Englub Histonad Review
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The English Historical Review
No. CCCCXXV - October 1992
The Divine Right ofKings Reconsidered
State of MONARCHIE is the supremest thing upon earth: For Kings
are not onely GODS Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon GODS throne,
but even by GOD himselfe they are called Gods.'1 James I delivered
these famous words to his Lords and Commons at Whitehall on 21 March
1609/10, and they have been the subject of debate ever since. In recent
times that debate has been amongst historians, once rather shocked by
James's un-English words, but more recently inclined to probe with
increased subtlety the mental world that underlay them. Even those more
recent attempts, however, have told us more about the ancestry of James's
ideas, and rather less about their place in the general structure of early
Stuart political discourse. It is to the latter subject that this essay is
addressed, in the belief that a history of the origins and sources of a
set of ideas is never by itself able to provide a complete account of the
uses to which those ideas can be put.
Since John Neville Figgis's pioneering study of The Divine Right of
Kings was first published in 1896, historians have found a variety of new
perspectives from which to view the subject. It seems, however, that
the best recent work has, in a number of respects, reinforced Figgis's
own judgements.2 Figgis rejected the view that the divine right of kings
was a 'collection of purely ridiculous propositions perversely preached
by a servile church'.3 Instead, he perceived the deep medieval roots
of the theory, and saw how it was developed to cope with real political
problems posed in the aftermath of the Reformation. Initially the divineright theory was valuable for its defence of the rights of monarchy against
the political claims of the Papacy; later it was equally useful against the
similar claims of Presbyterians.4 But perhaps the most significant of
the interpretative claims made by Figgis was that the divine right of
'THE
1. James I, 'A Speach to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-Hall, on Wednesday
the XXI. of March. Anno 1609 [ifiio]", in The Workes of the Most High and Mightte Pnnce, James
King of Groat Britoine, France and Ireland(London,
...
1616), p. £29.
2. N o t e the broadly favourable assessment of Figgis by G. R. Elton, 'The Divine Right of Kings',
in his Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government (2 vols., Cambridge, 1974), ii. 193-214.
5. J. N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (2nd edn., Cambridge, 1921), p. 256. The attitude which
Figgis decried may not yet be dead. 'Charles was unaware that it was not enough that he sincerely
believed in the divine right absolutism of monarchy or that he appointed a second-rate crew of divines
to provide a choral accompaniment to his views': David S. Berkowitz, 'Reason of State in England
and the Petition of Right, 1603-1629', in Staatsrdson: Studien zur Geschithte etnes poliuscben
ed. Roman Schnur (Berlin, 1975), p.180.
4. E g . Figgis, Divine Right of Kings, pp. 257,259-63,137-8, i86ff.
Begrij^s,
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kings had an essential place in the development of Western political
theory: it enabled the establishment of a proper theory of sovereignty.
It was 'necessary as a transition stage between medieval and modern
politics' because it served as 'the popular form of expression for the
theory of sovereignty'.1 The divine right of kings made the theory
of sovereignty concrete, thus facilitating its growth.
Subsequent work has on the whole expanded upon, perhaps qualified,
these perspectives, rather than moving beyond them. We now know
much more detail about the medieval sources for the theory of divine
right,2 and about the impact of the Reformation on theories of kingship
in England and on the European Continent.3 On what will be the
central issue addressed in this essay, the place of the theory of the divine
right of kings in the history of political thought, there has been less
unanimity. The consequence of Figgis's identification of divine right with
the theory of sovereignty is that it must also be a theory of royal absolutism. Figgis defined sovereignty - and here he was simply following John
Austin - as the doctrine 'that there must be in it [the state] some ultimate
authority, which because it can make laws is above law'.4 When that
ultimate authority is placed in the monarchy, then it must follow that
the monarch will be an absolute sovereign. Figgis stated this conclusion
clearly enough:
Monarchy is pure, the sovereignty being entirely vested in the king, whose
power is incapable of legal limitation. All law is a mere concession of his
will, and all constitutional forms and assemblies exist entirely at his pleasure.
... A mixed or limited monarchy is a contradiction in terms.5
Not all historians have accepted this argument.
For some there has been a need to qualify Figgis and to step back
from the starkness of his interpretation. Margaret Judson, for example,
has argued that only two clerical divine-right theorists achieved a proper
theory of sovereignty,6 and Francis Oakley has stressed the ambivalence
1. Ibid-, pp. 2j8, 237.
2. Sec W. H. Greenleaf, 'The Thomasian Tradition and the Theory of Absolute Monarchy', ante,
botix (19*4), 747-60; and id., 'James I and the Divine Right of Kings', Political Studies, v (1957), 36-48.
Cf. also id., Order, Empiricism and Politics: Two Traditions of English Political Thought, jjto-j/oo (Westport, Conn., 1980), esp. chs. 1-3^ Francis Oakley, 'Jacobean Political Theology: The Absolute and Ordinary
Powers of the King'Journal ojthe History ojIdeas, xxix (1968), 323-46; id , "The "Hidden" and "Revealed"
Wills of James L More Political Theology', Studia Gratiana, xli (1972), 365-75; and id., Omnipotence,
Covenant, and Order. An Excursion in the History of Ideas from AbeUrd to Lethniz (Ithaca, NY, 1984).
3. A selective list of recent work might include A. Fox and J. Guy, Reassessing the Hennaan Age:
Humanism, Politics and Reform, itoo-ijfo (Oxford, 1986); Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London, 19S8); and Quentin Skinner,
The Foundations of Modem Political Thought (2 vols., Cambridge, 1978), ii.
4. Figgis, Divine Right of Kings, p. 13,
j . Ibid., pp. $-6.
6. Margaret Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought
in England, idoj-iiiff (New York, 1976), pp. 202, 2J3TI. (the two were Roger Manwanng and William
Dickinson).
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of the theory. It was not solely absolutist, but could also imply some
sort of limitation on royal authority.1 Two scholars, however, have
gone further:2 James Daly and - rather earlier - J. W. Allen. Daly
has argued that the world-view underlying divine-right theories, far from
making kings absolute, was actually hostile to the idea that kings had
any substantial latitude for the discretionary exercise of sovereign will.
It embedded them in a divinely created hierarchy, and this position
required them to obey the norms and serve the purposes that God had
laid down.3 Daly was possibly unwise to lay so much stress on the
belief that the concept of 'cosmic harmony' was inherently inimical to
absolutist thinking,4 but his general perception that Royalist thinking
in the early seventeenth century was in some ways as constitutionalist
as it was absolutist remains valuable. It is compatible, too, with the verdict
reached in the neglected few pages that J. W. Allen wrote on the political
thinking of the early Stuart divines. Allen was of the opinion that only
ignorance and misapprehension were responsible for the belief that the
Jacobean and Caroline divines were absolutists. On the contrary, 'belief
in the King's divine right implied no particular belief as to the extent
of a King's rights in England or elsewhere.' They 'were certainly not
concerned with actual powers, legal or extra-legal, in any one State',
and so it follows that 'there are but very few traces in English writings
before 1642 of any theory of royal absolutism by divine right'.5 The
crucial difference between Figgis and Allen is that the latter did not see
divine-right theory as a phase in the history of the concept of sovereignty;
rather it was a theory of obligation, concerned primarily with the need
to demonstrate to both rulers and subjects their duties before God.6
Eventually this essay will provide reasons for thinking that Allen was
in large part correct. But it needs first to be established why that is
a task worth undertaking. In recent years there has been a powerful
reassertion of perspectives on the divine right of kings that are basically
Figgisian (i.e. they see it as a theory of absolute royal sovereignty). The
1. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, ch 4, esp. pp. niff.
2. There are also suggestive remarks in Robert Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics: Theories
of Absolute and Limited Monarchy in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978), pp. 1-6 and passim; also
p. 76 for a rejection of the view that divine-right theories constituted a theory of sovereignty. Nevertheless,
Eccleshall remans Figgisian in that he conflates the divine right of kings with absolutism.
3. See esp. James Daly, 'Cosmic Harmony and Political Thinking in Early Stuart England', Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, lxix, pt. 7 (1979), esp. 21-51; also icL, 'The Idea of Absolute
Monarchy in Seventeenth-Century England', Historical Journal, xxi (1978), 227-jo. But note that even
Daly has remarked that 'it is clear that the divines' use of the term [absolute] comes much closer
than the lawyers' to a general concept of absolutism': ibid 234, n.33.
4. See the telling remarks in Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order, pp. 99-103.
5. J. W. Allen, English Political Thought, 160J-1660 (2 vols. planned, but only one appeared, London,
i«8). i. 97,101.
6. Ibid, pp. 99-101.
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work of J. P. Sommerville has been central to this development,1 and
has already had a substantial impact upon early seventeenth-century historiography.2 Dissenting voices have been few - though they have,
admittedly, been powerful voices.3 Sommerville has argued that 'the
contention that the king drew his authority from God alone was the
central plank upon which absolutist theory rested'. Further, 'the effect
of absolutist theory was to make the king sovereign in England.' As
did Figgis, Sommerville believes that the force behind the development
of such a theory was a polemical one: 'Absolutists magnified royal power.
They did this to protect the state against anarchy and to refute the ideas
of resistance theorists.'4
But did they? The crucial issue here is the consequences that divine-right
theorists drew from their own premises. Everyone, including Allen,
would accept the negative dynamic with which Sommerville credits
divine-right theory: it was an argument designed to rebut Presbyterian
and Catholic resistance theories. The question is whether that negative
dynamic was also linked to a positive one, that of crediting the kings
of England with full legal sovereignty, and thus magnifying their authority. Conrad Russell has doubted that this was the case, explicitly echoing
the queries of J. W. Allen.5 He argues instead that divine-right theory
- even the view that kings derived their authority immediately from
God - was perfectly compatible with the view that kings were also limited
by the law. He warns us against deducing too much from the vague
words of divine-right theorists: unless they said explicitly that kings could
make, or ignore, laws at their pleasure, we should not assume that this
is what they meant.6 And generally speaking, they did not say this.
The picture that Russell's account conveys is one in which before the
Civil War, and certainly before 1625, the constitutional thinking of nearly
all Englishmen fitted into a narrow spectrum defined at one end b y the
absence of resistance theory and at the other by the absence of the view
that kings could, by themselves, make laws of a force equivalent to statute
1. J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England, 1603-1640 (London, 198*), esp. ch. 1; also id.,
"Ideology, Property and the Constitution', in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studio in Religion and
Politics, I6O}-I&*2, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London, 1989), ch. 2; id., 'From Suarez to Filmen
A Reappraisal', Historical Journal, m (1982), $25-40; id., 'Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia, and the
Advent of the Divine Right of Kings', History of Political Thought, iv (1983), 129-4$; »nd id., 'History
and Theory: The Norman Conquest in Early Stuart Political Thought', Political Studies, xxxiv (1986),
249-61.
2. See for example the acceptance of his interpretations in Lake, Anglicans and Puntansf, esp. p. 8,
alio pp. 64-5, 246, but cf. pp. 204-5; Richard Cust, The Forced Loan and English Politics, 1626-162S
(Oxford, 1987), p. 328; Thomas Cogswell, 'The Politics of Propaganda: Charles I and the People in
the 1620s", Journal of British Studies, xxix (1990), 190; Ann Hughes, The Causes of the English Civil War
(London, 1991), pp. 81-3.
3. Kevin Sharpe, Politics and Ideas m Early Stuart England (London, 1989), pp. 285-8, Conrad Russell,
The Causes of the English Civil War (Oxford, 1990), ch. 6. See also my own remarks in 'Revisionism,
Politics and Political Ideas in Early Stuart England", Historical Journal, xxxiv (1991), 465-78.
4. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, pp. 12,38,35.
5. Russell, Causes of the English Civil War, p. 150.
6. Ibid., pp. 145-8EHR Oct. 92
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or common law.1 It is, then, the fact that the differences between Figgis
and Allen are once more being fought over in the most recent work
on pre-Civil-War England that makes the subject of the divine right of
kings worth investigating again.
The divine right of kings and the theory of royal absolutism were not
the same thing.2 Both had long medieval pedigrees, but they were different pedigrees; both were given a new lease of life by the Reformation,
but it was not always the case that they went hand in hand in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries; most theories of royal absolutism may have
incorporated a divine-right element, but the reverse was not necessarily
true. The idea that there was something particularly divine about kingship
was one which went back at least to the earliest phases of medieval history.3 Even that supposed fountain of English constitutionalism, Bracton, could refer to the king as the 'vicar of God on earth'.4 There
was almost nothing new in early modern theories of divine-right kingship
(the possible exception is - as Figgis was aware - its connection with
indefeasible hereditary right5); indeed, if anything, early modern theories
were rather more modest in their claims than medieval ones, in that
they avoided notions of sacral kingship. In the early modern period the
main contention which divine-right theory served to underpin was that
the authority of kings was derived from God directly, and hence was
not derived from their people. This did not, even for some of the archexponents of the idea, rule out the possibility that kings might be elected
or chosen by their people.6 It did, however, rule out the possibility
that the people could resist or actively disobey their kings, whether they
1. Ibid , pp. ijoff.
2. I should make it clear that the exercise conducted here is very different from that attempted
in Daly, 'Idea of Absolute Monarchy', which examines the seventeenth-century political uses of the
term 'absolute'. The problem with this is that Daly too readily moves from absolute to absolutism,
though this latter term was a later coinage. What I have termed 'absolutism' would not have been
so termed in the seventeenth century, but the concept itself was not lacking.
3. P. D. King in The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, c.tfo-c.1450, ed- J. H. Burn*
(Cambridge, 19S8), pp. 127-9, H3~4i Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government tnd Politics in the Middle
Ages (London, 1961), pt. ii, esp. chs. 1 and 2. Also interesting, in spite of its now antiquated perspectives,
is Fritz Kern, Kingship and Law in the Middle Ago (Oxford, 1939), pp- 1-68. Note especially Kern's
point (p.i) that the components of early modern theories of divuie-nght kingship came from separate
medieval sources.
4. Ewart Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas (2 vols., London, 1954), i. 282.
5. See J. H. Burns, "The Idea of Absolutism', in Absolutism in Seventeenth Century Europe, ed. John
Miller (London, 1990), pp. 30-1.
6. See James I, 'Speach of XXI. March 1609 [1610]*, Workes, pp. 530-1; John Maxwell, Sancro-sancta
Regum Majestas: or; The Sacred and Royal! Prerogative of Christian Kings (Oxford, 1644), pp. 22-3. Maxwell,
in an obvious allusion to the Great Tew Royalists, even recognized that a theory of monarchy based
on consent and individual rights could be used to achieve his purpose (though it so happened that
he also believed such a theory to be in conflict with Scripture): ibid., pp. 18-19. F ° r t n c Great Tew
circle, see Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin tnd Development (Cambridge, 1979),
pp. 101-10; Perez Zagorin, 'Clarendon and Hobbes', Journal of Modem History, lvii (19S5), 593-616; and
John Sanderson, 'But the People's Creatures': The Philosophical Basis of the English Civil War (Manchester,
1989), ch. 3.
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had elected them or not. This was indeed the main function of the theory
in post-Reformation political thought.
In performing that function there was no need for divine-right theory
to go to the length of accepting the claims of absolutist theory. The
essential feature of absolutism was its claim that the king alone was superior to the positive law and not bound by it. In practical terms, this
guaranteed the right of an absolute sovereign to give people laws without
their consent.1 In the words of the civil law maxims frequently used
to buttress that claim, princeps legibus solutus est, the prince is free of
the law (Digest, I, ii. 31); and quod principi placuit habet legis vigorem,
what has pleased the prince has the force of a law (Digest, I, iv. 1). From
the central Middle Ages onwards, civil and canon lawyers developed
and applied these tags to the power of both the pope and the emperor.2
It was perhaps the concept of the pope's plenitudo potestatis (fullness
of power) which most prefigured the absolutism of the early modern
period, when the Reformation facilitated (though it did not initiate) the
transferral of that concept to secular rulers.3 But in any case, such
absolutism is just one possible end-point of a theory of the divine right
of kings. The two theories derive from different sources, and it has always
been possible to have one without the other. Nevertheless it is true that
in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe the two traditions were
generally fused into a theory of divine-right absolutism/ The question
is whether or not England followed this pattern.
To qualify as a theorist of 'absolutism' an English thinker would need
to make the claim that the king could give laws to his subjects, without
consultation, which in praaice amounts to the claim that proclamations
1. For Jean Bodin 'the principall point of Soveraigne majestie, and absolute power ... flies] in giving
laws unto the subjects in general], without their consent': The Six Bookes of a Commonweale, trans.
Richard Knolles, cd. Kenneth McRac (Cambridge, Mass., 19*2), i. 8, p. 98.
2. For example, Pennington in Cambridge History of Medina! Political Thought, pp. 43J-4; Brian
Tierney, '"The Prince is not Bound by the Laws": Accursius and the Origins of the Modern State',
Comparative Studies in Society and History, v (1963), 378-400; and Myron P. Gilmore, Arguments from
Roman Law in Political Thou$t, noo-1600 (Cambridge, Mass., 1941).
3. For the concept of plenitudo potestatis, see I. S. Robinson in Cambridge History ofMtdieval Political
Thought, pp. i8iff. Compare 'the pope is not bound by laws because he makes the laws' (ibid., p. 287)
with Figgis's definition of sovereignty quoted above. Also Pennington, ibid., pp. 430-1, 433-4. For
broader issues, see M. J. Wilks, The Problem of Sovereignty in the Later Middle Age,- The Papal Monarchy
with Augusunus Triumphus and the Publicists (Cambridge, 1963); and for new insight into the early
modern Papacy, in theory and praaice, Paolo Prodi, The Papal Pnnce: One Body and Two Souls the Papal Monarchy m Early Modem Europe (Cambridge, 1987).
4. See Burns, 'Idea of Absolutism'; also Roland Mousnier, 'The Exponents and Critics of Absolutism',
in The New Cambridge Modem History, vol. iv, ed. J. P. Cooper (Cambridge, 1970), ch. 3, which places
less stress on divine right, but certainly lumps James I in with all the continental theorists. For the
distinctiveness of England, see J. P Cooper, 'Differences between English and Continental Government
in the Early Seventeenth Century', in his Land, Men and Beliefs: Studies in Early Modem History (London,
1983), ch. 5
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1
should have a force superior to that of statute or common law. Such
an absolute monarch would not be a tyrant so long as he (or, more
rarely, she) respected the moral guidelines for the employment of absolute
authority contained in natural or divine law. The tyrant was distinguished
from the true king primarily in moral rather than constitutional terms.2
A theory of absolute monarchy of this sort did require the underpinnings
of something like a theory of sovereignty. It required that the king be
seen as someone with authority to make laws binding on all individuals
and groups within his realm, but who was himself not bound by positive
law. English divine-right theorists, it will be argued here, did not usually
espouse such a theory. This was not necessarily because they rejected
absolutism directly, but because they were working on a different plane.
Often they scarcely engaged with what we might identify as the problem
of absolutism at all. The questions they dealt with were not, generally,
questions that demanded any specific account of the extent and scope
of royal authority. Arguments demonstrating the iniquity of resistance
and the inviolability of the duty of allegiance, found in the writings
of James I and his more articulate subjects, did not amount to a theory
of absolutism because they entailed no commitment to any particular
view of the king's authority to make law, or of the ways in which such
an authority should be exercised. There was a world of difference between
claiming that a king possessed the right to give laws without consent,
and claiming that he did not possess such a right, but nevertheless could
not be resisted should he act upon the delusion of possessing it.
Divine-right theory, partly because it was not a theory of royal absolutism, did have a number of uses in Reformation England, the most important of which were its role in combating theories of papal jurisdiction
over secular rulers, and its role in rejecting theories of resistance, both
1. The conventions governing proclamations were expressed in 1539 by the Act of Proclamations
(31 Henry VIII, c. 8), which was repealed in IJ47. It specifically declared that by proclamations no
'acts, common laws ... nor yet any lawful or laudable customs of this realm ... shall be infringed,
broken or subverted': G. R. Elton, The Tudor Constitution: Documents and Commentary (Cambridge,
1971), p. 28; cf. Elton's comments, pp. 21-2. There was a continuing discussion of proclamations throughout
the early Stuart period: cf. Esther S. Cope, 'Sir Edward Coke and Proclamations, 1610', American Journal
0/Legal History, xv (1971), 21J-21; and R. W. Heinze, 'Proclamation and Parliamentary Protest, 1539-1610',
in Tudor Rule and Revolution: Essays for G. R. Elton from bis American Friends, ed. D. J. Guth and
J. W. McKenna (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 237-59, which does suggest substantial consensus on the constitutional theory of proclamations. Contrast, however, the argument of R. W. K. Hinton, 'Government
and Liberty under James I', Cambridge Historical Journal, xi (1953), 48-64.
2. See particularly Bodin's discussion of tyranny in Six Bookes of a Commonwcalc, 11. 4-5. Bodin
identified three types of monarchy: lawful (or royal), lordly, and tyrannical. Their essential features
were denned in the following passage (ibid., p. 200): 'Wherefore a lawfull or royall Monarchic is that
where the subjects obey the laws of a Monarque, and the Monarque the lawes of nature, the subjects
mjoying their naturall libertie, and propertie of their goods. The lordly Monarchic is that where the
prince is become lord of the goods and persons of his subjects, by law of armes and lawfull warre;
governing them as the master of a familie doth his slaves. The tyrannicall Monarchic, is where the
prince contemning the lawes of nature and nations, imperiously abuseth the persons of his free borne
subjects, and their goods as his owne.' The tyrant was essentially a king who misused his authority
by ruling selfishly and contrary to the natural principles of morality. This line of thinking took as
authoritative the remark of Aristotle, 'the aim of a tyrant is his own pleasure: the aim of a king
is the Good' (Politics, 1311a: Ernest Barker (ed.), The Politics of A ristotle [Oxford, 1956,1982I p. 236).
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Catholic and Calvinist. But, on the whole, political thought in this period
used divine-right theory without connecting it with absolutism. The classic examples are men like John Aylmer, Thomas Bilson and John Bridges.
There may have been elements of Caesaropapalism in some Tudor especially Henrician - understandings of the Royal Supremacy and of
monarchy1, but the dominant Elizabethan position seems to have combined the view that monarchical authority in both Church and State
was by divine right with the view that that authority should be exercised
through legal (and above all parliamentary) channels.2 In Lamont's
words on Bilson, the general objective of the apologists for the Elizabethan
ecclesiastical and civil polities 'was to free the Crown from bondage to
St. Peter while binding it to Magna Carta.'3 Bilson, Bridges and Aylmer
were all, in a sense, divine-right theorists: they all believed that the kings
of England were answerable only to God. However, they also believed
that the kings of England were not absolute, but were kept within legal
bounds by the nature of the English constitution.4
A position such as this had a number of ideological advantages. It vested
a divinely-ordained, irresistible authority in the English Crown, which
helped in rebutting the claims of the Papacy and of resistance theorists
(and of course, for obvious reasons, distancing themselves from Marian
resistance theory was a major intellectual preoccupation of the early Elizabethans5). But the ideological benefits of the position were not exhausted
1. See the general discussion in John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford, 1988), pp. 369-78. Also J J.
Scansbnck, Henry VIII (London, 1968), chs. 9 and 12, esp. pp. 395ft; Walter Ullmann, '"This Realm
of England is an Empire"', Jourjui of Ecclesiastical History, xxx (1979), 175-203; Fox and Guy, Reassessing
the Henrician Age, ch 7; Claire Cross, 'Churchmen and the Royal Supremacy', in Church and Society
in England: Henry VIII to Jama I, ed, F. Heal and R. O'Day (London, 1977), ch. 1; and ead., The
Royal Supremacy in the Elizabethan Church (London, 1969), esp. ch. 1 By the seventeenth century the
idea of imperial kingship was employed for general Erastian purposes by writers whom none would
consider Caesaropapalists: e.g. Sir Edward Coke, 'Of the Kings Ecclesiastical Law1, Fifth Part of the
Reports of Sir Edward Coke (1605), repr. in Coke, Reports (London, 1776), iii, pp. vii-ix, xl; and Nathaniel
Fiennes in the Long Parliament (8 Feb. 1641), in John Rushworth, Historical Collections (8 vols., London,
1659-1721), iv. 176.
2. See particularly G. R. Elton, 'Lex Terrae Victrvc. The Triumph of Parliamentary Law in the
Sixteenth Century', in The Parliaments of Elizabethan England, ed. D. M. Dean and N. L. Jones (Oxford,
1990), ch. 1.
3. William Lamont, 'The Rise and Fall of Bishop Bilson', Journal of British Studies, v (1966), 24.
See also Patrick Collinson, 'If Constantine, then also Theodosius: St Ambrose and the Integrity of
the Elizabethan Ecdesia Anglican!, in his Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism
(London, 1983), ch 4.
4. For Bilson and Bridges, see Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, pp. 132-5. For Aylmer, see John Aylmer,
An Harborowe for Fauhfull and Trewe Subjtctes (Strasburg [London], 1559), sigs. H3-H4 (the English
Constitution), and Bzv-B^ Ri (divine right). I am not persuaded by the attempt to explain away Aylmer's
constitutionalism in Michael Mendlc, Dangerous Positions: Mixed Government, the Estates of the Realm,
and the Answer to the XIX Propositions (Alabama, 1985), pp. 48-51. For general accounts, see Christopher
Morris, Political Thought in England: Tyndale to Hooker (Oxford, 1953), pp. 77-9, 117-21; and J. W.
Allen, A History of Political Thought m the Sixteenth Century (London, i960), pp. 169-83.
5. For recent work on the resistance theory with which so much of the Elizabethan clerical establishment was tainted^ see Donald R. Kelley, 'Ideas of Resistance before Elizabeth', in The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture, ed. Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier
(Chicago, 1988), pp. 48-76; and Gerry Bowler, 'Marian Protestants and the Idea of Violent Resistance
to Tyranny', in Protestantism and the National Church in Sixteenth Century England, ed. Peter Lake
and Maria Dowiing (London, 1987), ch. 5.
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there: by refusing an absolutist reading of divine-right theory the Elizabethans took away not only the theoretical, but also the practical case
for resistance. It was wicked to resist an English monarch; fortunately,
it was also unnecessary. The English constitution ensured that its monarchs ruled well. Furthermore, stress on the English constitution permitted the argument that in other, less fortunate polities, where tyranny
was a real possibility, resistance might be legitimate. This was especially
so in countries which were not hereditary monarchies, a position useful
in justifying English support for the Dutch revolt. Thus the ideological
character of 'mainstream' Elizabethan political thought was dependent
upon the simultaneous acceptance of the divine right of kings and avoidance of royal absolutism.1
It might not be contested that the apologists for the early Elizabethan
status quo were no absolutists, especially in view of our growing knowledge of just how much of the thinking behind Marian resistance theory
persisted into the Elizabethan period, even amongst those trying to distance themselves from it.2 But did things change from the 1570s or
1580s? Was there a 'growth of absolutism', or an attempt to give an absolutist thrust to the theory of the divine right of kings? Undoubtedly,
between the 1580s and the 1610s the pattern of English political discourse
underwent considerable transformation. This transformation has been
identified with a 'rise' of absolutism and divine-right monarchy; but its
real nature is more complex. On the whole, Jacobean and even.Caroline
divine-right theory was no more absolutist than its Tudor antecedents.3
Nor was it necessarily in any conflict with that deep reverence for English
constitutional and legal traditions characteristic of 'the common law
mind'.4 Its claims were not aimed at 'constitutionalism'; it was not
part of the mythical battle of 'constitutionalism' and 'absolutism' that
some have discerned in pre-Civil-War England.
What did transform the nature of political debate by the 1610s was
a combination of Presbyterian and Catholic threats to the established
1. The ideological dimension! of Elizabethan political thought are well brought out in Lake, Anglleans
and Puritans?, passim.
1. Gerald Bowler, '"An Axe or an Acte": The Parliament of 1571 and Resistance Theory in Early
Elizabethan England', Canadian Journal ofHistory, xix (1984), 349-59; and Patrick Collinson, 'The Monarchical Republic of Queen Elizabeth I', Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, btut (1986-7),
394-424. Cf. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, pp. 10-n, on the early Elizabethans, an account which
caprurej their constitutionalism, but not their adherence to divine-right theory.
3. I leave out of account here the view that there may have been the development of a different
sort of absolutism in early Stuart England, one based on civil-law concepts and reason of state theory,
advanced in such works as George Mossc, The Struggle for Sovereignty in England: From the Reign
of Elizabeth to the Petition of Right (East Lansing, 1950), chs. 2 and 4, esp. material on Ralegh and
Bacon; Berkowitz, 'Reason of State in England'; Peter S. Donaldson, Mtchucvelli and Mystery of State
(New York, 1988), ch. 3, esp. pp. 104-10; and above all Brian P. Levack, 'Law and Ideology: The Civil
Law and Theories of Absolutism in Elizabethan and Jacobean England', in The Historical Renaissance,
pp. 210-41. There is some comment on this thesis in Glenn Burgess, The Politics ofthe Ancient Constitution
(London, forthcoming 1992), pan ii.
4. The phrase is, of course, from J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the feudal Law:
A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957, new edn. 1987).
See also Burgess, Politics of the Ancient Constitution, esp. pan i.
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polity (culminating in the extensive intellectual energy poured into the
Oath of Allegiance controversy after 1606), and the Jacobean Union of
England and Scotland.1 The former produced an increase in the vigour
and single-mindedness with which resistance theory was pursued by English controversialists, and a greater care in closing off possible paths to
the development of resistance theory. This task was increasingly carried
out before a European audience, and so took on a degree of abstraction
from the specifics of the ancient constitution of England that had not
previously characterized it.2 The question of Union could have a similar
effect. Because they raised legal and other questions that were not purely
English, debates on the Union could not be conducted in the idiom
of English common law. Even English lawyers were forced to move
on to the more abstract ground of natural and civil law.3 Such debates
came closer than anything else to breaking down the insularity that
Pocock and others have found characteristic of English views of their
polity and its history.4 But the resulting increase in abstraction and
attention to first principles should not be taken to imply a change in
ideological complexion. Close attention to the content - and the silences
- of early Stuart divine-right sermons and tracts reveals a care not to
insult English constitutional sensibilities. All exceptions to this generalization serve genuinely to prove the rule.
In 1605 William Wilkes, Chaplain in Ordinary to James I, declared that
'the Lawe is the worke of the King, to whose regall dignitie it appertaines
to make Lawes'.s It is possible that Wilkes meant by this that the king
outside parliament could make laws superior to statute and common
law. Possible, but extremely unlikely. A few pages earlier he had cited
Fortescue as authority for the claim 'that the King cannot alter and change
the lawes of this Realm at his pleasure, because the rule of his government
1. Conrad Russell, 'English Parliaments, 1593-1606: One Epoch or Two?', in Parliaments of Elizabethan
England, ch. 8, esp. pp. 207$., is useful on the way the issue of union with Scotland affected the political
'atmosphere' of James's reign.
2. This is particularly true of the Oath of Allegiance controversy, on which see C. H Mcllwain's
introduction to his edition of The Political Works of Junes I (Cambridge, Mass., 1918); Peter Milward,
Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London, 1978), ch. 3; and Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, pp. 117-21, 195-208. There are also useful perspectives on the subject in
J. H. M.Salmon,'Gallicanism and Anglicanism in the Age of the Counter-Reformation', in his Renaissance
and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France (Cambridge, 19S7), ch.
73 This is particularly evident in the arguments and decisions given by Bacon, Coke and Ellesmere
in Calvin's Case (1608): State Trials, ii, cob. 559-^96; and Louis A. Knafla, Laai and Politics in Jacobean
England' The Tracts of Lord Chancellor EUesmere (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 202-53. For further material,
see Bruce R. Galloway and Brian P. Levack (ed.), The Jacobean Union: Six Tracts of 1604 (Edinburgh,
1985), esp. tracts by Doddridge and Spelman.
4. Pocock, Ancient Constitution, ch. iii; Donald R. Kelley, 'History, English Law and the Renaissance',
Past and Present, btv (1974), 24-51; also Burgess, Politics of the Ancient Constitution, ch. 3.
5. William Wilkes, Obedience, or Ecclesiastical Union (London, 1605), p. 56. [The work was reissued
in 1608 under the title A Second Momenta for Magistrates.] Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, p. }6,
cites this as an example of the absolutist contention that kings alone made law.
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is not onlie royall, but polhtick.'1 To interpret Wilkes's tract as a statement of any sort about the relationship of the king, 'our mortall God
upon Earth'2, and the law would be to miss its point. It was an instruction
in the duty of obedience - obedience to both the king and the law.3
At its heart was not so much the need to obey the commands of an
individual, as the need to follow 'publicke determination' rather than
'private .. .resolutions'?
The case of Wilkes is a warning against assuming that statements about
the king's law-making authority, or - to take another example - the
duty to pay taxes borne by his subjects, were claims to an absolute sovereignty, or were designed to reject the view that English kings should
rule through the forms of the common law. In a sense Wilkes's position
was paradigmatic. The ideological point of divine-right theory was to
condemn disobedience, or more particularly rebellion, not to remove
the king from all need to observe his own laws. Much is often made
of the fact that those laws were claimed to be the king's laws; but this
was the merest legal commonplace. Once that is accepted it becomes
significant that divine-right theorists almost all looked for a way of retaining the king's duty to govern lawfully, even while freeing him from
other human authorities. Even Peter Heylyn, for example, could argue
that there was a sense in which 'the liberties, possessions, and estates
of the kings leige people, are, if you will, confirmed by the lawes of
the land; not the kings authoritie' .5 The point of Heylyn's arguments
was not to question that the subject possessed liberties, but to show
that possession of those liberties was no evidence for an authority in
the kingdom independent of the king's. Laws were a guarantee of liberties,
even though those same laws 'were made by the Kings authority'. This
did not mean that liberties were insecure; it meant that 'in case the kings,
in some particulars, had not prescribed limits unto themselves, and bound
their owne hands, as it were, to enlarge the peoples, neither the people,
nor any lawes by them enacted, without the kings consent, could ever
have done it'.6 Like Wilkes, Heylyn was primarily a theorist of obedience to law, for by law the king declared his will.
In order both to free the king from all human authority and to preserve
the rule of law Heylyn introduced a distinaion between the power of
kings 'in abstracto' and their power 'in concrete'. In the former sense
they 'are above the lawes'; in the latter, 'a just Prince will not breake
those lawes, which he hath promised to observe.' It was, indeed, wrong
1. Wilkes, Obedience, p. 49 (but cf. p. 58 where room u made for the dispensing power).
1. Ibid., p. 6y
3. Ibid., pp. 49 (law), 6}S. (the king), 35 (both); and passim.
4. Ibid., p. 43.
5. Peter Heylyn, A Britfe and Moderate Answer, to the Seditious and Scandalous Oxdlenga of Henry
Burton (London, 1637), p. 37.
6. Ibid., p. 33 [stress added].
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to question in the abstract what kings could and could not do - which
is not to say that in actual fact they could do whatever they liked.1
These passages are very similar to statements made by King James himself
in 1610.2 He too distinguished between the abstract and concrete powers
of a king. Interestingly, the distinction was advanced as part of the defence
of a political sermon by one of his bishops.3 James argued that general
statements of divine right should not be read as making claims about
specific royal powers in any particular kingdom:
And therefore that reverend Bishop here amongst you, though I heare that
by divers he was mistaken or not wel understood, yet did he preach both
learnedly and trewly annent this point concerning the power of a King: For
what he spake of a Kings power in Abstracto, is most trew in Divinitie [stress
added]: For to Emperors, or Kings that are Monarches, their Subjects bodies
& goods are due for their defence and maintenance. But if I had bene in
his place, I would only have added two words, which would have cleared
all: For after I had told as a Divine, what was due by the Subjects to their
Kings in general, I would then have concluded as an Englishman, shewing
this people, That as in generall all Subjects were bound to relieve their King;
So to exhort them, that as wee lived in a setled state of a Kingdome which
was governed by his owne fundamentaJl Lawes and Orders, that according
thereunto, they were now (being assembled for this purpose in Parliament)
to consider how to helpe such a King as now they had; And that according
to the ancient forme, and order established in this Kingdome: putting so,
a difference between the generall power of a King in Divinity, and the setled
and established State of this Crowne, and Kingdome/
Divinity and politics were different things. As one contemporary report
of the King's speech put it, 'all he [the bishop] said was true divinity
in a king generally but not in every particular king.'5 James pointed
the lesson clearly enough: 'Every just King in a setled Kingdome is bound
to observe that paction made to his people by his Lawes.'6 James, like
Heylyn, said also that even to debate the power of kings in the abstract
was wrong, the equivalent to debating what God could and could not
1 Ibid, pp. 33,179.
2. These remarks were also reiterated in James's speech to the Judges in 1616: 'A Speacb in the
Starre-Chamber, the XX. of June. Anno ifirtT, in Workes, esp. pp. 550-2,556-7.
3. According to Archbishop Abbot, writing in 1627, the sermon was by Samuel Harsnett, Bishop
of Chichesten Rushworth, Historical Collections, i. 442; also in State Trials, ii, col. 1463, Cf. Martin's
speech of 14 November 1610, in E. R. Foster (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament, 1610 (2 vols., New Haven,
1966), ii. 328; and Somerville, Politics and Ideology, p. 132.
4. James I, 'Speach of XXI. March 1609 [1610]", Workes, pp. 529-30.
5. Foster (ed.), Proceedings in Parliament, 1610, 11. 60, n. 44 also ibid, i. 46, where James is reported
to have said that the sermon was "not saying what a king may do, but whit good subjects ought
to do'.
6. James I, 'Speach of XXI. March 1609 [uSioJ", Workes, p. 531.
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do.1 Nevertheless, the concrete powers of kings were declared in their
laws, and like all good kings James promised to 'rule my actions according
to my Lawes'.2
This speech has sometimes been seen as a special attempt at compromise.3 Politically, it may have been; but the position that James adumbrated was a standard one, and his advice on how to read divine-right
sermons can profitably be applied more widely. Divine-right sermons
were, sometimes explicitly, but more frequently implicitly, usually careful
not to ignore the constitutional sensibilities of the English political elite.
There were two crucial areas in which those constitutional sensibilities
were most heavily implicated: the principle of taxation by consent4;
and the principle of the rule of law. To both of these we might apply
the distinction (that runs through the writings of Wilkes, Heylyn and
King James) between the claim upon the subject's obedience legitimately
made by a divine-right sovereign, and the duty of that sovereign to rule
lawfully (i.e. by and through known and declared laws). It remains true,
of course, that no divine-right theorist believed coercive sanction could
be provided for this duty. That would have been incompatible with the
rebuttal of arguments for resistance. But it needs to be pointed out that,
even while eliminating all earthly rivals to the king, divine-right theorists
were very careful to indicate that they did not intend this to free the
king from the need to govern lawfully. Unlike the theorist of absolutism,
the divine-right theorist could thus believe the king to be bound to exercise
his authority through defined constitutional channels. Such a requirement
went beyond that expected of the absolute monarch, who was to rule
well if he were to avoid the charge of tyranny. In some cases, divine-right
theory could even come close to serving as an avenue for the criticism
of monarchy. John Rawlinson, for example, declared that 'a king in his
absolute and unlimited power is able to do more than a good King will
doe', and advised the King that he would do well 'to impose upon your
selfe a necessity of keeping the lawes'. It was the tyrant, not the king,
who refused to obey law (an argument which could have come close
to collapsing the distinction between an absolute sovereign and a tyrant
as drawn by Bodin). Certainly, Rawlinson ruled out tyrannicide, or resistance; but he warned, forcefully enough, that the fate of Saul was 'a
1. Ibid.; Heylyn, Bnefe and Moderate Answer, p. 179.
2. James I, loc. at.
5. See esp. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, pp. 132-44. Whether the right to tax without consent can be said to be a basic claim of even absolutist thought
is, of course, a matter of some doubt, given that Bodin denied that any sovereign had this power.
Bodin, Six Books of 4 Commonweale, 1, 8, p. 97. See further, Martin Wolfe, 'Jean Bodin on Taxes:
The Sovereignty-Taxes Paradox', Political Science Quarterly, btxxiii (1968), 268-84. Nevertheless, the
issue was crucial in English debates.
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faire example and warning-piece for Princes, to teach them... to be Kings
over themselves, lest God suffer them ... to be avenged of themselves'.1
On the subject of taxation and subsidies, Rawlinson stressed the King's
duty to moderate his demands.2 Others were not so careful. It was
reported in the Commons in 1610 that a recent sermon by Samuel Harsnett, Bishop of Chichester (probably the sermon on which James commented in March) had occasioned controversy by 'preaching upon this
text (Give unto Caesar etc.) that it was not to give but to render, and
made subsidies not gifts but duties'.3 In 1627 Archbishop Abbot recalled
this sermon and James's comments upon it. He had good reason to,
for at that time he was himself in deep trouble over his refusal to license
for publication a sermon preached in support of the forced loan, Robert
Sibthorpe's Apostolike Obedience* The voices of Harsnett and Sibthorpe
were not isolated ones. In 1606 John Buckeridge, preaching before the
King at Hampton Court, had said (as exegesis of Romans, 13:6): 'You
pay tribute & custome, and Subsidies of duetie and Justice; You give
them not of courtesie; and they are stipendium Regis, not praemium,
they are the Kings stipend or pay, not his reward.'5 In a Gunpowder
Plot sermon delivered in 1622, Robert Willan told the judges that 'tribute
is Princes due, as markes of their power, sinewes of their maintenance,
recompenses of their labours'.6 In an assize sermon delivered in Northampton, two more of the judges, Sir Richard Hutton and Sir George
Croke, were informed by Edward Reynolds that subjects had a duty
to princes 'to honour them in our services, and with our substance,
r. John Rawlinson, Vivat Rex. A Sermon Preached at Pauls Cross on the Day of bis Majesties Happie
Inauguration, March 24.1614 (Oxford, 1619), pp. 6-8. Rawlinson also talked of kings as stewards accountable
for their stewardship (pp 14-16), and as public servants (p. 32). Those, like Rawlinson perhaps, who
wished to equate tyranny with refusal to obey positive law, seem to have left little room for absolute
monarchy at all: any monarch nor bound by positive law would become a tyrant This line of thought
was developed extensively by Parliamentarians in the 1640s (it is found, too, in Locke). For good propaganda reasons the Parliamentarians found it useful to be able to label any theory of irresistible monarchy
as a theory of arbitrary monarchy or tyranny. Henry Feme (in a passage quoted later) responded
to an effort of this sort made by Philip Hunton, who claimed that the divines' arguments for Charles's
irresistibility amounted to the view that he was an absolute, or even an arbitrary, monarch- Hunton,
A Treatise of Monarchic (London, 1643), p. 33. From Feme's point of view, Hunton simply conflated
two separate issues: resistance and the extent of royal authority. Reading early Stuart divine-right theory
as a theory of absolutism is to interpret it in accordance with later Parliamentarian propaganda, which
attempted to dissolve distinction between divine-right irresistibility, absolute monarchy, arbitrary
monarchy and tyranny.
2. Rawlinson, Vivat Rex, pp. 14-16.
3. Foster (edL) Proceedings in Parliament, 1610, ii. 328.
4. See Abbot's reasons for his refusal to license Sibthorpe's sermon, in Rushworth, Historical Collections, i. 434-57, esp. p. 442; also printed in State Trials, ii, cols. 140-80.
5. John Buckeridge, A Sermon Preached tt Hampton Court before the Kings Majesue, on Tuesday the
2j. of September, Anno 1606 (London, 1606), sig. A3.
6. Robert Willan, Conspiracie agxinst Kings, Heavens Scorne. A Sermon Preached at Westminster-Abbey
before the Judges, upon the Fifth of November 1622 (London, 1622), p.8.
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with cheerefull obedience, and with willing Tribute'. 1 The claim that
subjects had a duty to pay tribute willingly was a commonplace of divineright sermons. Few who made it got into the trouble of William Beale,
who was charged in the Short Parliament with having preached in 1635
that 'taxes and subsedyes, tonnage and poundage . . . are the Kings Absolutely . . . as absolutely as his crowne and likewise or [sic] selves our goods
our servants, our children'.2
There is, however, nothing inherently controversial in all of this. On
the whole, to misappropriate a remark by Professor Collinson, these
sermons 'neither intended to provoke nor were in fact provocative.'3
As James I himself indicated, it was a general truth in divinity that subjects
had a duty to render unto Caesar; but it was also true that in any settled
nation there were particular channels through which this duty was to
be performed. In England the chief channel was Parliament. Most statements about this duty say very little: Buckeridge's, for example, was
a passing explication of the statement in Romans, 13: 5-6, that for conscience' sake tribute was to be paid. Indeed, his remarks were little more
than a paraphrase of the text, and could be rephrased in terms that carried
very different connotations than those read into the passage cited above:
'Kings are hired by tribute and custome by governing to serve their
servants and subjects.'4 The remark quoted from Willan was an aside
in a discussion of King Jesus, and Edward Reynolds' comment a vague
and conventional expression of the duty to honour one's ruler. To say
that subjects had a duty to render tribute willingly did not imply that
the king had a right to extract it forcibly or wantonly. General statements
of the subjects' duty to pay tribute to their king did not amount to
an attack on the principle of taxation by consent, for they did not impair
1. Edward Reynolds, The SbicUes of the Earth. A Sermon Preached before the Reverend Judges, Sir
Richard Hutton, and Sir George Crooke, at the Assize Holden at North-hampton: February 1$, 16)4 (London,
1636), p.20.
2. Esther S. Cope and WilUon H. Coates (ed.), Proceedings of the Short Parliament of1640 (London,
Camden Soc., 4th Ser., vol. xix, 1977), p 186; cf. Judith D. Maltby (ed.), The Short Parliament (1646)
Diary of Sir Thomas Aston (London, Camden Soc, 4th Ser., vol. xxxv, 1988), p. 112. The report of
the icrmon was given by John Pym. There is, however, much more to the Beale case than this, and
he comes closer thin most to fitting into SommerviUe's categories. Conrad Russell has suggested1 his
untypicality (The Fall of the British Monarchies, 16)7-1642 [Oxford, 1991I p. 116 and n. 144). In The
Politics of the Ancient Constitution, ch. 7, I recount Beale's story at some length, arguing that he was
used in 1640-1 as a weapon in the attempt to link the Laudian Church with absolutist politics, and
pointing out how little other evidence there was to sustain such a charge.
3. Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, ifjy-i62f (Oxford,
1982), p. 18. Collinson's remark refers to Jacobean statements on the relationship between monarchy
and episcopacy. My argument on divine-right politics is analogous to his (ibid. esp. pp. 10, 12-21): on
both subjects there has been a tendency to read general statements about the basis of authority as
if they were statements about the model of operation of that authority, and a tendency to play down
the conventionality of Jacobean thought and its links with the Elizabethan past.
4. Buckeridge, Sermon Preached at Hampton Court... i6o6,s\y A3V.
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the principle (which James reiterated later in his 1610 speech1) that it
was the law itself which defined what taxes, subsidies and tribute were.2
What needs particular stress is how uncontroversial most statements
of the king's divine right to receive tribute were. Provided that some
basic rules of usage were observed there was nothing objectionable in
such claims. This is apparent from an examination of the most controversial of all the sermons addressed to the issue of taxation, those preached
in 1627 to support the forced loan.3 Two of these sermons aroused
considerable hostile comment; two more of them, however, did not.
It is interesting to note what distinguished the two groups: the sermons
by Matthew Wren and Isaac Bargrave were unremarkable and uncontroversial; but those by Manwaring and Sibthorpe transgressed the unwritten
rules governing the use of divine-right theory. Wren's sermon did not
address the matter of finance at all. It was on the text 'Fear God, my
son, and the King' [Proverbs, 24:21], and confined itself to an assertion
of the need for complete obedience to kings.4 Similarly, Bargrave
preached against rebellion and in favour of 'obedience the chiefest of the
morall venues'. Again, there was no explicit mention of tribute, and
the sermon aimed many of its blows at Catholicism, contrasting Catholic
politics with the sound doctrines of Calvin and Luther.5 There was
little to distinguish this sermon from one Bargrave delivered three years
earlier, which was also an attack on the politics of Popery.6
If these sermons were quite unremarkable, the same could not be said
for those of Robert Sibthorpe and Roger Manwaring.7 These men got
1. See particularly his comment that it would be absurd for kings to neglect the law since it defined
property rights, including their own right to inherit the crown: 'Speach of XXI. March 1609 [1610]',
P-SP2. See also the message that James delivered to Parliament, via his Lord Treasurer, Salisbury, on
8 March 1610: "That the king may take subsidies without the consent of his people, he condemns
the doctrines as absurd and him that maintains the position. The marriage between law and prerogative
is inseparable': Foster (ed.), Proceeding in Parliament, 161a, ii. 50; also i. 31 (where subsidies are also
said to 'proceed out of the love and affection of his people', the only claim that many other divine-right
theorists were actually making); and S.R. Gardiner (ed.), Parliamentary Debates in 1610 (London, Camden
Soc., 1st Ser., vol. lxxxi, 1852), p. 24.
3. See Oust, Forced Loan, esp. pp. 6iff\ also id., 'Charles I, the Privy Council, and the Forced Loan',
Journal of British Studies, n i v (1985), 208-35.
4. Matthew Wren, A Sermon Preached before the Kings Majestie on Sunday the Seventeenth of February
Last, at White-Hall (Cambridge, 1627), passim, esp. pp. 3off.
5. Isaac Bargrave, A Sermon Preached before King Charles, March 2/. 1627. Being the Anniversary of
his Majesties Inauguration (London, 1627), pp. 5-6,17,18-19.
6. ld.,/4 Sermon Preached before the Honorable Assembly... of the Lower House of Parliament: February
the Last 1623 [1624](London, 1624), esp. pp. ;-6,22-5,34-5.
7. Probably the most accessible material on the reaction to the sermons of Sibthorpe and Manwaring
is that in State Trials, ii, cols. 1450-80; iii, cols. 335-58. This is mostly reprinted from Rushworth. For
Charles's proclamation (24 June 1628) calling in Manwaring's work, see James F. Larkin (ed.), Stuart
Royal Proclamations. Vol. II: Royal Proclamations of King Charles I, 1625-1646(Oxford, 1983), pp. 197-8.
There is further material in R. C. Johnson et al. (ed.), Commons Debates 1628 (4 vols., New Haven,
1977), ii. 86, 89, 92, 219; iii. 261-2, 404-16, 419, 429, 491, 512, 623-4, 6a; iv. 36-7, 39, 45, 68, 90, 92,
101-3, 220, 280-4, 3°7-28, 403; M. F. Keeler et al. (ed.), Lords Proceeding?, 1628 (New Haven, 1983), pp.
5*2-5, 59*> *O5-7, 612-14, 621-2, 628, 635-7, 642-4, 646-7, 654, 660-3, 672, 678, 684-*. See also Harry
F. Snapp, 'The Impeachment of Roger Maynwaring', Huntington Library Quarterly, i n (1966-7), 217-32;
and Somcrville, PolttiaandIdeology, pp 127-31.
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into trouble not for espousing the doctrine of the divine right of kings,
but for misapplying it. Both of them addressed too specifically the question of taxation and deduced from the general principle of divine right
conclusions that were properly matters of law rather than of divinity.
It was the maintenance of this boundary that kept others out of trouble.
Sibthorpe, for example, was rather too explicit about the financial implications of divine-right kingship, specifying the types of taxes to which
the Crown was entitled, and asserting that even 'an immoderate, yea
an unjust Taxe' was to be paid for conscience' sake. Even worse, Sibthorpe
implied there was no real difference between the power to tax possessed
by ordinary kings and that possessed by conquerors.1 Manwaring added
a further element that perhaps accounts for the greater vehemence in
the parliamentary pursuit of him in 1628. Like Sibthorpe, he said that
'to Kings therefore ... nothing can be denyed ... that may further the
supply of their Urgent Necessities'; but unlike Sibthorpe he went on
to question the role of Parliament in assenting to taxation. The king's
right to tax, he said, gained nothing from Parliament; its function was
to serve 'for the more equall Imposing, and more easie Exacting of that,
which, unto Kings doth appertaine, by Naturall and Originall Law, and
Justice .2 To assert a vague duty to pay tribute to kings was one thing;
but the claims of Sibthorpe and Manwaring were categorically different
from the other statements cited above. The former pair used divine-right
theory not as a theory of obligation, an explanation for the duties owed
by subjects to their sovereigns; but as something like a theory of sovereignty, deducing from divine-right assumptions statements about the
actual mode of operation of royal power that ought to have been left
to the law (as James I had stated so clearly). The most important thing
to note about Sibthorpe and Manwaring is their untypicality. They stand
out as controversial because they used divine-right theory direaly to
attack constitutional assumptions. Most others did not. They are, then,
the exceptions that prove the rule.
A similar argument can be constructed with reference to the claims
made by divine-right theorists about the relationship between the king
and the law. The claim that all law was the king's law, and that it was
the king who made law, was in general terms quite unexceptionable.
It was, indeed, a commonplace of English legal thought. On the whole,
divine-right theorists were careful to avoid stepping across the line that
divided the acceptable generalization from the unacceptably specific claim.
Witness, for example, William Dickinson, one of Margaret Judson's sovereignty theorists.3 It is true that Dickinson remarked, in passing, that
1. Robert Sibthorpe, Apostoltke Obedience, Shewing the Duty of Subjects to Pay Tribute and Taxes
to their Pnnca, According to the Word of God, in the Law and the Gospell, and the Rules of Religion
and Cases of Conscience (London, 1627), pp. 14-18. The full title is worth noting, for it makes plain
Sibthrope's attempt to deduce legal conclusion] from premisses of divinity.
2. Roger Manwaring, Religion and Aleguncc In Two Sermons Preached before the Kings Majestie (London, 16*7), i. 10,16.
y. Judson, Crisis of the Constitution, pp. 213-14.
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the power to judge is one 'which out of its owne absolutenes setteth
downe a Law', though the exact relation of this remark to the kings
of England was vague.1 More interesting, however, is this:
So it is in the Republike, the King is not limited, his power is diffused through
the whole and every particular, and according to the instruments hee works
by, so is his power denominated. In the Chauncery hee is called Lord Chauncelor,
in other courts Judge, Justice, and so of the rest.2
Dickinson's starting-point was an analogy between God and the king:
both were the first movers of all authority in their dominions. But clearly,
in practice, Dickinson saw that the king's authority was exercised through
a variety of legal channels. He was the first mover, but not the instrument.
The authority wielded by his instruments was always the king's, but
he was not usually the effective agency of his own authority.3 The
point was not in any way to challenge the operation of England's ancient
constitution, but to ensure its compatibility with the principle that English kings ruled by divine right. Dickinson's comments are quite comparable to those made in a speech by Sir Edward Coke on 6 May 1628
which began by saying of the king that 'in him is all the confidence
we have under God. He is God's lieutenant. Trust him we must'; and
moved on to insist that the king's response to grievances must follow
proper legal forms.4
Some clerical statements of political theory illustrate even more clearly
the attempt to maintain a consensual position. An instructive example
is Calybute Downing. He was not only a clergyman, but a trained civil
lawyer, and so sits on the border that divides divine-right theory from
civil law 'absolutism'. Downing can easily be made to sound like an
absolutist5, but his writings were much more subtle than that. 'All
supreame Dominion in a Monarchic is attained by conquest or succession,
or obtained by election', Downing wrote. For Sommerville, Downing
opted firmly for the English king as possessor of the rights of an absolute
conqueror. In fact, what he wrote was that the English king has 'all
these rights conjoyned'. Sommerville quotes Downing's statement that
'our present gratious Soveraigne hath it by lineall succession from an
absolute Conquerour'; but not its continuation, '... and all was made
sure unto him by the elective assent of the supreame Nobility.' 6 The
1. William Dickinson, The Kings Right, Bnefeiy Set Downe m a Sermon Preached before the Reverend
Judges at the Assizes held tn Reading... June 28.1619 (London, 1619), ng. B3.
2. Ibid., sigs. C+v-Di
3. Cf. James I, 'Speach in the Starre-Chamber', Workes, p. 550: 'In all well setl<-d Monarchies ...
Judgement is deferred from the King to his subordinate Magistrates.'
4. Johnson et id. (ed.), Commons Debates, 1628, iii 171-1.
5. Sommerville, Politia and Ideology, pp. yj, 68; cf. pp. 74, 80, on Downing's espousal of resistance
theory in 1640.
6. Calybute Downing, A Discourse of the State Ecclesiastical of this Kingdome, in Relation to the Ctvill
(Oxford, 1632), p. 48. Contrast Jama I's own verdict, in his letter rejecting the proposed Canons of
1606, that 'the crown is mine by all rights but that of conquest': John Overall, The Convocation Book
ofMDCVI, Commonly Called Bishop Overall's Convocation Book (Oxford, 1844), p. 7. Further, on the
complicated pattern of uses of conquest theory, sec Sommerville, 'History and Theory'
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work is replete with statements which mitigate whatever practical effect
Downing's remarks on conquerors might have had. He did say that 'the
power of an absolute Prince is above all Lawes', but this was with specific
reference to their power to grant privileges. Elsewhere, Downing sounded
a rather different note. King John, he said, 'could not grant anything
in prejudice of the whole state, without the consent Regni universitatis,
(as Mathew Paris tearmeth the Parliament)'; episcopacy he defended as
'received with an universall consent and desire of all, and hath its right
according to the laws'; England, he wrote, was 'a free Monarchic, erected
and protected by free consent, and of long continuance, not imposed
but confirmed and reformed to the first freedome by a happy conquest'.
The echoes in this of the common-law mind were even clearer in Downing's aside about the laws of England 'which by reason of their long
use, are as it were naturalized, into the manners and disposition of our
nation'.1 It seems that Downing was simultaneously a theorist of divineright monarchy, of government by consent, and of the ancient constitution.
The lesson which might be drawn is that there is need for considerable
care in interpreting the political claims actually being advanced by divineright theory. Their praaical implications were usually unclear, perhaps
dehberately so: as in the case of Robert Willan who said that kings were
above law, only to add immediately that nevertheless 'their humilitie
respects it', and to comment with some opacity that with regard to 'estates
and livelihoods . . . the power over it is in the King, the property in
his Subjects, the tuition in his Lawes, the fruition their owne'.2 But
in fact, as Margaret Judson has noted, most divine-right sermons and
tracts said little about the king and the law at all. This she finds surprising.3
Even the examples she does produce amount to little: they are
mostly conventional statements of the king's immunity from other coercive human authority (which no one would have questioned), or statements of his general powers as a law-giver.4 It was only when divine-right
theory was brought to address specific legal issues, as it was with Sibthorpe
and Manwaring, that it ever proved controversial.
Manwaring's legal theory, at least, did go beyond the norm, asserting
with a dangerous specificity the binding force of sovereign will and of
commands contrary to positive law.5 He, and possibly Sibthorpe too,
are good examples of men who can plausibly be seen (in Sommerville's
1. Downing, Discourse of the Suu Ecclesiastical, pp. 91,57,29,3,14.
2. Willan, Conspiracy against Kings, Heavens Scome, pp. 26-7
3. Judson, Crisis of the Constitution, pp. 195-6.
4. Ibid., pp. 196-202; tee also Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, pp. J4-9, a list that also includes
its fair share of the platitudinous.
5. Manwaring, Religion ondAlegionce, L 17-20.
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terms) as theorists of absolutism by divine right. For this reason, Sommerville's account of them may indeed be superior to Allen's;1 yet both
accounts seem to miss the untypicality of the pair, commented on above.
There are very few divine-right theorists whose ideas were at all close
to those of Manwaring and Sibthorpe - William Beale may be one, but
others are difficult to find.2 Consequently, the interesting question to
ask about Manwaring and Sibthorpe is whether their sermons marked
a general change Ln the tone of early Stuart political thinking, the rise
of an Arminian political theory.3 The question is too big a one to
answer here, but a number of points should be noted. Firstly, there
is no evidence that Sibthorpe and Manwaring were Arminian/ Secondly,
there is very little sign before the Civil War, in sermons or tracts, of
the use of divine-right theory for purposes different from those in the
Jacobean period, except in the case of Sibthorpe and Manwaring. Thirdly,
however, there is some sign of change in the polemical focus of divineright theory, from a Jacobean situation where it was primarily anti-Catholic or at best even-handed in its condemnation of Roman and Genevan
politics,' to a situation in which it became implicated in an attempt
to tar Puritanism with imputations of political disloyalty. If we compare
the sequence of sermons to Parliament by James Ussher (1621), Isaac Bargrave (1624), and William Laud (1626 and 1628), we see continuities,
especially a stress on the importance of unity. But whereas the two earlier
sermons aimed their barbs at Catholicism almost entirely, Laud pulled
back on the anti-Catholicism and heightened the anti-Puritanism.6 If
there was change, then, one might suggest that it was not in doctrine,
but in polemical focus.7 The actual political beliefs of Caroline church-
1. Compare Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, pp. 127-31, with Allen, English Political Thought,
pp. 176-80.
2. On Bole, see above p. 851, n. 2. He was reported to have argued 'that the King might constitute
Lawes what, where, when, and agf.ainst]t whom hee would ...', Cope and Coates, Proceedings of the
Short Parliament, p. 185.
3. Cf. J. S. Morrill, Seventeenth Century Britain, i6oj-ijii (Folkestone, 1980), pp. 57-8.
4 Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calmnvts: The Rise of English Arminiamsm, c. 1190-1640 (Oxford, 1987),
P- >595. Sec the neat formulation of David Owen, Herod and Pilate Reconciled: Or, The Concord of Papist
and Puritan ... for the Coercion, Deposition, and Killing of Kings (Cambridge, 1610), sig. \\i\ also id.,
Anti-Parieus, or, A Treatise in the Defence ofthe RoyalI Right ofKings (York, 16+2), sigs. B1-B3V.
6. James Ussher, 'A Sermon preached before the Commons House of Parliament . . . the 18th of
February, 1620 [1621]', in Tie Whole Works ... of Junes Ussher, ed. C. R. Ellington and J. H. Todd
(17 voU., Dublin, 1847-64), ii. 415-57; Bargrave, Sermon Preached before the Honourable Assembly, The
Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud D. D., ed. W. Scott and J. Bliss (7 vols ,
Oxford, 1847-60), i. 91-117, 149-82.
7. This would seem to fit well the picture being drawn of the attitudes to puritan conspiracy found
amongst some of Charles's advisers from the late 1610s in such works as L. J. Reeve, Charles 1 and
the Road to Personal Rule (Cambridge, 1989), and Richard Cust, 'Charles I and a Draft Declaration
for the 1628 Parliament', Historical Research, lxiii (1990), 143-61.
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men seem little different from those of their Jacobean predecessors, Calvinist and non-Calvinist alike.1
To conclude this discussion it is necessary to attempt to specify something
of the rules governing the uncontroversial use of the theory of the divine
right of kings in early Stuart England, and its relations with other forms
of political discourse found in the period.2 The divine right of kings
was an uncontroversial theory, and was not seen as threatening to customary constitutional practice, provided that it was used within certain tacitlyrecognized boundaries and restricted to a place on the edge of civil politics.
The theory of divine right had a range of accepted uses. The first was
to demonstrate, as a conclusion of divinity, the duty that subjects had
to obey their rulers. John Buckeridge summed up the claim:
For the King is first among men, and next, or second to God; neither Pope
nor people stand berweene God and the King: For he is Gods Minister, not
mans. He is superiour and above all men, and inferiour, and under God onely.
Hee hath no equall in earth, and no superiour, but in Heaven; greater than
all men, and solo Deo minor, lesser then God onely, from whom he immediately
receives his power over all men, and all sorts of men, Priest and people, in
all causes Civill and Spirituall.3
At this level of generality the assertion contained no implications threatening to the common-law mind, and aroused no hostility. It received classic
expression in the homilies on obedience and rebellion, and formed one
of the main lines of attack on the sin of rebellion/ Here obedience
was a moral duty; more overtly political was the use of divine-right
theory against claims for resistance, its main political use in the seven1. There is, though, a need for a detailed study of the political thought of William Laud. Arguably,
the best account remains W. H. Hutton, William Laud (3rd edn., London, 190;), ch. 4. Lack of detailed
guidance on the subject can lead even the best astray. One recent historian, for example, has cited
as Laud's a remark found in his famous table of English Parliaments and their doings ([Public Record
Office] SP 16/96/31 - some insight into the point behind this compilation might be had from the
document produced at about the same time in which Laud listed the arguments for and against calling
a Parliament, ibid. 16/94/88), which says of Magna Carta that it 'had an obscure birth from usurpation:
8t was fostered and shewed to the World by Rebellion': Malcolm Smuts, Court Culttm and the Origins
of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England (Philadelphia, 1987), p. 273. The remark, like many
of the annotations from this document, is in fact a quotation from Sir Walter Ralegh, 'The Prerogative
of Parliaments in England' (1628), in his Works, ed. William Oldys and Thomas Birch (8 vols., Oxford,
1829), viii. 161.
2. This concluding section draws upon perspectives developed at greater length in my Politics of
the Ancient Constitution, esp. part 11.
3 John Buckeridge, A Sermon Preached before His Ma/estie at Whitehall, March 22. 1617 (London,
1618), p. 4. Examples of the use of divine-right theory to express a general obligation of obedience
can be multiplied endlessly: e.g. Humphry Sydenham, Moses and Aaron: or, The Affmitic of Civill and
EcdesUstidu Power (London, 1626), p. 5; Buckeridge, A Sermon Preached at Hampton Conn, ligj. A3,
Civ; Henry Valentine, God Save the King. A Sermon Preached in St Pauls Church the 17th of March.
ii)9 (London, 1639), pp. 3-8,28; Willan, Conspirtcu against Kings, Heavens Scome, p. 24,
4. M. E. Rickey and T. B. Stroup (cd.), Certaine Sermons or Homilies ...A Facsimile Reproduction
of the Edition of 161) (Gainesville, Fl., 1968), i. 69-77: ii. 275-322. For further material, see Richard
L. Greaves, 'Concepts of Political Obedience in Late Tudor England', journal of British Studies, xxii
(1982), 23-34; and Gordon J. Schochet, 'Patriarchalism, Politics and Mass Attitudes in Stuart England',
Historical journal, xii (1969), 412-41.
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teenth century as it had been under the Tudors. Throughout the early
Stuart period preachers attacked doctrines of resistance, but the works
in which they did so seldom strayed across the boundary that divided
expression of the duty to obey from expression of absolute sovereignty.
There were, of course, particular times when the issue of resistance became
a pressing one, most noticeably after the Scottish rebellion. Thomas Morton, a veteran of Jacobean anti-Catholicism, preached on the text Romans
13:1 at Durham on $ May 1639.1 But just as in 160$, in the midst of
his learned attack on Catholic resistance theory, Morton could assert
that 'the King is established in his Throne by common consent of the
kingdome'2, so in 1639 he maintained that the kings of England ruled
by consent but with divine authority.3 Others at this time were possibly
more virulent in their condemnation of resistance, but just as careful
to confine their criticism to that doctrine alone, though condemning
it in both its Catholic and Calvinist forms (the latter symbolized especially
by Buchanan)/ Constitutional royalism, as it has been called, has its
deep roots precisely in early Stuart divine-right theory; and the precision
of Henry Feme in 1643 would have been applauded by James I:
It was never my intent ... to plead for absoluteness of power in the King,
if by absoluteness of power be meant (as it should be) a power of arbitrary
command, but if by absoluteness of power this Author means (as he doth
sometimes) a power not to be resisted or constrained by force of arms raised
by subjects, such a power we plead for.5
Much more interesting, however, than these commonplaces was an
additional area in which divine-right theory seems to have had an acceptable place: ecclesiology. Many of the most debated expressions of the
divine right of kings were in fact asides in works devoted to issues of
episcopal jurisdiction and church government.6 In this context divineright kingship could serve a number of purposes. One was to support
1. Thomas Morton, A Sermon Preached before the Kings most Excellent Majestie, in the Cathedrall
Church of Durham. Upon Sunday, Being the Fifth Day of May :6}o (London, 1639). Before publication,
Morton's sermon was tampered with by Laud, in order to remove sutements too generous to Presbyterian
ecclesiology and citations of Calvin's political teaching: SP 16/437/56; Cfalendar off SftateJPfapers] Dfomesucj, 1639-40, pp. 212-13.
2. Thomas Morton, An Exact Discovene of Romish Doctrine in the Case of Conspiracie and Rebellion
(London, 1605), p. 15.
3. Morton, Sermon Preached before the Kings most Excellent Ma/esue, esp. pp. J - I I . He was also careful
to distinguish the rebel, condemned by scripture, from 'he that obeyeth not' (pp. 13-14).
4. For example Valentine, God Save the King, pp. 10-11, 26-7; and Henry King, A Sermon Preached
at St Pauls March 17. 1640. Being the Anniversary of His Majesties Happy Inauguration to his Crawne
(London, 1640), pp 5-6.
5. Henry Feme, A Reply unto Several Treatises (Oxford, 1643), p. 12.
6. Of the works cited above, the following are primarily ecdesiological: Coke on Caudrey's Case;
Fienna (1641); Wilkes (1605); Heylyn (1637); Buckeridge (1606); Downing (1632); Sydenham (1626). Many
of the remainder were general sutements of the subjects' duty of obedience. There are numerous other
example! of the use of divine-right theory as an adjunct to ecclesiological debate: e.g. George Carleton,
Jurisdiction Regall, Episcopall, Papall (London, 1610), esp. pp. 31-2, more generally chs. 3 and 4; Richard
Field, Of the Church (London, 1606-10); and Thomas Jackson, 'A Treatise of Christian Obedience'
(first publ. 1673, but written perhaps c. 1630), in The Works of Thomas Jackson, D.D. (12 vols., Oxford,
1844), xii 185-243.
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the argument, against some varieties of puritan opinion, that bishops
rightly possessed powers of ecclesiastical jurisdiction, conveyed to them
by the king. With a monarchy clearly commined to the institution of
episcopacy, the divine right of kings could be shared in by the Church,
even in its temporal aspect. More important than this, as a special adjunct
to the attack on resistance theory, was the use of divine-right monarchism
to buttress the claim that kings had coercive jurisdiction over priests (and
more particularly that priests did not have coercive authority over kings),
used for anti-Catholic purposes by Buckeridge in 1606 or Carleton in
1610, and for anti-Presbyterian purposes by Heylyn in 1637 or Morton
in 1639.' But the point of this ecclesiological argument was not to magnify royal authority or to assert a royal power to govern without law.
It was simply to keep royal authority superior to all other human authority. The purpose of the theory remained primarily what it had been
for Richard Bancroft, when, in 1593, he had signalled the new rigour
with which all theoretical avenues to resistance would be closed off.2
There was, however, another face to the view that the clergy, like the
laity, were at least temporally subservient to a divine-right monarch.
The controversial Canons of 1640, which contained a strong expression
of the divine right of kings, attracted criticism more for their perceived
undermining of royal authority than for elevating it.3 Divine-right
theory had another implication, reflected in Fiennes' invocation of imperial monarchy in 1641: it might be used to argue for the mutability of
church government. Hence critics of the 1640 Canons argued that the
et cetera oath would bind them to resist changes to ecclesiastical order
1. Buckendge, Sermon Preached at Hampton Court, sigs. Cl, C1V-C2, C3V S.; Heylyn, Briefe and
Moderate Answer, pp. 6ff., ch. 5; Carleton, Jurisdiction, chs. 3, 4. Carleton, of course, was very careful
to delineate the boundary between the authority of the king and that of the bishop, and to preserve
a spiritual authority in the bishops that could be used against the king (ibid,, pp 44-^); but this should
not be sera out of perspective. The book's central object is to rule out any clericist resistance theory,
and its final chapter is a lengthy refutation of the claim that the Church possesses coercive jurisdiction
over princes. For discussion of Carleton, see William Lamont, Godly Rule: Politics and Religion, i6o}-6o
(London, 1969), pp. 36-41; Colhnson, Religion of Protestants, pp. 3-4, 12-21; and id. 'If Constantine,
then also Theodosius', pp. 132-3; but cf. J. P. Sommerville, 'The Royal Supremacy and Episcopacy
"Jure Divuio'", Journal of Ecclesiastical History, xrxiv (1983), $48-$; also, more broadly, id., Politics
and Ideology, ch. 6.
2. Richard Bancroft, Dangerous Positions and Proceedings, Published and Practised within this IUnd
of Brytaine (London, 1593). The essential object of Bancroft's criticism was the Genevan view that 'if
Kinges and Princes refused to refourme Religion, the inferior magistrates or people, by direction of
the ministene, might lawfullie, & ought (if need required) even by force & armes, to reform it themselves'
(p. 9). He then spent great effort demonstrating that this doctrine infected the British Isles, thanks
largely to the Scots and their English followers.
3 The Canons are reprinted in Works of .. William Laud, v. 607-33; * " ^P- Canon I, pp. 613-ij.
For criticism of the Canons as derogatory to the royal prerogative, see Rushworth, Historical Collections,
iii. 1209, 1207, 1205, 1354; IV. 359; CSPD, 1640, p. 656; and note that Joseph Hall's defence of the Canons
shows no inclination to defend their divine-right political doctrine: 'A Speech in Parliament in Defence
of the Canons made in Convocation', in Philip Wynter (ed), The Works of the Right Reverend Joseph
Hall, D.D. (new edn., Oxford, 1863). viii. 278-81. More generally, I remain persuaded of the perspectives
advanced in William Lamont, Richard Baxter and the Millennium: Protestant Imperialism and the English
Revolution (London, 1979), ch. 2, which reveals some of the wayj in which the Civil War was not
an anti-authoritarian struggle, but a bartle in defence of true authority.
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that the king could legitimately make (and which some, no doubt, hoped
he would make).
Most important in the end, though, is understanding not what divineright theory could be used to do without controversy, but what it could
not do. It was not a language appropriate for addressing specific legal
questions involving prerogatives and liberties; and when it was used as
such (or even, as with Harsnett, when there was an appearance of its
being so used) controversy was likely to result. It is, of course, impossible
to demonstrate what a theory does not do, but a sense of the limited
field within which the theory of the divine right of kings operated may
be gleaned from the nearest thing we have to an 'official' statement of
it. This was Richard Mocket's Deus & Rex (1615), translated into English
as God and the King in the same year, and commended by James to
his subjects on 8 November 1615 as suitable for instructing youths in
the duty of allegiance.1 Mocket's work was devoted to demonstrating the two points that the king had no superior but God, and
that the bond of allegiance with his subjects could never be dissolved.
It was primarily aimed at the political claims of Roman Catholicism,
and a defence of the Oath of Allegiance. There is almost nothing in
it to worry the common-law constitutionalist2; its arguments were on
another plane entirely. Primarily, it was a work of controversial theology.
This is not an exhaustive catalogue of uses (and non-uses) of divine-right
theory; but it is adequate to suggest a number of conclusions. Firstly,
that the theory of the divine right of kings was a consensual position
and was uncontroversial provided a number of conditions were met.
One of these was crucial: the theory could not be used to justify specific
royal powers in civil matters. That was a matter of law, and it was for
infringing this condition that Sibthorpe and Manwaring were attacked.
It is quite remarkable how few others did so before the Civil War. A
close examination of most of the statements of the divine right of kings
shows that they were in fact statements of a general duty to obey, or
to render duty willingly, and avoided specific indication of what that
might entail. There is also evidence, as we have seen, that advocacy of
the divine right of kings did not preclude belief in the view that kings
should rule through the common law. Secondly, the language of divine
right had two perfectly legitimate uses. It could be used to justify the
duty of obedience, and more specifically to condemn resistance theory.
And secondly, it could be used in ecclesiological argument, both to condemn the idea of an independent secular authority resident in the Church
and not derived from the king (and this was but another facet of the
1. Jamej F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes (ed.), Stuart Royal Proclamations. Vol. L Royal Proclamations
ofKingJamc I, i6oj-i62f (Oxford, 1973), pp. 355—6.
2. The nearest we get to an exception is the passage summarizing Romans 13:6 that talks of rendering
obedience to the prince 'by payuig tribute unto him for his Regal] support': Richard Mocket, God
and the King (London, 1615), p. 34 - but like so many similar remarks, it is the bland statement of
a moral duty, not a legal argument.
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condemnation of resistance theory), and to suggest more loosely the
dependence of the Church on the secular power, whether this was a
technique (as with Heylyn) for accusing critics of the Church of sedition,
or (in the early 1640s) for arguing that the form of church government
could lawfully be altered. By that time there were attempts to appropriate
the divine-right authority of kings over their churches for use (even contrary to the king's personal wishes) against the divine right of bishops.1
We should always remember, however, that the performance of none
of these tasks required a theory of absolute sovereignty by divine right,
and that there is little evidence of divine-right theorists' concern to produce such a theory.2
There are senses in which the realms of law and theology were conceptually distinct in early Stuart discourse3, and it is only by taking theological statements of the duty to obey as if they were statements designed
to answer legal questions that one can make a case for the existence
of absolutism by divine right in the political thought of the period. The
evidence suggests that we should not do this. The divine right of kings
was a theory that most properly formed one branch of controversial
theology, and it should not be interpreted as something else. Instead,
historians might take more notice of James Fs instructions to his Parliament in 1610 about how to read Bishop Harsnett's sermon, and apply
them more widely. If there was a 'consensus' in early Stuart political
and constitutional discourse, it lay here: not in the existence of only
one political language, but in the maintenance of defined roles for, and
boundaries between, a variety of such languages. The language of divine
right was not inherently 'opposed' to the language of common law or
the language of consent, because each had its own sphere within which
it could be used uncontroversially.
University of Canterbury, NZ
GLENNBURGESS
1. There may be a sense, then, in which some of Charles I'i enemies were as indebted to the divine
right of kings as his friends, for that theory had been crucial in establishing the subjection of the
Church and its clergy to temporal authority. See also the suggestive remarks in Edmund S. Morgan,
Inventing the People The Rise of PopuUr Sovereignty in England tnd Amena (New York, 19S8),
ch. 1, on the ways in which divine-right theory could be used to limit royal activity.
2. Since this article was written there has appeared a discussion of the divine-right theories of Jama
II's reign which in places parallels the argument here: see Mark Goldie, 'The Political Thought of
the Anglican Revolution', in The Revolutions of16S& The Andrea Browning Lectures, 1988, ed. Robert
Beddard (Oxford, 1991), ch. 2, e.g. remarks on pp. m-12.1 would like to thank Colin Davis for bringing
these similarities to my attention.
3. See further Burgess, Politiaof the Ancient Constitution, part ii.
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