For a generation or two the interest attaching to the new-old teaching of the Church of England, and its general adopting, pretty well absorbed the attention of all classes, more especially of the upper and middle ranks; but the more the doctrines were assimilated, the more they nourished a sense of the need of temporal freedom, and roused speculation in thoughtful minds as to what was most needed and wholesome for the social well-being of the State. The old dogma of kingly supremacy had become, to say the least, unpalatable since the days of the despotic Henry VIII. The English nation had no mind to endure tyranny from the new dynasty; and many had looked with suspicion upon James Stuart, not forgetful that the blood of the papist and haughty Guises ran in his veins, and that he held with marvellous tenacity to the dogma, if in his case one might not call it the hobby, of kingly supremacy. Fond of scribbling, and endowed in his own estimation with surpassing argumentative and theological faculties, he sustained and comforted his bodily and mental timidity by pompous assertion and spiritual aphorism concerning the right of kingly control over everything the sun shone upon within his realm. The dogma of the infallibility of the Pope, James I. matched by his postulate that the king could not merely do no wrong, but that everything he did and willed was to be applauded and obeyed. The difficulty was to impose this view upon a sufficient number of his influential subjects to make it work satisfactorily; those wise and moderate counsellors of Elizabeth’s reign, who survived into James’ time, kept him in check, and their experience of feminine weaknesses and short-comings in Elizabeth’s vigorous mind was further widened by an acquaintance with the depths of folly and of childish self-conceit into which an anointed king could fall. Such men as Lord Chancellor Cecil and John Hampden had troublesome conviction of this; and King James I., whom Sully dubbed the wisest fool that ever lived, and Henri IV. relegated to the grades of “Captain of Arts and Bachelor of Arms,” however strong himself in the comfortable doctrines of the divine right of kings, failed in arresting the growth of the life of political liberty.