ancestors; finally, the abolition of ship-money. He had [A.D. 1641.] also given up the restoration of the old forest boundaries, allowing them to remain as they had been in the twentieth year of his father. He could not admit that the people had had a right to these concessions: he held firmly to the view that all was free gift in favour of his subjects, on whose confidence and obedience he might now more than ever reckon[262]. He assented to the dismissal of his two armies, the English and the Irish, convinced that the Scots, now that their demands were satisfied, would quit English territory. He himself wished to go to Scotland, according to his promise, and hold a Parliament there. It really seemed as if the King was willing to accept his present position, to abandon not only the views which he had before prosecuted, but also the modes of government of his ancestors, so far as they were inconsistent with the restrictions imposed on him. Some of the chief foundations of the royal authority which the Tudors had enjoyed had been removed. But who could assert that the crown could not be worn, and be worth wearing, under these conditions? On the other hand it is clear at the first glance how hard this must again become. There was some importance in the fact that Charles I was a born king, with a definite idea of inalienable rights and duties necessary to be fulfilled, an idea all the more potent in the indefinite state of the constitution and of the limits of parliamentary power. The party from which the great impulse proceeded, and which controlled the debates with its majority, had made a start which would carry it beyond the limits of the old constitution. Questions were already being raised, and tendencies exhibited, which implied a new and thorough transformation. In the very foreground appeared the religious question. The matter of the two petitions relating to church affairs had in due time been brought before the Upper House, and referred for discussion to an ecclesiastical committee composed of lords of both parties. By it a sub-committee was appointed, in which distinguished theologians of both [A.D. 1641.] Anglican and Presbyterian opinions, Prideaux and Hacket, as well as Burgess and Young, took part. The chairman of both was the astute Williams, who had returned from the prison in which Laud had confined him, to his seat in the Upper House. They busied themselves with reversing Laud’s arrangements, and with the complaints against his government, but they had no idea of touching on the constitution of the English episcopate. Men like Williams lived in the union of two forms of activity, the spiritual and the temporal. How was it to be expected that the bishops would rob themselves of their seats in the Upper House? The temporal lords also were mostly against it.