James and Parliament
James's attitude towards Parliament also demonstrated his absolutist tendencies. He told the Spanish ambassador: 'I am surprised that my ancestors should ever have permitted such an institution to come into existence. I am a stranger, and found it here when I arrived, so that I am obliged to put up with what I cannot get rid of.'
The Parliament that James was obliged to put up with had developed a strongly independent character during Elizabeth's long reign. Its composition and nature had changed too. The gentry – the knights of the shires who had once provided the affinities of quarrelling magnates – had been given responsibility for much of the business of local government. They had grown accustomed to this exercise of power, and they expected to be consulted.
Above all, they held the purse strings. To raise new taxes, the king needed the agreement of Parliament, but to summon it meant inevitable demand that the crown address a long string of grievances. To someone who believed in his divine right to rule, it was demeaning.
Losing the argument
So James tried to avoid summoning Parliament. This meant avoiding unnecessary expense and, particularly, foreign wars. But when James died, his son Charles I proved unable to show the same restraint. The price that Parliament exacted for providing the funds for war was the Petition of Right, a bedrock of English freedoms.
But the relationship between the king and Parliament continued to deteriorate, and Charles attempted to rule without it altogether. The attempt failed when Charles tried to impose a degree of religious uniformity on the Scots, in particular to enforce the use of the Book of Common Prayer, and prompted a revolt against him. The conflict between Parliament and the king came to a head in the English Civil Wars, and Charles lost his head as a result of it.
Despite the restoration of the monarchy under Charles II in 1660, the advocates of the divine right of kings had lost the argument. The 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688 finally removed them from power permanently. The limited or constitutional monarchy triumphed over absolutism, and in large part as a result of that, no future British monarchs went the way of Charles I or their counterparts in France, Russia and elsewhere.
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 Riot in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, after the imposition of the Book of Common Prayer in 1637: one of the events that would lead to civil war.
British Library/Bridgeman Art Library
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