even his queen seemed to exercise no political influence over him. But this calm, artistic, religious sovereign, certainly did not add to his qualities the cleverness which marked the administration of his father. James could never be really affronted: he put up with everything which he could not alter. Charles I had a very lively and irritable sense of personal honour: he was easily wounded and sought to revenge himself; and then perhaps he committed himself to enterprises, the scope of which he did not perceive. He wanted that general sense of the state of affairs which distinguishes what is attainable from what is not. He prosecuted the quarrels in which he was involved as zealously and as long as possible, and then suddenly renounced them. People compared him to a miser, who turns over every penny, as we say, before he parts with it, but then suddenly throws away a large sum. Yet still when Charles I made concessions, he never made them unconditionally. This trustworthy man could bring himself to balance the promises he made in public by a secret reservation which absolved him from them again. With Charles I nothing was more seductive than secrecy. The contradictions in his conduct entangled him in embarrassments, in which his declarations, if always true in the sense he privately gave them, were only a [A.D. 1637.] hair’s-breadth removed from actual and even from intentional untruth. His method of governing the State was in itself of an equivocal character, inasmuch as he declared that he wished to uphold the laws of England, and then notwithstanding made dispositions which rested on obsolete rights and ran counter to what all the world deemed lawful: he affirmed that he did not wish to encroach upon Parliamentary government, and then nevertheless did everything to relieve himself for a long period from the necessity of summoning Parliament. Notwithstanding all the forbearance from shedding human blood which he had imposed on himself, yet he had the severest punishment inflicted upon the opponents of his system, by which even their lives were endangered. For his political aim outweighed all other considerations, and he did not hesitate to employ any means to attain it.