In the autumn of this year, the first child of Lady Strange was born. The home was complete; but domestic peace and content were destined to be lost like a beautiful dream, in the gloom of the times. Charles had not reigned twelve months before the first signs of the coming struggle took form and shape; if even already, in marrying the Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria, he had not hopelessly offended his subjects. Marriage with French princesses has almost invariably brought disaster on our English kings, and violent death in some form; the union of Henry V. with the Princess Catherine of France being one of the exceptions proving the rule. Even in his domestic affections the evil destiny of the Stuarts thus attended Charles; and truly his fate was an ill one indeed which placed him at the head of a kingdom at such an epoch in its history. The times were out of joint; and the vacillating, arbitrary Charles was not the man to set them right at this crisis, when the very strength of the divinity hedging a king was being questioned and tested by that sense of the rights of individual and collective humanity which was beginning to quicken on every side. The state of England however, on Charles’s accession, was but the effect of causes which had been at work for many a generation past. Looking back no farther than to the Wars of the Roses, we see the resistance of a proud and jealous nobility to supreme kingly power, and its subjection by the ruthless Henry VIII., who suffered no mortal to live, from loftiest to lowliest, who attempted to cross his path or to thwart his will. Henry’s despotism, inherent in Queen Mary, and carefully nourished by her bigoted husband, Philip of Spain, was in Elizabeth softened by the chastening experiences of early life, and throughout her long reign kept in check by prudent counsellors. During the time that she was on the throne moreover, the new religion was on its probation. In its form of “Church of England, as by law established,” it had still to approve itself to the nation. But long before her successor James I. took her place, Episcopalianism had been accepted by the English people from Tyne to Thames. By Roman Catholics it might be regarded as a hollow pretence, and by nonconformists as a popishly tainted compromise; but by the bulk of the community it was recognised as an ark of safety, spiritual and temporal, whose bulwarks warded off the shafts of Rome as effectually as her course ran clear of the shoals and whirlpools of the sectaries. The Church of England, risen purified from the ashes of Romanism, was, or at least was accepted as, the reproduction of the church of the early Christians. It contained the ideal scheme of a perfect law of liberty—religious, social, and political; and allowed a range of thought and of speculation not to be found in any other formulated expression of Christian belief whatever. Only of papistry the Church of England was intolerant.