Principles of western civilisation

322 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

his advisers, that in the act of his breach with Rome, and in constituting himself the only supreme head of the Church in his dominions, he was but restoring the Church in England to a position similar to that which it occupied on the continent of Europe in the age of Charlemagne. He himself imagined that he was at least allying the despotic civil power of the house of Tudor with the principle of divine right in the State. Yet we see him as but a cork on the stream of history. At a later stage Elizabeth, as the movement progressed, was also ready to ally her own government with the new forces in religion; these forces being in the main those which bore her to success and triumph.* But in the middle of her career we see her reminded by a Scottish deputation, that there must also be considered to be latent in the theory of divine right in the State, as it was now understood, the doctrine that nations were in the last resort superior to the sovereigns who differed from them. Still later, James I. and his son Charles I., saw in the alliance between their own authority and that of the established Episcopal Church in England the form of government that, in the words of the chronicler, ‘‘ best compared with their own idea of monarchical power.”* But the stern Calvinists behind the Long Parliament were ready to support, and did support through all the bitter consequences of the overthrow of Charles and the ascendency of Cromwell, the assertion that the theory of divine right in the State, as it had

1 Constitutionol Documents of the Puritan Revolution, Intro. xv., by S. R. Gardiner. 2 Moeller, Hist. of Chr. Church, vol. iii. p. 345.