Cornish Characters and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Cornish Characters and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Cornwall (England : County) -- Biography; Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Legends -- England -- Cornwall (County)
As Green says: "The Cavaliers who had shouted for the King's return,
had shouted also for the return of a free Parliament. The very Chief
Justice who asserted at the trial of the Regicides, the general
freedom of the King from any responsibility to the Nation, asserted
just as strongly that doctrine of ministerial responsibility, against
which Charles the First had struggled. It was the desire of every
royalist to blot out the very memory of the troubles in which monarchy
and freedom had alike disappeared, to take up again, as if it had
never been broken, the thread of our political history. But the point
at which even royalists took it up was not at the moment of the
Tyranny, but at the moment of the Long Parliament's first triumph,
when that Tyranny had been utterly undone. In his wish to revive this
older claim of the Crown, which the Long Parliament had for ever set
aside, the young King found himself alone. His closest adherents, his
warmest friends, were constitutional royalists of the temper of
Falkland and Culpepper. Partisans of an absolute monarchy, of such a
monarchy as his grandfather had dreamed of and his father had for a
few years carried into practice, there now were none."
The clergy in advocating passive obedience were actuated by the sense
of the miseries through which England had passed during the Great
Rebellion--better to submit under protest than to fly to arms again,
better certainly to submit even to what was deemed an injustice or
inexpedient, when the Crown was hedged about with restrictions, and
when the ministers of the Crown were responsible to the nation. There
was, however, a noisy and vehement party that went much beyond this,
and one Filmer had worked the theory of Divine Right of the Sovereign
into a system, that was accepted by the more crazy and immoderate of
the old Tory party, mainly among the clergy; and the Oxford
declaration went a long way in this direction. Men were beating about
for a theory on which to base Government by a King, they had not
grasped the truth that the King represents the people, just as does a
President in a Republic, but with the superaddition of Divine
ratification and imparted grace for the task of ruling, by unction and
coronation. That the Kings of England had ever been elected, and that
coronation was the confirmation by God, through the Church, of the
choice of the people, had been forgotten through the prevalence of
feudal ideas in the Middle Ages. Filmer propounded his doctrine that
the Divine Right rested in primogeniture, and the rabid Tories,
looking out for a theory, snatched at this for want of a better.
On the very day on which Russell was put to death, the University of
Oxford adopted by a solemn public act, drawn up by Jane, this strange
doctrine, and ordered the political works of Buchanan, Milton, and
Baxter to be publicly burned in the court of the schools.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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