"--HOOKER,
_Ecclesiastical Polity_.
When Chillingworth's great work was published, in 1637, the last of the
Tudors, after having outlived her popularity, had passed to her rest, as
had also her most unworthy successor, whose insolence had outraged, but
whose weakness had strengthened, the awakening spirit of liberty, and
who, as Macaulay well expresses it,[23:1] "was, in truth, one of those
kings whom God seems to send for the express purpose of hastening
revolutions." To him had succeeded his most worthy son: a king whose
perfidy and duplicity were only equalled by his self-complacency and
power of self-deception, who never looked facts in the face, but
placidly expected them to conform to his own petty desires, and whose
dignified death failed to atone for a life devoted to ignoble personal
ends, by crooked ways and treacherous means; a king peculiarly incapable
of taking a broad statesman-like view of any question, who manifested no
thought for the interests of the people of whom he regarded himself as
ruler by right divine, whose futile domestic policy was inspired solely
by considerations for the advancement of his own personal power, whose
feeble and shifty foreign policy was determined only by considerations
for his own family interests, who intrigued with France against Spain,
with Spain against France, with both against Holland, and with Holland
against both, and with France, Spain, Holland, and Rome against his own
subjects, with English Presbyterians against English Independents, with
English Independents against English Presbyterians, and with Irish
Catholics and Scotch Presbyterians against both English Presbyterians
and Independents, and who yet succeeded in deceiving nobody but himself,
and in satisfying nobody, not even himself; a king whose love was far
more dangerous than his hate, a worthy patron of a Buckingham, a Goring,
or of a Laud, but unworthy the genius of a Shaftesbury or the loyal
services of a Verney, a Montrose, or a Worcester; a king, in short,
treacherous to his friends, faithless to his word, who went to his
wedding and came to his throne with a lie on his lips,[24:1] whom, again
to use the words of Macaulay,[24:2] "no law could bind, and whose whole
government was one system of wrong," of whom even the conservative and
partial Hallam is forced to admit[24:3] that "it would be difficult to
name any violation of law he had not committed.
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