Charles’s religious beliefs have traditionally been more associated with the political theory of the ‘divine right of kings’, the concept elucidated by his father but embraced with less compromise by the son. But to assume that Charles’s ‘divine right’ was a kind of backward-looking, superstitiously unrealistic view of kingly power is to prejudge the issue. In other European monarchies at this time, it was precisely this kind of thinking that was reducing the part played by the ‘Estates’ in government and exalting the monarch’s. Charles’s problem was that he attempted to expound this theory in a political atmosphere that was widely unreceptive to it, and that he seemed to possess the diplomatic skills of a spoilt child.