James" son, Charles I, proved even more unacceptable as a King to the Puritans. Leaders of the parliamentary party looked for ways to limit his powers. Consider, for example, the struggle between the King and the Parliamentarians over rights of taxation, or unauthorized taxation in the late 1620s and early 1630s. To generalize, the pattern was this in the two or so decades before the outbreak of war: Parliament would grant the King a certain degree of rights to collect duties and taxes (the King needed funds after all). The trick was that there were limitations on the King's power. For example, he could collect these taxes for, say a year, instead of his entire reign. This is what happened in 1626. In anger, the King dissolved the Parliament - which was his right. But he still failed to raise the money he needed and was forced to call a new Parliament (which he did in 1628). Charles complies, but oversteps the financial and "taxational" bounds set out for him by Parliament. Distraught, Charles attempts to rule without any Parliament, which he felt was limiting his powers too greatly. He failed dismally. The same pattern unfolded in 1639-1640, when powers were granted by the Parliament to Charles, who then went on to dissolve it.
It was this back-and-forth power struggle between the Crown and Parliament that mainly constituted the intellectual origins of the Revolution. In addition, it was also about the inability to compromise, with both sides jealously guarding their powers and prerogatives. Mutual trust was hardly possible under such circumstances, and suspicion grew in tandem with hostility.
The sources of conflict.
To begin, it is worth noting that the English Revolution has also been called the Puritan Revolution. The title explains a great deal about the war's sources of conflict. The opponents of King Charles I tended to have a distinctly religious complexion, that being predominantly Puritan.
