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CHAPTER I

THE ACCESSION OF CHARLES I.

THE seventeenth century was a time of crisis, as serious as the Reformation, in the history of the English Chant

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e years from 1625 to 1662 mark the duration of that conflict, and hardly before 1714 had its echoes died away.

In the period of which this book is to treat there is an

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CHAPTER I

THE ACCESSION OF CHARLES I.

The struggles

seventeenth

THE seventeenth century was a time of crisis, as serious as the Reformation, in the history of the English Church. The masterful and moderating hand of Elizabeth once removed, men began to look out more freely over of the a wide expanse of thought and life, and to carry century. the principles which they had adopted into vigorous action. The Thirty Years' War, the suppression of the political and ecclesiastical separation of the Huguenots, and the establishment of Protestant supremacy in the United Provinces, appealed to Englishmen as great religious questions. And in the freedom which they had won for themselves the sharp divisions of opinion in England tended to stand out more clearly. With the reign of Charles I. began the decisive struggle which was to fix the limits of the Reformation, and to determine whether the English Church should maintain the principles of doctrine and order enunciated in the Preface to her Book of Common Prayer and her Ordinal. The divergence between historic, traditional Christianity, with its creeds and its Episcopal system, and the new dogmas and disciplines which had been elaborated in Germany and Switzerland, and which were echoed from many English pulpits, was one which must eventually lead to open conflict. The years from 1625 to 1662 mark the duration of that conflict, and hardly before 1714 had its echoes died away.

In the period of which this book is to treat there is an

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extraordinary wealth of interest-doctrinal, disciplinary, constitutional, personal. Much of it must here be passed by with but slight notice, and attention will chiefly be directed to the important principles and the important characters as they are viewed from the standing-point of the Church as a continuous historic body. The interesting and fruitful history of the societies which now definitely separated from the Church must be put aside; and, for the same reason, the period of the Church's disestablishment will receive but scant notice. We must be content to trace how events moved, and why, to human view, they moved in the direction which they took.

On March 27, 1625, King James I. passed away at Theobalds. He made a pious end, spending all his last days in prayer, and receiving absolution and the Holy Communion. His only surviving son watched by him assiduously, and with him the friend for whom the dying king had done so much— George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.

The accession

Clarendon, looking back forty years afterwards, records that Charles, Prince of Wales, succeeded to the crown with as universal a joy in the people as can be imagined, of Charles I. and in a conjuncture when all the other parts of Christendom were very solicitous of his friendship; and he refused to look back into the past for the causes of the discontents which were soon to overthrow the monarchy. But the very days of mourning showed the disturbance of popular feeling; it was whispered that the late king had been poisoned by Buckingham, and eventually his physician, Sir William Paddy, was examined on the matter. The accusation was, of course, ridiculous, but it showed how popular feeling went. It was of ill omen for the young king that he so greatly trusted his father's favourite, the object of almost universal distrust and dislike.

On May 1, 1625, the king was married by proxy at Paris to Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henry IV. of France. On May 7 he attended the solemn funeral of his father in Westminster Abbey, an act of filial piety which was contrary to precedent. Williams, Bishop of Lincoln and Lord Keeper, preached a sermon on Great Britain's Solomon." It was a time of national mourning, for the plague was rife, and a day of public fasting was held on July 2. When the plague

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