Lovelace's prison song
The poem Lovelace wrote in prison goes on to say that birds playing in the air are not as free as he is. Stone walls do not make a prison, nor iron bars a cage; innocent and quiet minds take them for a hermitage. If his love had its liberty and his soul were free, then only the angels flying in the heavens would enjoy such freedom as his.
In 1645 Lovelace went to war again, and in a short poem, To Lucasta, Going to the Wars, he begged his sweetheart's pardon. Do not call me unkind, he said, if I leave the convent of your chaste breast and quiet mind to take up arms. This inconstancy is such that you yourself would love it: I could not love you so much, dear, loved I not honor more. On a false report that he had been killed in battle, Lucasta married another. Lovelace had lost both his beloved and his fortune in the king's cause. He sank into such poverty that he begged food from friends, and the man who had once worn cloth of gold was now dressed in rags and lived in a ruined house. At last, in 1658, he died of consumption at about forty.
Waller, who learned how to last
Lovelace might have learned survival from Edmund Waller. Waller was active for sixty years on both sides of the English revolution, became the most popular poet of his time, outlived Milton and died at eighty-one (1687). He entered Parliament at sixteen, and, the source says, lost his reason at twenty-three and then recovered (a puzzling remark that the source does not explain). At twenty-five he married a London heiress, buried her three years later, and soon afterwards courted Lady Dorothy Sidney in the old manner but a new style. His best-known lines are addressed to a rose. Go, lovely rose, he says, and tell her who wastes her time and mine that when I compare her with you she will know how sweet and fair she seems. Tell her that she is young and does not wish her beauty to be seen, and that if you had grown in a desert where no man cared to pass, you would have died unvalued. So die, rose, that she may read in you the common fate of all rare things: that things which are sweet and fair have so little share of time.
Crashaw and the mystic strain
Another poet who is not even counted among the minor ones is named in this period, Richard Crashaw, a devout man who paid little attention to bodily pleasures. His father, an Anglican clergyman, had written tracts against the Catholics and had warned his son against popery, but Richard turned Catholic. He was expelled from Cambridge for his loyalty to the king, and had to go from England to Paris, where he softened the hardship of his poverty by thinking of God. The Spanish mystics were his models of piety and religious ardor. Standing before an image of St. Teresa, he envied her the wound she had received from the dart of divine love, and begged her to take him as a disciple who had given up himself. By the kingdom of that last kiss, he said, and by the eternal joys you find in Him, leave nothing of me in myself, and let me so know your life that I pass beyond my own.
He published this poem and others in a collection called Steps to the Temple (1646), a mixture of mystic rapture and poetic conceit. From Crashaw and another poet, Henry Vaughan, we see that England in those stormy years was not simply divided into Puritans and Cavaliers. Amid the struggles of religion and poetry, there were some who did not look for faith in grand cathedrals, drowsy ceremony, terrifying doctrine or proud superiority, but found it in the trusting, childlike bond between the poor in spirit and a kind and forgiving God.
Charles I and his Parliament, 1625 to 1629
What sort of king was it for whom all Englishmen were now to fight? Before the revolution wore away his kindly nature, he was a fairly good man: a gentle son, an unusually faithful husband, a true friend, and a father whom his children worshipped. Charles began life with a struggle against a bodily weakness, since he could not walk until he was seven. By hard exercise he overcame it, so that as a grown man he could ride and hunt with the most skilled. He also had a speech defect and until ten could seldom speak clearly, and his father even thought of an operation on the child's tongue. The condition improved little by little, but he stammered all his life and spoke slowly to master it. When his beloved elder brother Henry died and left him heir to the crown, Charles was blamed for the death. The charge was false, but it left him depressed. He preferred study in seclusion to his father's lively court, and so he became skilled in mathematics, music and theology, learned a little Greek and Latin, and acquired French and Italian with a little Spanish.
Charles loved art. He cherished the collection his brother had left and added to it, became a skilled collector, and supported artists, poets and musicians. He called the Italian painter Gentileschi to court, then Rubens, Van Dyck and Frans Hals. Hals declined, and Rubens came as an ambassador. The whole world has seen the portraits in which Van Dyck painted Charles with a beard like his own. They show a proud, well-formed king. William Dobson, a pupil of Van Dyck, likewise painted the royal family very well.
Charles's ancestry and his marriage brought him misfortune. Like his father he loved absolute monarchy and wanted the right to make and execute law, to rule without Parliament and to ignore the laws Parliament had made. This theory was backed by the precedents that had been seen, and in France and Spain it was taken as self-evident. Buckingham, the court and the queen all supported Charles's view.
Henrietta Maria had grown up at the French court, where Richelieu was teaching Louis XIII the ways of despotism (the source's wording here is muddled, and seems to say that Richelieu considered himself beyond the king's power). She was a zealous Catholic who came to England with priests of her own, and the more her faith was attacked in England the more firmly she held to it. She had beauty, vivacity and a quick mind, and like the Medici she had a feel for politics. In the end she persuaded her faithful husband to ease the pressure on England's Catholics, and she no doubt hoped to bring Charles into the Catholic church. She bore six children (the book's number), and Charles must have resisted her pleas that they be raised as Catholics. He was sincerely attached to the Church of England, and supposed that most Englishmen were Protestant and opposed to the Pope's threats.
The first Parliament of Charles's reign met on 18 June 1625. The House of Lords had a hundred nobles and bishops. The five hundred members of the Commons, three quarters of them Puritans, had come in by money and influence that were not altogether honorable, and no one made claims for democracy. Yet the ability in this Parliament was perhaps higher than its electors deserved, because it included men famous in history, such as Coke, Selden, Pym, John Eliot, Sir Thomas Wentworth and others. The Commons' combined wealth was three times that of the Lords. The Commons showed their mind by insisting that the anti-Catholic laws be enforced in full. When the king asked for money for the government and for war with Spain, Parliament voted only 140,000 pounds (the book's figure), which was not enough, since the navy alone needed twice as much. For two centuries English kings had been granted for life the right to levy duties on goods coming in and going out, from two to three shillings on each tun and six to twelve pence on each pound. Now, by a bill that passed Parliament, Charles was allowed this right for only one year.
Parliament argued that the earlier grants had been wasted by James's extravagant court, and complained that the king had gathered taxes without Parliament's consent. It therefore meant to meet every year and examine the government's spending. Charles resented this thrift and these aims, and when plague broke out in London he used it as an excuse and dissolved Parliament on 12 August 1625.