaimed by the universal Father, through the pages of the same book which brought spiritual life and immortality to light. By this common origin political principles were elevated into sacred ones, and invested with all the solemnity of duty.
James VI. of Scotland had been educated amid the intense fermentation of these discoveries. The very ground, as it were, heaved under his cradle with the convulsive energy of the awaking powers of the gospel amongst the serious people of his kingdom. Knox and his associates had imbibed in Geneva the most stern and most ascetic principles of the reformers. They were persuaded, with their master Calvin, that all human institutions must submit themselves to the church of Christ, and Calvin himself, in his condemnation of Servetus, gave them a practical proof of his persuasion that heresy as well political tyranny must be exterminated in its advocates. Thus not only their own rights, but the intolerance of the rights of others, were established in the minds of the earnest Scotch people; and accordingly their zeal burst forth in a most uncompromising and exacting form. They drove James's mother from the throne in their intolerance of her popery; and when he himself began to rule without the restraint of his guardians, the ministers of the reformed kirk assumed a censorship of his words and conduct, and treated him with a rude and overbearing familiarity, which excited in him an everlasting horror of presbyterianism, the form of worship which the bulk of the Scottish people had adopted.
In 1596 the general assembly sent a deputation of four ministers, including James and Andrew Melvil, to James, at Falkland, to admonish him of the wickedness of the country, the king's own habit of "banning and swearing," the queen's not repairing to the preaching of the word, but indulging in balls and dances, the encouragement of superstition in permitting pilgrimages, singing of carols at Yule, profanation of the sabbath, wanton games, drinking, tribes of idle, dissolute people, as fiddlers, pipers, sorcerers, strong beggars living in harlotry, and not having their children baptised, the neglect of justice, and the appointment of ignorant or wicked men to offices, as well as allowing such sacrilegious persons as abbots, priors, and dumb bishops, voting in parliament in the name of the kirk.
James growing out of patience at their catalogue of crimes and delinquencies, one of the ministers pulled him by the sleeve of his coat, telling him that the country was in danger of wreck through the truth not being told him; and informing him that though he was a king in a certain sense, yet of Christ's kingdom, that is, the kirk, he was neither king, nor head, nor lord, but only a member; and that neither king nor prince should be allowed to meddle in it. These visits to the king were frequent, and the same intended for the queen, but she seemed to avoid most of them. They then attacked her unmercifully from their pulpits, censuring, in the strictest terms, her neglect of their preachings, her going to episcopal clergymen, her not introducing religious
