But it was complained of, and probably with reason that the impartiality was altogether confined to the orders, and that the execution of them was only meant against the Calvinists.
In return for Charles's indulgence towards the church, Laud and his followers took care to magnify, on every occasion, the regal authority, and to treat with the utmost disdain or detestation all Puritanical pretensions to a free and independent constitution.

But while these prelates were so liberal in raising the crown at the expense of public liberty, they made no scruple of encroaching, themselves, on the royal rights the most incontestable, in order to exalt the hierarchy, and procure to their own order dominion and independence.

All the doctrines which the Romish church had borrowed from some of the fathers, and which freed the spiritual from subordination to the civil power, were now adopted by the church of England, and interwoven with her political and religious tenets.

A divine and apostolical charter was insisted on, preferably to a legal and parliamentary one.[**] * State Papers collected by the earl of Clarendon, p 338.
** Whitlocke, p.

22.
The sacerdotal character was magnified as sacred and indefeasible: all right to spiritual authority, or even to private judgment in spiritual subjects, was refused to profane laymen: ecclesiastical courts were held by the bishops in their own name, without any notice taken of the king's authority: and Charles, though extremely jealous of every claim in popular assemblies, seemed rather to encourage than repress those encroachments of his clergy.