Between 1642 and 1651 England was in a state of civil war, a civil war that centred around the issue of state government. King Charles I maintained his father, James I’s doctrine of the “Divine Right of Kings”, the belief that the King was only accountable to God and was not to be controlled by any earthly authority (civil or ecclesiastical) even if he governed wrong. He treated the Parliament according to this doctrine, too, regarding it as a representative body of the landed gentry whose only task was to collect the taxes that the King levied to raise money for his purposes. The Parliaments which Charles I summoned, however, were unwilling to perform this task unconditionally. Therefore, Charles attempted for a time to govern without calling the Parliament but was finally forced to convene it again in 1640. Instead of granting the requisite financial support, however, the Parliament began to express their resentment of Charles’s arbitrary government. The King, infuriated by such opposition, dissolved their session after about three weeks’ time (the “Short Parliament”). Later in the same year, however, Charles was forced to assemble another Parliament, which turned out to be even less inclined to fulfill the King’s expectations. They continued expressing their grievances against the King and introduced reforms which placed the King’s power under parliamentary control, including the law that the King could not dissolve Parliament without its consent. In fact, this Parliament was not officially dissolved until 1660 (hence its name: the “Long Parliament”).