IV
POLITICAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY,
1629-40
T A THEN Charles I dismissed his parliament in 1629 he hoped
V V never to have to summon another. Observers noticed that,
on his return from Westminster after the dissolution, he was in
high spirits, as if he had freed himself from the yoke.1 He was
now at liberty to practise that form of government which com-
mended itself to him. In his own eyes he was the guardian of
the church and constitution against iconoclasts and anarchists.
He declared that he was going to maintain the established doc-
trine of the church of England, as well as the just rights and
liberties of his subjects;2 and he meant what he said. The dif-
ficulty was that he was to be the sole judge of true doctrine and
just rights. If the very elasticity of the reformation settlement
permitted the adoption of Arminianism as the true doctrine,
then the suppression of puritanism was inevitable. Charles held
strongly, if unconsciously, the theory that was embodied in such
legislation as the Corporation Act after the Restoration—that
only a devoted adherent to the national church could be a loyal
citizen. At court nonconformity and sedition were synonymous
terms, and puritans were time-servers who stayed in the church
only to betray it or revolutionaries who made zeal for religion
the cloak for their nefarious designs. Absolute unity of church
and state was the ideal that Charles and Laud, his favourite
ecclesiastic, set before them. They regarded all their opponents
as both morally and politically dangerous—guilty of blasphemy
and disaffection alike. They intended that disputes about doc-
trine or ritual should be settled by the clergy in convocation—
subject to the royal leave—and the layman was to accept their
decisions without question.
Just as the ordinary citizen had no voice in determining the
discipline of the church, so the intermission of parliament de-
prived him of any share in shaping the law of the land. His
only concern with the law was to obey it. True, Charles had
promised to observe it, but events were to prove that he meant
1 State Papers, Venetian, 1628-162$, p. 589.
2 Gardiner, Constitutional Documents, pp. 97-8.