LIFE OF RICHARD BAXTER. 15 There were many things in the policy of the government, and in the character ofthe times, which promoted, duringall this reign, the cause of Puritanism. The king, with nothing of the mascu- line energy by which Elizabeth controlled her parliaments, had the most extravagant notions of his own divine right to govern with- out limitation, and was evidently bent on setting his will above all laws. Under such a prince, too arbitrary to be loved, and too foolish to be feared, the spirit of liberty naturally revived among the people. Jamesin his folly, gave the name of Puritanism to every movement and every principle;wherever manifested, which breathed of popular privilege, or implied the existence of any limit to his prerogative. Thus the causeof the Puritans was associated, in the estimation both of court and country, with the cause of English freedom, and of resistance to the encroachments of arbi- trary power; and the caúse of the prelates was equally associated with all those measures of the government that were odious to the friends of liberty, or pernicious to the common welfare. Nor was there any incongruity in these associations. The Puritans were men of a stern and republican cast; they spake as if they had rights, and addressed the throne with their complaints. The prel- ates, in all their. relations,, were dependent on the court ; they sympathized with the king in his love of power; they joined with him in his maxim, No bishop, no king ;" and they fedhis orien- tal notions of royalty with strainsof oriental adulation. Thus the party of the Puritans, though it lacked not.the support of many a high-minded nobleman, rapidly became the party of the middling classes ; while prelacy was espoused chiefly by the luxurious and unprincipled nobility on the one hand, and by their degraded and dependent peasantry on the other. At the same time, with a folly ifpossible still greater, the king deserted the Protestant interest in Europe, of whichboth policy and principle ought to have made him the head ; sought first a Spanish, and afterwards a French alliance for his son ; entered into treaties binding himself to protect and favor the Papists in his own kingdom; and in many ways showed himself not unwilling to be reconciled to Rome. Nothing could have been more offensive to the people, whose hatred of Popery, kindled into a passion by the persecutions under Mary, and kept alive by the terror of the Spanish invasion, and by the national rejoicings over its defeat, had now been aggravated into an incurable horror by the recently discovered " Powder Plot." Hardly any thing could have given the Puritans a better introduc- tion topopular favor ; for theywere cordial and zealous Protestants, hating the very garments spotted with the pollutions of Rome; and what could their enemies be but secret Papists ? Another in- stance of the infatuation of this reign was the marked favor shown
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