Page:General History of Europe 1921.djvu/475

BOOK VII. THE SEVENTEENTH AND EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES CHAPTER XXVIII STRUGGLE IN ENGLAND BETWEEN KING AND PARLIAMENT I. THE STUARTS AND THE DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS 597. Accession of James I of England (leoa) ; the Stuarts. On the death of Elizabeth in 1603 James I ascended the throne. It will be remembered that he was the son of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and through her he was a descendant of Henry VIII. In Scotland he reigned as James VI ; consequently the two king- doms were now brought together under the same ruler. The chief interest of the period of the Stuarts, which be- gan with the accession of James I and ended with the flight from England of his grandson, James II, eighty-five years later, is the long and bitter struggle between the Stuart kings and Parliament. The vital question was, Should the Stuart kings, who claimed to be God's representatives on earth, do as they thought fit, or should Parliament control them and the govern- ment of the country? 598. James I loved to discuss the King's Claims. James I had a very irritating way of claiming to be the sole and supreme ruler of England. He wrote a book in which he asserted that the king could make any law he pleased without consulting Parlia- ment ; that he was the master of every one of his subjects, high and low, and might put to death whom he pleased. According to the theory of "the divine right of kings" which James held,