For his conduct on this occasion he is accused of hypocrisy, because a few days afterwards he agreed to a truce with Ireland, and to the toleration of Papists in that country. To grant such a truce and such a toleration would not in the present day be deemed inconsistent with the sincerest Protestantism; but the matter was otherwise regarded at that time, and most advocates of religious liberty then denied the privilege to Roman Catholics, because they knew that Catholics would deny the privilege to them. Indeed, they reckoned such persons no better than social incendiaries, and incorrigible rebels against constitutional government; and, however unreasonable it may seem to us, they considered that to allow any scope for popish worship was to connive at the practices of popish treason. Charles himself was by no means prepared to place the toleration of Roman Catholics on its righteous grounds. He was willing, when it served his purpose, to declare himself of one mind with those who condemned all religious freedom; and he must have wished the declaration made by him, upon receiving the Lord's supper from the hands of Ussher, to be understood as meaning that he would not tolerate popery at all. Therefore, to proclaim toleration to Irish Catholics immediately after this declaration could not but lay him open to the charge of hypocrisy on the part of his contemporaries. But at the same time we have no doubt that his expression of attachment to the Protestant religion as it stood in the days of Elizabeth, understanding by that expression a religion both anti-papal and anti-puritanical, was perfectly sincere. Prelacy was an essential principle in the reformed religion of Charles; and with prelacy were associated in his mind forms of worship which many of his subjects pronounced to be "flat popery." His notions of reformation, perhaps, mainly hinged on a separation from Rome, with the abolition of monachism and the removal of certain gross abuses which had been prevalent in the mediæval church. He inherited, in fact, the Protestantism of the Tudors: but at the same time he had none of the magnanimity of Elizabeth, none of that religious patriotism which made her the idol of her subjects, none of that indignation against popish wrongs and cruelties, which she so strongly felt and expressed--as, for example, when she dressed herself in deep mourning to receive the gay French ambassador after the St. Bartholomew massacre:--in short, Charles had none of that spirit which made Elizabeth appear, without any tinge of hypocrisy, so much more of a Protestant than she really was. And we may add, that he had a trick of saying and doing things with a smooth artificial gravity which awakened suspicion, so that even when really honest he found it difficult to obtain credit for sincerity. [Sidenote: 1643.]