The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought

Citation preview

THE FRENCH RELIGIOUS WARS IN ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT

THE FRENCH RELIGIOUS WARS IN ENGLISH POLITICAL THOUGHT BY

J. H. M. SALMON

OXFORD AT THE CLARENDON PRESS 19 5 9

Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4 GLASGOW

NEW YORK

TORONTO

BOMBAY

CALCUTTA

MADRAS

CAPE TOWN

©

IBADAN

MELBOURNE KARACHI NAIROBI

WELLINGTON

KUALA LUMPUR ACCRA

Oxford University Press

1959

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN

OKULP

institutions are seldom constructed from a system of abstract beliefs: rather do they grow from the countless responses which individual men are compelled to make to the demands of transient situations. Nevertheless, it would be foolish to affirm that in their reactions to the practical problems which confront them men are uninfluenced by political principles. There can be no fixed boundary line between theory and event. The terms in which the last political crisis has been rationalized are the pre¬ suppositions which are brought to the solution of the next. In this study I have often been unable to distinguish between political theory and political history. I have been less concerned with the logical development of political doctrines than I have with the varying mood in which Englishmen employed French precedents and principles to interpret their own predicaments. For this reason I have examined the appearance in English politics of the ideas and models provided by the French Religious Wars chronologi¬ cally, rather than by the logical juxtaposition of French and Eng¬ lish concepts. At the same time I have endeavoured to draw such logical conclusions as seem to be justified. The theme of the influence of the Wars of Religion in English politics would, perhaps, be more manageable if it were restricted to a more limited period than that which is here surveyed. Yet this would distort the conclusions in which it issued. Throughout the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries the English attitude to the Religious Wars varied in direction and intensity, and it is not to be properly understood in any one phase in isolation from its antecedents and consequences. To attain this wider perspective it has been necessary to draw upon a variety of sources uneven in quality and dissimilar in tone. Some of these have not, to my knowledge, been discussed in works concerned with the history of political thought. Many are, of course, familiar texts. The Political

V

33139

PREFACE

originality of this study does not lie in the discovery of new sources, but in the cumulative weight of evidence which demon¬ strates the extent to which seventeenth-century Englishmen con¬ sciously adapted French theory and example to their own needs. I wish to record my thanks to those with whom I have discussed certain aspects of this book. They include Mr. Peter Laslett of Trinity College, Cambridge, Mr. Charles Parkin of Clare College, Mr. K. D. McRae of Carleton University College, Ottawa, and Professor Myron Gilmore of Harvard University. J. H. M. S.

VI

Contents chapter

1. Introduction

1

chapter 2.

The Elizabethan Reception

15

CHAPTER 3.

The Intermediaries

39

CHAPTER 4.

Prelude to Civil War

58

CHAPTER 5.

The Civil War

80

CHAPTER 6.

Regicide and Interregnum

CHAPTER

7. Restoration and Exclusion Crisis

101

123

CHAPTER 8.

Revolution and Aftermath

147

CHAPTER 9-

Conclusion

163

appendix A.

A List of Trench Works Published in England 1560—98

appendix B.

171

Some Personal Links between English Statesmen and French Theorists

181

BIBLIOGRAPHY

186

INDEX

199

vii

CHAPTER 1

Introduction T O Voltaire English conflicts in the seventeenth century differed from those of the French Religious Wars as the principles of reason differed from the blight of superstition. French rebellion was based in purposeless faction and resulted in the increase of arbitrary government. English revolution had pursued a more reasoned course and preserved the national heritage of political liberty. The French assassinated their kings: the English judged them. Why was it, asked Voltaire, that the English were more fortunate in their politics than other peoples?1 More than a cen¬ tury later an eminent Cambridge historian suggested an answer in a lecture entitled 'The Growth of the French and English Monarchies Compared’: To the question of Voltaire, then, why has England so long and so successfully maintained her free Government and her free institu¬ tions? I answer, because England is still, as she always has been, German; because her national franchises are the spontaneous and legitimate fruit of her national character; of that character, dutiful, serious, persevering, reverential and hopeful, which has been trans¬ mitted to us from our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and which it now remains for us to transmit to our remotest descendants.2 When Voltaire asked his rhetorical question he had already received this answer from his English friends. A legend had been established. The tumultuous half century preceding the Revolu¬ tion of 1688 had issued in a solution achieved by the national political genius. It was this English genius, this Anglo-Saxon genius, which had preserved the spirit of liberty throughout the ages. Elsewhere Voltaire was more sceptical of English liberty. 1 Letters concerning the English Nation, 1733, letter viii. 2 Sir James Stephen, in Lectures on the History of France, 1851, vol. ii, p. 495. 6109

1

B

INTRODUCTION

He was delighted to learn that a boatman who had extolled English freedom as he rowed him across the Thames had subse¬ quently been taken by the press-gang. Yet Voltaire accepted the complacent and insular Whig rationalization of the past. In the eighteenth century English experience appeared to be so unlike European experience that the theory of the Glorious Revolution was represented as a purely English phenomenon, an extraneous contribution to European thought. It has been regarded in this light ever since. It has become fashionable to be sceptical of Whig political history, but its Liberal counterpart in the history of political ideas still dominates English thinking. This attitude assumes that seventeenth-century dissensions in England prompted the expres¬ sion of the English genius in its modern form, and thereby dis¬ seminated a specifically English liberalism throughout Europe. The course of English history alone is thought to have shaped the political philosophy with which the makers of the Revolution of 1688 were to endow the West. The Lockian version of indivi¬ dualism permeated European thought and enabled it to break with the continuity of the past, because English political expe¬ rience had been so different from French or German or Dutch that it only required the interpretation of Locke and the final example of 1688 to bring it forcibly to the attention of continen¬ tal thinkers. This is the popular Liberal distortion of the history of ideas.3 Nothing demonstrates its falsity so clearly as the reflec¬ tion of the French Religious Wars in English political thinking throughout the seventeenth century. Both the French civil wars of the last four decades of the six¬ teenth century and the crises which divided seventeenth-century England produced a mass of political speculation comparable in bulk and in variety. There have been several penetrating sugges¬ tions that some special relationship exists between theorists in the two fields, and between the political problems which they faced.4 3 e.g. 1929, p. 4 e.g. Century,

Kingsley Martin, French Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 32; L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, pp. 51, 52. G. P. Gooch, History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth 1898, p. 29, suggesting that Huguenot resistance theory was intimately 2

INTRODUCTION

Yet this relationship is something more than the posterior analy¬ sis of modern historians who have remarked unexpected similari¬ ties and speculated upon parallel developments in the history of ideas. It is a relationship which was consciously created by seven¬ teenth-century Englishmen. They looked to French precedents to elucidate their own dilemmas, and imported French ideas to pro¬ vide theoretical solutions to them. Of course, no one would seriously maintain that English refer¬ ence to the French past was a practice as frequent as the search for English precedents for situations perplexing in their very origin¬ ality. Nor would it be imagined for a moment that France pro¬ vided the only foreign source of inspiration for the critics and supporters of Stuart government. Seventeenth-century England shared in that general European awakening to the implications of the discovery of non-European societies, whose habits and tradi¬ tions differed radically from the accepted patterns. Within Europe itself, and especially in Italy, there were many models other than French to attract English attention. Moreover, the classical past continued to exert a fascination which influenced the growth of political ideas.3 English reference to the French Wars of Religion may have been but a fraction of the total endeavour to explain present discontents in the light of historical experience. Nevertheless, it was a significant fraction, and the parallels were all the more convincing because they incorporated both facts and ideas. The measure of the significance of this constantly recurring theme may be gauged from the manner in which English interest in the Religious Wars varied in proportion to the crises which known to the opponents of the Stuarts; J. N. Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings, 1914, p. 107, comparing English seventeenth-century political attitudes to those of the Huguenots, Ligueurs, and Politiques; Paul Janet, Histoire de la science politique, 1913, vol. ii, p. 188, comparing French and English theorists of resist¬ ance; Georges Weill, Les Theories sur le pouvoir royal en Trance pendant les Guerres de Religion, 1892, p. 230, comparing Pierre Gregoire with Sir Robert Filmer; G. L. Mosse, The Struggle for Sovereignty in England, 1950, c. 2, showing the influence of Bodin’s ideas in England until 1629; F. D. Wormuth, The Royal Prerogative 1603-1649, 1939, pp- 31, 32, showing the similarity between French and English views of fundamental law. 5 Cf. Z. S. Fink, The Classical Republicans, 1945.

3

INTRODUCTION

disturbed the English political scene. At the most crucial and formative periods of English thought, in the Puritan Revolution, the Exclusion Crisis, and the Revolution of 1688, there occurred a recourse to French history and a sudden influx of French ideas. There were many Englishmen for whom these crises seemed to recreate conditions analogous to those experienced under the last Valois kings and the first Bourbon. There were some who were haunted by the belief that another society, separated from them in time and space, had experienced the upheavals which they were experiencing and had explained them in terms singularly appropriate to their own situation. There were some who did not regard these resemblances as fortuitous, but as the product of identical forces working in the two fields. These are the facts which throw doubt on the belief that English problems were met and explained in a way quite unrelated to European traditions. The reasons for English dependence upon French example were primarily religious. However diverse the social and economic causes now assigned to the dissensions experienced in various European states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, con¬ temporary explanation of politics was generally attempted in terms of religious belief. It was in France that the political effects of the Reformation first stimulated a radical examination of European traditions which resulted in the transformation of European political theory. The French Religious Wars were the first demonstration of these effects within a sovereign state. This was not evident in the earlier Schmalkaldic Wars in Germany, because the constitution of the Empire made these less a civil war than a conflict between virtually sovereign princes. The solution of cuius regio eius religio sustained this view, and the Thirty Years War confirmed it. Nor did the initiative in the transformation of European thought arise from the Revolt of the Netherlands, which, though it was contemporary with the French conflicts and in some phases inseparable from them, was largely dependent upon French political theory. Theory and event in Scotland fol¬ lowed similarly in the wake of those in France. Thus it was the French conflicts which provided the initial 4

INTRODUCTION

stimulus to the enunciation of modern political concepts. It was French thought which first essayed the task of adapting medieval controversies between a universal church and a supposedly uni¬ versal state to the political and religious problems of a modern nation state. The full flood of the English conflict did not burst the banks of the Elizabethan religious compromise until the crisis of the Reformation was past in France, in Scotland, and in the Netherlands, and nearing the end of its second phase in Germany. There were occasions in the sixteenth century when it seemed likely that England would be the first of European states to put the Reformation to the arbitrament of civil war. Yet circum¬ stances conspired to make it otherwise, and when the crisis became acute French experience offered precedents and ideas which were relevant to English politics. The ideas and the precedents went hand in hand. Those Eng¬ lishmen who wrote in the cause of Stuart kingship never tired of making the point that their opponents shared the anti-monarchi¬ cal tenets once propounded both by French Calvinists and French Papists. The implication was clear. Two mutually hostile French factions expressed similar political opinions because historical circumstances placed each in its turn in opposition to legitimate monarchy. Such opinions could not, therefore, be true. They were the result of a blatant political opportunism. There was an ele¬ ment of truth in this kind of analysis, for it is true that political theory is generally the product of its own historical context. Yet neither Huguenots nor Ligueurs were opportunists in the sense that they paid no more than lip-service to the ideas they preached. The theory with which English monarchists defended Stuart absolutism was itself in part the product of its environment. But, since the Divine Right of Kings was a religious dogma, its critics never reproached those who professed it with insincerity. The same could not be said of the juristic theory of monarchical sovereignty, nor of certain aspects of French resistance theory. While politics remained a branch of theology, it is possible to see in the thought of the French Religious Wars the opening of the breach between them. 5

INTRODUCTION

No one who has followed the political vagaries of the French Wars of Religion can fail to remark the curious way in which the events dictated the development of ideas. Huguenot theories of resistance went through three distinct phases until the death of the youngest son of Catherine de’ Medici made the Protestant Henri of Navarre the heir to the Valois crown, and caused his following to espouse the principles of hereditary absolute mon¬ archy. It was then the turn of the Catholic Ligue, opposing the Bourbon succession, to repeat the phases of Huguenot resistance theory. Under the weight of this new assault, an assault sanctified by Papal blessing, the Politique monarchical writers changed the emphasis in their thought from a legalist view of sovereignty to that theory of Divine Right which James I imported into England to fire the long train of seventeenth-century conflicts. The first phase of Huguenot opposition was directed against the king’s advisers, and not against the person or status of the monarch. It clung to the principle of legitimacy in its insistence upon the leadership of its own movement by the princes of the blood. After what appeared to be a flagrant betrayal of trust by the monarchy in the origins of the third civil war in 1568, it turned to a kind of historical constitutionalism, which sought for precedents to support those who claimed the role of guardians of an ancient constitution. Inevitably such a theme became a theory of limited monarchy, though the limitations were seldom precise and were usually advanced in terms of immemorial custom. It made use of moderate opinions such as those expressed by Claude de Seyssel in the age preceding the exaltation of absolute mon¬ archy by the legistes of the reigns of Francois I and Henri II.6 The enormity of the act of St. Bartholomew’s night called forth 6 There is a case for placing the constitutional phase somewhat earlier. During the second war it was common to maintain that the ancient constitution had been preserved in its essentials until the establishment of the autocracy of Louis XI. Hence the factious nobility who had opposed Louis XI were regarded as constitu¬ tionalists in tracts such as Memoires des occasions de la guerre appelee le bien public rapportes a I’etat de la guerre pre sente (1567). Of course, all generalizations which confine phases of political thought to periods defined by certain specific events are subject to countless exceptions. There were even anticipations of Hugue¬ not contract theory of the post-1572 period in the 1568 tract Discours par dialogue sur l’edict de la revocation de la paix. 6

INTRODUCTION

a new response from Huguenot theorists. They appealed to reason rather than to history. At the same time they continued to employ their constitutional myths of the power of the Estates General, and to quote historical precedents to disguise revolutionary action as conservatism. They returned to the anarchic conflicts of Armagnacs and Burgundians. They explored remoter ages to prove the constitutional deposition of the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties. But behind this fagade of historical experience they proceeded on a priori grounds to construct general proposi¬ tions about the nature and organization of political society. They wove rational arguments to show that the community in its cor¬ porate capacity possessed an ultimate sovereignty which enabled its representatives to discipline or depose the ruler. Even Frangois Hotman in his Franco-Gallia selected and twisted the historical facts to serve the needs of Huguenot logic.7 The argument that French kings had been elected and deposed by their people until comparatively recent times was intended to show that the ruler was still virtually elected and might be deposed by his subjects. This conclusion would not follow from the historical argument, and it can therefore be taken that history was quoted as empirical verification of an a priori set of assumptions. For Hotman it was in the nature of the descendants of the Francogauls, and hence in their institutions, that there should be means of dealing with a tyrant. The maxim rex singulis major, universis minor epitomized the theory of popular sovereignty as it was expressed in the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos and the writings of Beza after the massacre. Its reasoning was derived from Aristotelian premisses which described a human society as alone providing a full life for its members, and which endowed such a society with an organic unity. The ruler existed to promote the welfare of the whole society. If he placed his own welfare before the collective good of his subjects, he no longer fulfilled his function. The society as a 7 Arguments based on the preservation of ancient customs do not rest easily beside logical views of popular sovereignty. It may be that Hotman was trying to get the best of both worlds, but it does seem certain that the demands of the situation shifted his habit of thought from the historical to the rational.

7

INTRODUCTION

whole was greater than he, and those who represented it might take action against him. Arguments of this kind had been implicit in medieval thought. They had been advanced on behalf of the temporal ruler against the Papacy to show that the emperor or king had received his power from God through the mediation of his people and not through that of the Pope. They had been employed in the Conciliar Controversy to show that the Council of the Church represented a communal power greater than that of its earthly head. These lines of reasoning had been popular in France among Gallican churchmen and secular opponents of the Papal pleni¬ tude> potestatis since the thirteenth century, but they had never been applied to a situation where open rebellion against the monarchy took place within what was at last realized to be a national society. John Major had expounded the doctrine of the subordination of the king to the will of the whole community two generations before, but then the Roman precedents of universalism had obscured its radical implications. Now the doctrine of popular sovereignty lost its scholastic context, and emerged from the chrysalis of academic controversy to spread its wings as the slogan of popular revolt. In the hands of French theorists of resistance the concept became a revolutionary force because within a national society it was no longer the latent sanction for the existence of authority, but an active incitement to overturn it. Roman Law controversies over an original transference of power from people to ruler, either conditionally or irrevocably, were adapted to the new situation. Theories of contract became an essential part of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. It was assumed that such sovereignty would be exercised by the natural leaders of society. There was no conscious attempt to express this in the pseudo-rational terms of a volonte generale. For this it was necessary to await the age when the common man would rebel against his traditional masters. Many Fluguenot writers were aware of the fact that there was nothing specifically Calvinist about these secular opinions. Some, who expounded them in terms of contracts between king and 8

INTRODUCTION

people, added contracts between God and people, so that resis¬ tance might become a spiritual duty. Others asserted that these views were consistent with the penultimate paragraph in Calvin’s Institution, where it was declared that certain 'inferior magis¬ trates’ might be appointed to safeguard the constitution and in cases of extreme tyranny to resist the ruler. But this was foreign to Calvin’s usual emphasis on non-resistance, and in any case it had more in common with the constitutional phase of Huguenot thinking.s The manner in which Huguenot thought became increasingly radical in response to political events was no more remarkable than the comparable reactions of the theorists of the Ligue. When Henri III showed himself more of a Politique than a Catholic in coming to terms with the Huguenots in 1576, the early mani¬ festos of the Ligue showed the same loyalty to the king and the same abhorrence for the policy of his advisers as the Huguenot conspirators had shown at Amboise in 1560. When a heretic became heir to the Valois throne in 1584, and the king seemed likely to accord him recognition, the publicists of the Ligue favoured doctrines of limitation of royal power, and wrote of imprescriptible fundamental laws of the constitution in a way similar to the trend of Huguenot thinking in 1568. The murder of Henri de Guise by the royal command in 1588 produced a response like that which in Protestant propaganda had been in¬ spired by the massacre of St. Bartholomew. After the assassination of the last Valois in the following year, the Ligue continued to oppose Henri IV with theories of popular sovereignty in uneasy combination with ultramontane views of the Papal power to depose princes and sanction the rebellion of their subjects. If anything, Ligueur opinions were more radical and extreme than those of their Huguenot predecessors. They promoted the 8 This passage (1. iv, c. xx, sec. 31) was later styled 'the herb that spoils the pottage’ or ’the gap in the hedge’ by Anglican divines who were concerned at the frequency with which it occurred in the writings of English critics of the monarchy. M. E. Cheneviere suggests that the political ’Calvinism’ of Hotman, Mornay, and Beza was contrary to the teaching of Calvin himself. La Pensee politique de Calvin, 1937, p. 11.

9

INTRODUCTION

murder of Henri III and justified an attempt upon the life of his successor. The Ligue contained elements of the lower classes which were able for a time to wrest control of Paris from their aristocratic leaders. The ideas which accompanied the reign of Les Seize in the capital sometimes anticipated those of a greater revolution two centuries later. On the other hand, the more orthodox Ligueur theorists, such as Rossaeus and Jean Boucher, were able to express the concept of popular sovereignty with greater clarity than their Huguenot counterparts. They felt them¬ selves to be more directly in line with their medieval predecessors, and they did not experience the difficulty of Huguenot writers who strove to reconcile Calvinist federalism with the corporate unity implied in their theory. When they wrote of the corporate action of the whole community, they were closer to reality than those Protestant theorists who had spoken in the name of a mere fraction of French society. Circumstances also forced the Ligue towards a greater understanding of the inherent conflict between the idea of customary law and that of legislative sovereignty. The problem arose very clearly in the debate in the 1593 Estates General to choose a Ligueur candidate for the throne. The sanc¬ tity of the Salic Law was defended by the Parlement as the pro¬ duct of immemorial custom, but the Estates showed themselves ready to enact a 'fundamental’ law concerning the religious ortho¬ doxy of the king. Thus the fortuitous course of political circumstance drove the theorists of resistance from a conservative dependence upon the past to radical analyses of the nature of political authority in logical rather than historical terms. And, as if to re-emphasize the subjection of theory to event and to reaffirm secular motives con¬ cealed beneath religious dogmas, the transformation of Protestant theories was repeated in the process of Catholic opposition to the crown. In reaction to these developments the French proponents of monarchical absolutism were no less radical, for they reposed an irresponsible sovereignty in the ruler alone, and suggested that even the restraint imposed by Natural Law could not be enforced by human agency. Although absolutist theory came increasingly 10

INTRODUCTION

to rely upon the obscurantism of Divine Right, it never lost the logical, juristic definition of legislative sovereignty achieved by Jean Bodin. War, especially civil war, is the fruitful parent of political speculation. Political theories and the patterns of their interpreta¬ tion become profitless intellectual exercises unless they are related to human realities. Political crisis and civil war drove seventeenthcentury Englishmen to adapt French experience to their own use. It is significant that they, too, felt an impulsion to convert their mode of political expression from the historical to the logical. It is even possible to discern a repetition of the process in opposition to the Stuarts comparable to that experienced by the forces opposing Valois and Bourbon. If the succeeding phases of opposi¬ tion are to be determined arbitrarily, they may be said to be separated in one period by the Petition of Right, the approach of civil war and the Regicide, and in the other, perhaps with less assurance, by the Popish Plot, the Oxford Parliament, and the Revolution. In the Interregnum the forces which triumphed over hereditary monarchy bred yet more radical attitudes curiously in advance of their epoch. A similar phenomenon had occurred during the ascendency of the Ligue. Although Englishmen could not be fully aware of these quite fortuitous resemblances, their existence gave an additional impetus to the importation of French ideas. For while they could not achieve the objectivity necessary to analyse the intellectual pattern of their own political responses and to compare it with the French, many English theorists were convinced that the same forces were operating in the two fields. It may be that French ideas imparted that additional jolt which shifted the English habit of thought from the traditional to the rational. Generalizations about patterns of thought in the history of ideas are at best but partial truths. There must always be scope for that human ingenuity that enables ideas to play a role more posi¬ tive than the mere reflection of the material environment in which they are fashioned. There is even less certainty in the accurate identification of the phases of English thought with their 11

INTRODUCTION

political and social background than there is in the case of the French conflicts. Moreover, there are as many points of contrast in the two fields as there are similarities between them. They issued, constitutionally at least, in antithetical conclusions. There was a certain continuity between Commonwealthsmen and Whig Exclusionists which was quite lacking in the French parties of opposition. French and English legal traditions differed radically from each other. French theories of sovereignty were nurtured in Roman Law. In England the Common Law brooked little rivalry from the system of jurisprudence which other European states had inherited from Justinian and placed beside relics of customary law far less vital than their English counterpart. It was difficult for Englishmen to appreciate the relevance of French ideas remote from their own legal traditions until an open breach between king and parliament, an overt contest for the sovereign law-making power, forced them to do so. Yet even at the close of the seven¬ teenth century a reliance upon customs believed to have been received from immemorial antiquity remained a characteristic part of English thinking.9 If radical political ideas are bred in an atmosphere of political crisis and social instability, the subsequent return to peace and order involves the trimming of the heresies of the past to suit the respectability of the present. If the outcome of the conflict has been indecisive it may involve the reconciliation of ideas pre¬ viously in opposition one to another. It would be tempting to represent French influence in English thought as a struggle be¬ tween the idea of monarchical sovereignty propounded by Jean Bodin and that of popular sovereignty as defined in the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. Yet this would distort the true complexity of the matter. The two opposing theories of sovereignty defined during the French wars underwent searching examination by continental jurists in the period that followed. Dutch and Ger¬ man civilians, such as Althusius, Arnisaeus, Grotius, and Besold, sought in more peaceful media to analyse the contributions of 9 Cf. J. G. A. Pocock’s valuable treatment of this theme from the historio¬ graphical point of view in The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law, 1957. 12

INTRODUCTION

French theorists by the criteria of Roman Law. They perceived that instead of presenting a precise antithesis French ideas of sovereignty were based on certain common presuppositions. Hence they were able to effect various combinations of French ideas which either extended French arguments or sought a com¬ promise between them. It was through this dialectical process that certain Englishmen came to view the original exponents of French ideas. The same kind of observation would be equally true of the consequences of the religious disputes of the age. Neither Pro¬ testantism nor Catholicism engendered the spirit of toleration within themselves, but only through their mutual conflict. An age of religious warfare was followed by an age of reason. Dogmatic belief in revealed religion was succeeded by an optimistic belief in the rationality of nature. When Grotius remarked that just as God could not make twice two anything but four, so He could not make the intrinsically bad to be good,10 he laid the founda¬ tions of a new anthropocentric view of Natural Law. Natural Law became less a grand universal order in which man shared in part the rationality of his Creator but required faith to complement the limitations of his reason, and more a system of rules contain¬ ing nothing which the unaided reason of the individual man might not comprehend. Toleration, then, became not only expe¬ dient but reasonable. Such an attitude promoted respect for the individual rather than for the cause. This was born in the ideas of the Politiques at the close of the Religious Wars. It inspired a libertinisme which persisted throughout the seventeenth century and attained fullest expression in England after the Revolution of 1688. Here again French and English ideas were inseparably intertwined. The apologists of toleration were often those exiled Huguenots who had suffered in the persecutions culminating in the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Voltaire’s comparison displays a superficiality exceeded only by the insular prejudices of the Whig historians. The origins of that Age of Enlightenment which established the criteria of 10 De Jure Belli ac Pacts, 1625,1. i, c. i, sec. 10.

13

INTRODUCTION

modern liberalism are to be sought in the French Wars of Reli¬ gion, and are to be seen reflected in subsequent English thought. These criteria may be found in the destruction of medieval ideas of custom before the logic of legislative sovereignty, in the trans¬ formation of the scholastic concept of Natural Law, or in the new individualist ethic inspired by Protestant theology.11 These are not disparate strands, but merely ways of differentiating the habits of political thought which we choose to term modern from those we describe as medieval. In the interweaving of these strands French influence in seventeenth-century English thought is of decisive importance. But to examine this influence in proper per¬ spective it is first necessary to consider how far Elizabethan Eng¬ land absorbed contemporary French ideas, and to what extent Dutch and German intermediaries reshaped them for later Eng¬ lish use. 11 These themes receive their most celebrated exegesis in the works of C. H. Mcllwain, Otto von Gierke, and Ernst Troeltsch.

14

CHAPTER 2

The Elizabethan Reception POLITICAL RESPONSES Those

seventeenth-century English publicists who discerned

parallels with earlier French experience displayed a familiarity with the events and ideas of the Wars of Religion that cannot be explained as a contrived attempt to lend exotic colour to their interpretation of English politics. They wrote as if they expected their readers to grasp the significance of French example from an established knowledge of the French background. The French conflicts had become part of the English historical consciousness, and the ideas which accompanied them had already crossed the threshold of English political thinking. In part this was due to the Elizabethan reverence for French culture. In part it stemmed from those religious bonds, transcending national boundaries, which had led, even in the sixteenth century, to the adaptation of French ideas relevant to the English endeavour to define the relationship between the spiritual and temporal powers. The third, and not the least important, reason was the political response of Elizabethan England to the French situation. It is true that this response was very different in focus from that of the later seventeenth century. Contemporarily, civil war in France seemed merely one aspect of an international struggle between Catholic and Protestant forces. The politics of the various French factions appeared merely as the reflection of the greater contest between Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Later it became possible to regard them as a number of secular forces competing for power within a single society. This outlook could not become possible until Englishmen had themselves expe¬ rienced the turmoil of civil war. Even then, it only became a theme of importance because the earlier response had fostered

15

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

a detailed knowledge of French events and led to the English representation of French political attitudes. Quite apart from active English participation in the initial and concluding phases of the French wars, many factors made English¬ men responsive to the uncertain fortunes of the French monarchy and its opponents. The massacre of St. Bartholomew, the ValoisTudor marriage projects, the association of Mary Queen of Scots with the Guisard faction, and the rivalry between French and English interests in the Netherlands, were themes which excited English apprehension. It was generally the policy of the English Government to assist French Protestantism while preserving an alliance with the Catholic monarchy of France to offset the might of Spain. The shifting balance of the French parties required the continual adjustment of this policy. Its contradictory elements made it necessary to condition public opinion and at times to make concessions to its Protestant bias. Both its methods and the criticism it provoked were reflected in a stream of English versions of French political commentaries.1 Thus contemporary political responses led to the publication of much that influenced the development of seventeenth-century English controversy. While English interests were sharpened by the conflicting claims of foreign policy and religious sympathies, they were seldom directed towards the theoretical aspects of French politics. No one, for instance, was in a better position to appreciate the early trend of Huguenot doctrines of resistance than Sir Thomas Smith, and yet, when he was composing his De Republica Anglorum at the court of Catherine de’ Medici in 1565, he did not allow his observations on the French constitution to influence his analysis of English institutions.2 The very statesmen who con1 A selection of French works published contemporarily in England and illus¬ trative of English sympathies is given in Appendix A. Much information bearing on this topic is contained in M. A. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476—1622, 1929. 2 In the introduction to his 1906 edition of De Republica Anglorum L. Alston suggests that Smith was influenced by the ideas of Hotman. It is true that such passages as his description of the supposed overthrow of the ancient French con¬ stitution and assumption of absolute power by Louis XI (1. i, c. vi, p. 16) reflected the opinions of Huguenot pamphlets. Had Smith been able to associate the judicial

16

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

ducted Elizabethan policy had close personal contacts among the French authors of those ideas which were later to exert an in¬ fluence in an English setting. Francois Hotman was the corre¬ spondent of Burghley. Jean Hotman was tutor to the sons of Sir Amyas Paulet, secretary to Leicester in the Netherlands and the informant of Walsingham. Hubert Languet and Du PlessisMornay, the authors of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, were also well known to the latter, as indeed was Jean Bodin, whose mon¬ archical sympathies were in direct opposition to Huguenot theories of resistance.3 These were men of affairs as well as jurists and publicists. Their ideas were often less important to Eliza¬ bethans than the diplomatic manoeuvres in which they partici¬ pated. The English publication of their speculative works on politics was controlled to accord with English statecraft. When it was thought necessary to vindicate English intervention in the Netherlands, there appeared an English text of the fourth section of the Vindiciae: 'Whether neighbour princes or states may be, or are bound by law, to give succours to the subjects of other princes, afflicted for the cause of true religion, or oppressed by manifest tyranny.’4 Those sections of the work which had been written to justify resistance to absolute monarchy both in France and in the Netherlands were not published in English until 1648. Bodin himself expressed conclusions identical with the fourth section in his Republique, and while in Antwerp with Alengon supported French intervention on the same grounds. The debate arising from the deposition and captivity of Mary Queen of Scots affords a similar example of the English response to foreign political opinion. The works in which George Buchanan functions of the Parlement de Paris with the legislative role claimed for the Estates General in 1560, and to compare these institutions with the English Parliament, he might have succeeded in anticipating the distinction between law-declaring and law-enacting powers. The distinction was never clearly made by Huguenot theorists. Both Hotman and Gentillet believed that the Parlements had usurped functions properly belonging to the Estates. 3 A summary of these relationships is given in Appendix B. In the long-standing debate on the authorship of the Vindiciae I accept the view of Raoul Patry and Pierre Mesnard (Philippe du Plessis-Mornay, 1933, pp. 275-9, and L’Essor de la philosophie politique au XVIe siecle, 1936, p. 337 n.). 4 Published as A Short Apologie for Christian Souldiours, 1588. 6109

17

C

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

and Adam Blackwood, both Scotch by birth but French by adop¬ tion, advanced antithetical views on the nature of kingship attracted little contemporary English notice. Neither the De Jure

Regni apud Scotos (1579) nor the Apologia pro Regibus (1581) found the application in England that they did in France. But in contrast to the abstract opinions expressed in the dialogue of the De Jure, such personal attacks on Mary Stuart as those in Buchanan’s Ane detectioun of the duinges of Marie Queue of

Scottes (1571) received wide English circulation.5 No comparable English political situation tempted Puritan dissent to direct the more radical of Huguenot secular arguments against the Tudor monarchy. The cry of loyalty uttered by John Stubbes, a bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, at the moment following the public amputation of his right hand was a memorable testimony to this from one who was widely read in Huguenot propaganda. His offence lay in his criticism of the queen’s suitor and betrayer of French Protestantism, the Duke of Alengon and Anjou. His

Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf whereinto England is like to be swallowed by Another French Marriage (1579) was a diatribe against Catherine de’ Medici and her sons which borrowed most of its colour from the Huguenot writings which had answered the massacre of St. Bartholomew. But it drew upon no Huguenot speculation about the nature of political authority, and Stubbes’s cry of 'God save the Queen’ was proof enough that Englishmen felt in no need of such doctrines. Many Huguenot political ideas in the years following 1572 were concealed in a torrent of virulent execration directed against Italianate influence, or mentioned in brief asides to horrific descriptions of the massacre. These were the publications which interested men of the stamp of John Stubbes. They read Hotman’s 5 The execution of Mary Queen of Scots provoked an extreme French reaction. Belleforest and Blackwood had already defended her against Buchanan. They and many others now lamented her martyrdom. Cf. Georges Ascoli, La GrandeBretagne devant l’opinion frangaise, 1927, pp. 143—9. It was a typically Elizabethan piece of diplomacy that the envoy sent to France to explain the execution should have carried with him a demand for the withdrawal of the French ambassador, who was accused of complicity in plots on her behalf, said to be sponsored by the Ligue.

18

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

A True and Plaine Report of the Furious Outrages of Fraunce (De Furoribus Gallicis, 1573), Henri Estienne’s A Mervaylous Discourse upon the Lyfe, Deedes and Behaviours of Katherine de Medicis (1575), Jean de Serres’s Lyfe of ... Colignie (1576), and Innocent Gentillet’s more moderate Apologie or Defence for the Christians of France (1579).6 But there were no contemporary English versions of the Franco-Gallia, of Beza’s Du Droit des magistrats sur leurs sujets (1574), of Le Reveille-matin des Fran¬ cois (1574),7 of the Dialogue de Vauthorite des princes et de la liberte des peuples {Archon et Politie, 1576), or of the first three parts of the Vindiciae. These were the works which contained Huguenot theoretical views, and the few Englishmen who were acquainted with them read them in their French or Latin originals. The later alliance of the Ligue with Spain and the Papacy pro¬ voked greater English concern with French ideas. There was a certain identity of interest between the French and English mon¬ archies against their common enemies. French criticism of Jesuit theory proved readily adaptable to English conditions. The excommunication of Navarre and Conde called forth a number of Bourbon replies, of which Hotman’s Brutum Fulmen (1585) reached English readers as The Brutish Thunderbolt or Rather

Feeble Fier-Flash (1586). Pierre de Belloy’s Politique opinions, combining a theory of the irrevocable transfer of power from people to king with that of Divine Right, were known in French in his Apologie Catholique (1585) and in the English version as A Catholike Apologie against the Libels ... of the League (1590). Pamphlets such as the Contre Guyse and the Contre League (both 1589) appeared both in French and English, and the works of Michael and Jacques Hurault were widely read in translation.8 6 Another work by Gentillet popular in England was his Anti-Machiavell (A Discourse upon the Meanes of Wei-governing. French edition 1576, English 1602. The dedication of the English edition is dated 1577). 7 The Reveille-matin was the work of many hands, and included plagiarism of La Boetie’s De la servitude volontaire. Much of it can be attributed to N. Barnaud and Beza. It included both theoretical opinion and vilification of the authors of the massacre. One reason which may have prevented its translation was the violently anti-English tone of the second dialogue. 8 M. Hurault’s Discourse upon the Present Estate of France (1588) contained

19

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

The English text of M. Hurault’s Antisixtus anticipated by a year the equally vigorous English tract Martin Marsixtus. The English author was more critical of the past policy of the French monarchy towards Protestantism than was his French counterpart, but they expressed identical theoretical views. Both reprinted the oration with which Sixtus V had acclaimed the murder of Henri III in terms of the story of Judith and Holofernes. The text was to be quoted in English controversy throughout the succeeding century. In this way the Elizabethan response to the Wars of Religion led increasingly to a sympathy with French political attitudes, although not to an understanding of the radical import of French anti-monarchical doctrines. Englishmen who had little knowledge of the works of Dorleans, Boucher, and Rossaeus were nonethe¬ less ready to enjoy the burlesquing of Ligueur attitudes in the

Satyre Menippee (A Pleasant Satyre or Poesie, 1595), and there were many who could go far towards accepting the Politique views on kingship held by its authors. FRENCH SCHOLARSHIP AND CULTURE

There was little in secular Elizabethan politics to which the radical opinions expressed in contemporary France appeared relevant. Nevertheless, the English interest in French events induced the unconscious assimilation of French political ideas. These ideas also filtered into English thought through English dependence upon French scholarship and culture. Links between French and English scholars were established before the Wars of Religion and survived the stresses to which the French conflicts subjected them. The glow of the French humanist past continued to suffuse the horizons of English thought. Sir Thomas More had corresponded with Guillaume Bude. Camden and J. A. de Thou were to exchange the fruits of their learning. Those French works which exercised a formative influence on the English mind were often composed by the very men who a flavour of the constitutional phase of Huguenot politics, but his Restorer of the French Estate (1589) was entirely Politique in tone. His Antisixtus was published in 1590. J. Hurault’s Politicke, Moral and Martial Discourses had two English editions (1592 and 1595). 20

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

shaped the course of French political thought. Thus it was pos¬ sible for Englishmen to derive their cosmology from Of the

Interchangeable Course or Varietie of Things in the Whole World (1594), by Louis Le Roy, the monarchist writer at the court of Catherine de’ Medici, or from The Wonderfull Woorkmanship of the World (1578), by Lambert Daneau, the codifier of Huguenot political opinion. Another seminal work in English thought was Pierre de la Primaudaye’s Trench Academie,9 a com¬ pendium of knowledge dedicated to Henri III in 1577, when La Primaudaye held a post at the Valois court. La Primaudaye com¬ mented on the Wars of Religion with a surprising detachment. When he came to the underlying causes of the contemporary anarchy he was moved to observe that 'the nobility should not keepe the people too much under. . . . The poore people, being oppressed by both the other Estates, is fallen under the burthen like to Aesops Asse.’ Indeed, to La Primaudaye the basic reason for the wars was neither the rivalry of the factious nobility nor that of the religious parties, but the destruction of a healthy eco¬ nomic balance between classes. In many of his opinions La Primaudaye was very much a mon¬ archist and a disciple of Jean Bodin. He reproduced the classical definition of the three forms of state and their perverted counter¬ parts, and mentioned the preference of Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero for the mixed or compounded form. But this, he said, was not convenient for modern conditions. A commonwealth was monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy as the sovereignty reposed in one ruler, the few, or all the citizens. Sovereign power might be distinguished by eight attributes, especially by legislative autho¬ rity. In France the king alone held the sovereignty, but this did not permit him to tamper with the fundamental laws of the con¬ stitution. Moreover, he was limited by natural and divine law, for, as St. Augustine had observed, no human law was properly a law unless it was consistent with the law of God. The law of nature 9 English publications, in whole or in part, occurred in 1586, 1589 (two), 1594 (two), 1602, 1605, 1611, 1618. The summary that follows is taken from the first of the four parts of the work.

21

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

might be defined as 'a sense or feeling, which every one hath in himselfe, and in his conscience, whereby he discerneth betweene good and evill’. All this closely followed the thought of Jean Bodin, the discussion of the classical admiration for the mixed commonwealth being a paraphrase of Bodin’s treatment of the subject. He was aware of one subtle distinction drawn by Bodin which he took directly from the Republique (1576). In two pas¬ sages unremarked by any other contemporary Frenchman, Bodin observed that the form of a commonwealth might differ from its government or method of administration.10 Hence, although the definition of sovereignty as indivisible law-giving and lawenforcing power rendered the mixed constitution a logical impos¬ sibility, it was none the less possible for its government to be compounded of the three elements. As it will be seen, this was one of the ways in which Bodinian theory could later be adapted to English conditions. Like La Primaudaye’s Academie, Bodin’s works must be seen in this period as providing Englishmen with an encyclopaedia of political wisdom, and not as a source of controversial argument of doubtful applicability to English circumstances. It was not until well into the next century that the more forceful of Bodin’s ideas were woven into the tapestry of English political dispute. Never¬ theless, much evidence has been collected to demonstrate the wide contemporary popularity of the Methodus ad facilem histo-

riarum cognitionem (1566) as well as that of the Republique.n Parts of the latter work betrayed a more polemical spirit than the academic detachment of the former. The sixth chapter of the

Methodus was a preliminary draft of the Republique, but its stresses differed from those of Bodin’s major work. The former emphasis on the sovereign as the supreme executive power was replaced with a stress on the sovereign as the sole legislator. It 10 Republique (1606 English edition), 1. ii, c. ii, p. 199 and 1. vi, c. vi, p. 785. 11 Cf. L. F. Dean, 'Bodin’s Methodus in England before 1625’, in Studies in Philology, 1942, vol. xxxix; G. L. Mosse, 'The Influence of Jean Bodin’s Repu¬ blique in English Political Thought’, in Medievalia et Humanistica, 1948. The latter stops some thirty years short of the period in which Bodin's influence became most significant, that is, in the Civil War.

22

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

was clear from this, and from his examination of constitutional precedents, that it was Bodin’s intention to refute those Huguenot arguments which subordinated the king to the legislative power said to be inherent in the representatives of the community, and which referred to the past actions of the Estates General to sup¬ port this opinion. Bodin wished to describe absolute monarchy as the sole means of restoring order from anarchy. Contemporary Englishmen, however, did not perceive this, and their failure to do so is not surprising. Bodin was so eager to exhibit his extraordinary erudition that he could not allow the power of his logic to discipline the mass of empirical knowledge at his command. He was constantly defending conclusions reached

a priori against a nagging array of contradictory facts. The law, for instance, was said to be the will of the sovereign. Yet there were certain standing laws (leges iviperii) described as inseparable from sovereignty in the abstract, over which the actual sovereign had no control. Many of Bodin’s views did not seem inconsistent with English constitutional practice. It is true that England was classi¬ fied as an absolute monarchy. Yet when he came to examine the conventions of the English constitution, Bodin admitted that the monarch could not repeal former legislation enacted in Parlia¬ ment, that the Commons could debate royal marriage and the succession, that, except in cases of dire necessity, the ruler could levy no taxation without parliamentary consent, that Parliament might judge disputes between the monarch and his subjects, and that the Lords had even sequestered a king, Henry VI.12 Bodin was also notorious as a rationalist in his religious opi¬ nions. He was represented by Ben Jonson in Volpone as an atheist fit for the company of Machiavelli.13 Bodin’s comparative study of religions, the Ueptaplomeres, circulated only in manuscript, but many of his views were restated in the enduring work of his disciple, Pierre Charron.14 Charron’s De la Sagesse, like the work 12 All these instances appeared in Republique, 1. i, c. viii. 13 Act IV, scene i. Cf. J. L. Brown, 'Bodin et Ben Jonson’, in Revue de Litterature comparee, 1940, vol. xx. 14 Sampson Lennard’s translation, Of Wisdome, was published in 1606, 1612, 1640, 1651, 1658, and 1670: George Stanhope’s translation in 1697, 1707, and

23

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

of the Stoic philosopher Guillaume du Vair, was a source of in¬ spiration to the libertins in the seventeenth century. The politi¬ cal portions of Charron’s book contained many passages taken directly from the Republique. Soveraignty [he wrote] is a perpetual and absolute power without constraint either of time or condition. It consisteth in power to give laws in generall and to every one in particular without the consent of any other or the gift of any person.15 One of the most telling tributes to Bodin’s popularity is the much-quoted entry in Gabriel Harvey’s Letter Book: 'You can not stepp into a schollars studye but (ten to one) you shall litely finde open either Bodin De Republica or Le Royes Exposition uppon Aristotles Politiques_’16 Le Roy’s own views were them¬ selves very similar to Bodin’s. His De 1’excellence du gouverne-

ment royal (1575) anticipated many of the opinions of the Republique. The English version of his edition of the Politics (1598) was translated from the 1576 French edition, and his commentary reflected the rational bent of contemporary French speculation. In many of his glosses upon Aristotle’s text Le Roy seemed to be following his more illustrious predecessor, St. Tho¬ mas Aquinas. But where he differed from Aquinas it is possible to see that subtle interplay between the conservative force of scholastic tradition and the radical demands of the contemporary political situation.17 Just as Englishmen knew their Aristotle through Le Roy, so also were they familiar with Plutarch through Sir Thomas North’s translation of the edition prepared by Jacques Amyot, the tutor both of Charles IX and Henri III. It was the common source from which both French and English writers drew parallels be¬ tween the events and personalities of their own age and those of classical antiquity. There were no English scholars whose classical learning approached that of Amyot, Estienne, the Scaligers, and 1729. English versions of Du Vair’s Moral Philosophy of the Stoicks were pub¬ lished in 1598 and 1667. 15 Op. cit., 1670, 1. i, c. xlix. 16 1884 edition, p. 79. 17 This is examined in more detail below, Chapter 9, p. 167.

24

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

Casaubon. Moreover, the historical vision of educated English¬ men began to expand beyond a consciousness of the English past and a loose familiarity with classical history. It now began to include a detailed knowledge of the French past and to benefit from that French debate on the origins and nature of the consti¬ tution which the Wars of Religion provoked. The Memoirs of Philippe de Commines gave an exact political account of the reigns of Louis XI and Charles VIII, the contemporaries of the Yorkist kings and of Henry VII. Commines had been secretary and ambassador to both these sovereigns. His history was popular in France during the Wars of Religion because of the legend that Louis XI had overthrown the ancient constitution and freed the monarchy from the surveillance of the Estates General. In Eng¬ land Commines was widely read because of his comparative treat¬ ment of the constitutions of both countries, and his praise of English parliamentary liberties. Certain passages expounding these themes were cited by later English writers throughout the seventeenth century.18 Commines was known in Thomas Dannett’s translation, and his method was followed in the translator’s con¬ tinuation of the narrative to 1559There was also an increasing, if unappreciative, awareness of the new school of French historians—Pasquier, Belleforest, Du Haillan, and Du Tillet. Each of these had his critical faculties chained by political prejudice. Pasquier exalted the constitutional role of the Parlement de Paris at the expense of the Estates General. Belleforest gave a royalist interpretation of the past to refute the historical myth-making of the Huguenots. Du Tillet exposed the lack of historical sense in the contemporary assertion of the immutable fundamental law of the constitution. He de¬ clared it the mere product of custom, and no restriction on the absolute power of the ruler. Du Haillan was obsessed with the idea of the mixed constitution, and tempered the absolutism of 18 e.g. in the list of grievances recited in 'The speech without doors’ 1627 (Rushworth, Historical Collections, 1682, vol. i, part i, p. 490), and the preface to State Tracts, 1692, vol. i, citing Commines on the convenience of 'the true and legal constitution of our ancient famous English government’. English editions of Commines appeared in 1596, 1601, and 1614; Dannett s Continuation in 1600.

25

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

the monarchy with an admixture of aristocratic and democratic elements.19 The breadth of the new English consciousness of French learn¬ ing may be seen in the pedantic travel guide composed by a Nor¬ folk schoolmaster, Robert Dallington, in 1598, and published six years later as The View of Fraunce. The author drew his political opinions from Bodin, his classical history from Amyot’s Plutarch, his philology from Louis Le Roy, Robert Estienne, and Scaliger. He quoted the immensely popular Politicke and Militarie Dis¬

courses (1587) of that Huguenot paladin Francois de la Noue, whose reputation for chivalry and erudition outshone that of Sir Philip Sidney. He ranged from Ronsard to the sceptical Mon¬ taigne, from Rabelais to the Ligueur satire, Dialogue d’entre le

Maheustre et le Manant. He derived from de Serres the popular Huguenot view of the policies of Catherine de’ Medici and the Guises. He saw the early Valois through the eyes of Commines, and the more remote French past through those of Du Haillan and Du Tillet. He even cited Cujas, the French originator of the historical school of Roman Law. The authors he commended before all others were Commines, Bodin, Du Plessis-Mornay, and the Huguenot poet Du Bartas, 'for Historic, Policie, Divinitie and Moralitie’.20 Something of the fervour pervading Huguenot political atti¬ tudes was carried across the Channel in the works of Du Bartas and his fellow poet and historian, d’Aubigne. There was an Eliza¬ bethan translation of the song of victory with which Du Bartas 19 Du Haillan became the best known in England of these constitutional his¬ torians, and was usually referred to by his patronymic, Girard. In his De I'estat et succez des affaires de France (1570), in which he acknowledged a debt to Bodin and Du Tillet, Du Haillan declared that constitutional laws were fundamental only in the sense that they were sanctioned by customary usage. In his later Histoire generate des roys de France (1576), he included considerations as to the role of the Estates General which were a priori rather than prescriptive, hypothetical rather than historical. It is possible that this change in outlook was due to the influence of Hotman’s Franco-Gallia. 20 A book of similar design was John Eliot’s Surrey of France (1592), which drew upon the works of Du Bartas and Belleforest. Eliot was a Catholic who lived in France until the death of Henri III. His Ortho-epia Gallica (1593) made men¬ tion of Scaliger, Marot, Ronsard, Amyot, and Mornay.

26

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

greeted Henri IV’s military triumph at Ivry in 1590. There was also an Elizabethan version of his indictment of tyranny, Judith. But the book which made him familiar to every literate seven¬ teenth-century Englishman was the Devine Weekes and Workes, translated by Joshua Sylvester and reprinted in full or in sum¬ marized form more than twenty times. Like Judith, this epic variation on biblical themes contained many curious political allusions."1 Less influential, but even more crammed with Cal¬ vinist politics and morality, was d’Aubigne’s Les Tragiques, first published in 1616 but written before 1580. D’Aubigne castigated the vices of Henri III, whose court he had attended as a member of Navarre’s retinue in 1574-6. To those Puritans who knew it,

Les Tragiques must have seemed the poetic counterpart of Foxe’s martyrology. To d’Aubigne Calvinism had no national bounds. The Marian martyrs had their place in Les Tragiques beside those who suffered in the contemporary persecutions of Henri II. His was the fierce intractable spirit which inspired the armies of Cromwell: Mais c’est ta gloire, O Dieu, il n’y a rien de fort Que Toy, qui sgais tuer la peine avec la mort. Void les cieux ouverts, void son beau visage; Freres, ne tremblez pas; courage, amis, courage.22 French classical learning, French historical writing, and French poetry were all indirect channels through which the political attitudes of the Wars of Religion filtered into English thinking. So, too, was French drama. The Huguenot playwright Jacques Grevin was for a time an exile in England. Buchanan’s play Bap¬

tistes belonged to an earlier period, but was given new political meaning by the Religious Wars and at the same time became well known in England.23 Especially in English dramatic themes was 21 e.g. The Second Day of the Second Weeke, which concluded a description of the tyrant with: 'He maketh it his glory to invent subsidies, imposts and tributes to impoverish his people, and is a man-eater, as Homer saith.' 22 Les Feux, lines 199-202. The parliamentary commander Lord Fairfax, it may be noted, greatly admired d’Aubigne’s Histoire universelle and translated some of his verse. 23 In his Puritanical Plays Confuted in Five Actions (c. 1586), Stephen Gossen

27

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

the course of French events brought home to Englishmen. Mar¬ lowe’s Massacre at Paris ran through the story of St. Bartholo¬ mew’s night, the subsequent wars, the murder of Guise, and the assumption of an anti-Papal mission by Henri of Navarre from the lips of the dying Henri III, with scarcely a pause for breath in all its vigorous bloodshed. All the major participants in the drama appeared on Marlowe’s crowded stage. There was room even for Du Bartas, and for the philosopher Ramus, pleading for time to revise his estimate of Aristotle’s logic before his murderers dispatched him. The Huguenot view of the Queen Mother and Henri de Guise lost nothing in Marlowe’s version. They were depicted, for instance, contemplating the remains of Coligny hung from a tree:

Guise\ Now, madam, how like you our lusty admiral? Catherine: Believe me, Guise, he becomes the place so well As I could long ere this have wish’d him there. Another playwright who made much of French themes was the Catholic George Chapman. His two plays about Bussy d’Amboise told the story of the duellist and lover of Marguerite of Valois, the unfortunate favourite first of Henri III and then of Alengon, and examined the fate which overtook the Valois king during his domination by the Ligue. He also wrote a play about Biron, the commander who joined Navarre at the death of Henri III, and subsequently betrayed the confidence reposed in him by the Bourbon. Shakespeare himself, it has been alleged,24 took much of his inspiration from the events and personalities of the Wars of Religion. PROBLEMS OF CHURCH AND STATE

Of all the means through which English thought was attuned to French events and prepared for the coming English conflicts, exempted Buchanan’s drama of Herod and the Baptist from censure on the grounds that it might teach the ruler 'to governe his owne house, and beware what entreatie he gives to the Prophettes of God’. 24 Percy Allen, The Plays of Shakespeare and Chapman in relation to French History, 1933. Chapman, in Allen’s view, puts the English Catholic attitude to the Religious Wars, Shakespeare the Protestant attitude. 28

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

the most profound was the religious impact of French Calvinism. The registers of the Stationers’ Company abounded with transla¬ tions of the devotional works of Calvin, Beza, Mornay, Pierre Viret, and Lambert Daneau. There were nearly one hundred edi¬ tions of works by Calvin published in England before the turn of the century, and over fifty by Beza. While it is true that political thought was but a branch of theology in this period, some Cal¬ vinist writers paid more attention to political implications than did others. Many of Beza’s devotional works, for instance, make it difficult to believe that their author had also composed the Du

droit des magistrats sur leurs sujets. Mornay had one role as a director of Huguenot political propaganda, another as the author of the pious reflections of A Worke concerning the Truenesse of

Christian Religion, translated by his friend Sir Philip Sidney and by Arthur Goulding, or of A Discourse of Life and Death, trans¬ lated by the Countess of Pembroke. Except for the assumption that a lay society was, like a church, a self-regulating and autono¬ mous association, there were few political assertions in the views of Viret. Many of Daneau’s works, however, were full of discus¬ sions of the proper relationship between church and state.25 Some, such as his Politicorum Aphorismorum Silva (1583), were en¬ tirely political. Here the only modern author to be represented beside the passages selected from the ancients was, significantly, Commines. But this work was never translated into English, nor was his weighty Politices Christianae (1596). The latter was a compendium of all Huguenot anti-monarchical theory. It was composed at Leyden where Daneau, who was uninfluenced by the post-15 84 Huguenot conversion to the ideals of hereditary mon¬ archy, had a comparatively safe refuge from the turmoil of events in France. Not unnaturally, English Puritans such as Thomas Cartwright and Walter Travers, who quoted and reproduced the theological opinions of French Calvinists, were suspected of entertaining their political views also. Figgis, discussing the Calvinist habit of see¬ ing church and state as separate societies instead of dual aspects of 25 e.g. A Treatise touching Anti-Christ, 1589-

29

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

a single society, has remarked that, whether or not it was in the thought of Calvin, the actual political organization of the Hugue¬ nots served as a striking example to Calvinists throughout Europe.26 When Cartwright was writing his reply to the Erastian Whitgift in 1574, he had before him the example of those Huguenots who had formed a federal association of congrega¬ tions by the Articles of Millau. It was the object of the association to prevent the king’s interference with the reformed church, but clearly it was also a challenge to his political sovereignty. Cart¬ wright maintained that the church was quite distinct from the state, and might reform itself without reference to the lay magis¬ trate, just as the Apostles had created the primitive church with¬ out the authority of Rome. Cartwright argued that the church asserted no claim to possess the civil sword, yet he left it in no doubt that the magistrate was an ordinary member of the church and as such might be excommunicated. Knox and Melville had already made this plain in Scotland, and Travers reaffirmed it in his Ecclesiastical Discipline. But to Cartwright and his fellows this was no principle of sedition. Indeed, an independent church was the prerequisite of a healthy commonwealth. Each had its distinct sphere, and no conflict need necessarily ensue. Whitgift, however, claimed that the lay ruler must control the external government and policy of the church. There could not be two authorities within what was really one society. Unless there was to be dissension, there must be one governor at the head of the two hierarchies of officials who ministered to the society in each of its aspects. This opinion must have been strengthened by the events which had split the Gallican Church. Moreover, the Tudor Government was well aware of the fact that Puritan works were being published at La Rochelle, and that the printer of the Marprelate tracts was being sheltered there. Yet, after all, the Huguenots were Protestants, and the direction of Anglican theo¬ logy was not so clear that it was possible to ignore the popular English reaction to the massacre of St. Bartholomew. When Whitgift succeeded Grindal as Archbishop of Canterbury in 26 Churches in the Modern State, 1913, p. 216.

30

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

1583, and when, in the following year, Huguenots began to neglect their anti-monarchical opinions, there seemed no reason to depart from the sympathy with which French Protestants had been regarded. Indeed, Bishop Bilson in his True Difference

between Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (1586) went to some lengths to justify Huguenot action. Calvin had preached non-resistance. It could not be denied that Beza had participated actively in the civil wars,27 but he and other French Calvinists had fought against the Guises and Catholic persecution, not against the king. Navarre and Conde, princes of the blood, fought lawfully for the maintenance of their constitutional rights. In these circumstances it was possible to ignore the fact that the Calvinist doctrine of the separation of church and state, which imperilled the Anglican settlement, was put into practice by the Huguenots before it was preached by Cartwright. This was less possible after the conversion of Henri of Navarre. Anglican opinion against the Huguenots hardened. Now they began to be classed with the Jesuits and zealots of the Ligue as advocating political doctrines subversive of monarchical autho¬ rity. In his Dangerous Positions (1593) Bancroft would not dis¬ tinguish between the principles of Goodman, Gilby, and Cart¬ wright and the seditious practice of the Huguenots. His Survey of

the Pretended Holy Discipline, published in the same year, held up Geneva as the birthplace of seditious doctrines that threatened every monarchy in Europe. Bodin, he remarked, had observed that, when the citizens of Geneva had reformed their church, they had also transformed the state into a popular commonwealth.28 However much Calvinists and Papists might affirm the separation of church and state, they both in reality asserted the supremacy of the church over the state. The Huguenots and Puritans merely substituted many popes for one. Moreover, works such as the 27 In addition to his ecclesiastical sanction for Huguenot resistance and his pamphlets in its justification, Beza accompanied Conde on his early campaigns as his personal chaplain. 23 When the unauthorized 1577 edition of the Republique was published at Geneva, the publishers added a preface denying any necessary connexion between political and religious reformation.

31

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

Franco-Gallia, Bancroft observed, declared that the people in their civil capacity had the power to elect and depose kings. Ban¬ croft saw that the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos advanced the same claim, and hazarded the opinion that it had been written by a Papist. When Richard Hooker cited the Vindiciae in the eighth book of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity he condemned these doctrines of the virtual election of every king who appeared to acquire his throne by hereditary succession. He called them 'strange, untrue and unnatural conceits, set abroad by seeds-men of rebellion’. And yet in the preceding passage Hooker had repeated with approval that fundamental principle expressed in the Vindiciae, rex major

singulis, universis minor. It was true, Hooker admitted, that there was a sense in which the king had received his power from the community as a whole, but this had been an original donation, and Cicero had denied that this made every king subordinate to the corporate power of the people. The principle provided a latent sanction for authority. It did not mean that every successive king had first to be empowered by his subjects. Above all, it did not justify rebellion. Hooker perceived a radical import in the Hugue¬ not doctrine of popular sovereignty, and in this he was not de¬ ceived. He was suspicious of the very use of the word sovereignty. He took care, he said, 'lest we be forced to make overlarge dis¬ courses about the nature of soveraigntie’. When Hooker discussed the influence of the Huguenot ex¬ ample on English Calvinism, he gave a broader philosophic basis to the opinions of Whitgift and Bancroft. He saw well enough that the Huguenot example of resisting a ruler who invaded the autonomy of the French Calvinist churches was fatal to his doc¬ trine of the monistic society with its one supreme governor and its dual hierarchies of lay and ecclesiastical officials. The Vindiciae suggested that it was when the king set out to destroy the unified church that resistance to him was legitimate. But since the Hugue¬ not minority in reality contended for the survival of their own church beside the Catholic Gallican Church, their practice might suggest that there could be several autonomous ecclesiastical

32

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

societies within the national state. Here then was a precedent for Brownists, Barrowists, and the like, although the Huguenot con¬ gregations presented a doctrinal unity which prevented the rise of anything comparable to English Independency. Hooker would never allow that Englishmen could be anything but Anglicans. His Aristotelian argument that the state existed not merely to allow men to exist in material security, but also to enable them to develop every aspect of human personality to the full—gratia

bene vivendi, in short—could be extended to justify the interest of the state in the external control of the church. It might justify ecclesiastical legislation by Parliament rather than by convoca¬ tion. In this, as in his view of Natural Law, Hooker was remark¬ ably close to the thought of Bodin, who declared also that it was the purpose of the state to make it possible for man to commune with his Creator. And although he might scorn 'overlarge dis¬ courses’ on sovereignty, Hooker, in his chapter 'What the Power of Dominion is’, wrote: Where the King hath power of dominion or supream power, there no forrain state or potentate, no state or potentate domestical, whether it consisteth of one or many, can possibly have in the same affairs and causes authority higher than the King. This was precisely the import of Bodin’s definition of sovereignty, but Bodin had applied it to the purely political rivals of the monarch. Hooker was primarily concerned with that rivalry offered both by the Pope and Calvinist consistories to the over¬ riding powers of kingship. Hence he would go far in exalting the religious status of the supreme governor, while limiting him in civil government more severely than did Bodin. Clearly Hooker had no great sympathy for Huguenot politics. Yet it was still possible for those who supported the Anglican settlement to defend the political action of the Huguenots. It could be said that their religious opinions had nothing to do with their opposition to the monarchy. The explanation of their role in the French conflicts was purely political. This was the position developed by Robert Abbot, brother of the archbishop, in his 6109

33

D

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

Antichristi Demonstratio (1603). He thought that the French constitution gave the ruler greater power than did the English. Nevertheless, he saw that Bodin had laid it down that there were certain constitutional laws which the king could not alter. The Huguenots had defended these constitutional laws. The Guises, however, could claim no such justification. Their purposes were those of political adventurers, concealing their true intent under the pretence of protecting the Catholic Church. As it might be expected, Abbot’s target was ultramontane Catholicism rather than Calvinist sedition. The problems of English Catholicism were also closely con¬ nected with the Wars of Religion. England was to be won back to the faith through the seminary for secular priests established under Cardinal Allen at Douai in the Netherlands, and through that English Jesuit college at Rome with which the conspirator Robert Parsons was associated. The activities of the Douai priests were seldom political, but they could not be so regarded by Eng¬ lish Protestants who saw them as potential executors of the bull of excommunication of 1570. Moreover, when the Douai estab¬ lishment was forced in 1578 to quit the Netherlands, it was offered sanctuary by the Guises at Rheims. Association with the Guises transformed suspicion into certainty. Parsons was often at Rheims, and, through his patron, Henri de Guise, he was closely in touch with the Ligue. Guise gave Parsons the means to train priests at Eu. Later, when Parsons came to rely primarily on Spanish support, he moved his organization to St. Omer. The controversy which arose between English seculars and Jesuits over the appointment of the English archpriest turned on the question of political allegiance. The seculars depended on the ideas of Gallican writers such as Pierre de Belloy and William Barclay, who advanced royalist political opinions and recalled Gallican traditions denying the Papacy the power to depose kings. The Jesuits advanced the same doctrines as had their associates during the ascendancy of the Ligue. Barclay’s De Regno et Regali

Potestate (1600) attacked the 'monarchomachs’, Hotman, Brutus, Buchanan, and Boucher. He admitted the Papal headship of the 34

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

church, but denied the Pope the right to interfere in secular poli¬ tics. Barclay could assert that he was both a good Catholic and a loyal subject by branding the theory of popular sovereignty as a Calvinist doctrine. He professed his astonishment that a Catholic Ligueur writer such as Boucher could subscribe to it. This was precisely the attitude of 'secular’ writers in the archpriest contro¬ versy. In his Important Considerations (1601)29 William Watson defended the loyalty of English Catholics to the Crown. He scorned 'the huf muf Puritan popularity’ of Calvin, Buchanan, and Cartwright. He condemned the Ligue and the Guises and associated them with the conspiracies in England. His particular adversary was Parsons, who had promoted the cause of Spanish Jesuitism, and sought to make the Infanta Queen of England, France, and Scotland. Like Boucher, Parsons maintained both the Papal power of deposition, and the power of the corporate community to depose its ruler and elect a successor. In his Conference about the Next

Succession (1594), Parsons followed Rossaeus in the selection of Belloy as his principal opponent. Belloy, he claimed, had stated the Divine Right of hereditary monarchy as if it were some uni¬ versal principle. The ruler received a divine sanction only in¬ directly, through the medium of the people. His power was

potestas vicaria or delegata from the community. Kings were subordinate to human as well as divine law, and must observe their contracts with their people. In France the rules of regal succession were more strict than in England, but the history of both countries showed that the direct heir had not always been chosen and that sometimes the dynasty had been changed. Par¬ sons gave examples from the works of royalist historians such as Du Haillan, Du Tillet, and Belleforest to refute Belloy. It became clear to Anglican leaders that, although the Church of England and the Gallican Church might differ in doctrinal 29 Important Considerations which ought to move all True and Sound Catholics who are not wholly Jesuited to Acknowledge without all Equivocations, Ambigui¬ ties or Shiftings that the proceeding of Her Majesty and of the State with them, since the beginning of Her Highnesse Reigne, have bene both Mild and Mercifull. Republished as The Jesuits Loyalty, 1675 and 1677.

35

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

matters—and there were some to say that these differences were in trivialities, not in fundamentals—they held a common attitude to the Jesuits and the Ligue. The repeated attempts on the life of Henri IV leading to the banishment of the Jesuits from France, and their endeavours to gain re-admission, resulted in the publica¬ tion of works such as Antoine Arnauld’s The Arrainement of the

Whole Societe of the Jesuites in France (1594) and his A Dis¬ course .. .in Aunswer of Sundry Requests for the restoring of the Jesuits into France (1602). These found a ready English appli¬ cation. In his answers to Parsons, Matthew Sutcliffe made much of the Papal attitude to the assassination of Henri III, and the attempt to assassinate Henri IV in 1594, undertaken by Jean Chastel, and subsequently justified by Boucher. Sutcliffe criticized the views of the Ligueur, Dorleans, and borrowed those arguments which the Politiques had adapted from Roman Law definitions of treason. He cited Bodin himself in this connexion.30 Sutcliffe differed from Barclay and other Gallican writers, however, in that he was pre¬ pared to defend the Huguenots against the criticism of Parsons. The history of the Wars of Religion was retold as the story of the deserved fate of French Catholicism. Both the death of Henri III and the defeat of the Ligue were the just retribution which those who followed the politics of Rome might expect. The Jesuits had been responsible for inciting the Valois kings to persecute their Protestant subjects.31 A further answer to Parsons’s Conference came from the pen of another English civilian, Sir John Hayward.33 Hayward de¬ fended Belloy against Parsons. He supported the former’s view that hereditary monarchy was established by Natural, and hence Divine, Law, and invoked a regiment of Roman lawyers in his 30 A New Challenge made to N. D., 1600, p. 9931 These opinions were stated in A New Challenge and also in A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel . . . (1600) and A Full and Round Answer to N. D. alias Robert Parsons the Noddie (1604). 32 An Answer to the First Part of a Certain Conference concerning Succession, 1603. This is said to be a paraphrase of Bodin’s Republique (G. L. Mosse, Struggle for Sovereignty, p. 38). It would be more correct to call it a paraphrase of Belloy’s Catholike Apologie.

36

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

interest. Parsons’s association with the Ligue, he asserted, betrayed the true colour of his political opinions. Parsons had mi»represented the examples he had taken from Du Haillan’s

Hjstoire generate and ignored Du Haillan’s interpretation of them. In this way those who defended the political doctrines which the Anglican Church was to include within its canons were already identifying themselves with the political opinions of Gallicans and Politiques. In both France and England the claims of Rome and Geneva were met with the affirmation that the external control of the church was a national and not a supra- or ultra-national prerogative. The outcome of the Wars of Religion presented this attitude in a way which the supporters of the Eliza¬ bethan religious compromise could not ignore. They had before them a series of conflicts explicable in terms of Calvinist and Jesuit principles as to the nature of church and state. In denying these principles they had every reason to believe that Puritanism would follow in the footsteps of the Huguenots, that the methods of Catholic ultramontanes were applied in England as they had been in France. In the working out of the relationship between church and state there was a direct and immediate response to French ideas. Enough has been said to indicate the breadth of the English interest in the political ferment of contemporary France. Such was its scope that it has been necessary to select instances in widely differing fields in order to explain and illustrate it adequately. The demands of foreign policy dictated a shrewd apprehension of the complexity of French situations. Religious sympathies excited a response which often oversimplified and misrepresented French motives. A general dependence upon French culture introduced, as if by accident, themes from French political thinking for which English thought was not always prepared. On the other hand, common religious problems as to the proper relationship of church and state tended to induce some contemporary under¬ standing of French doctrines. The idea of sovereignty was par¬ tially apprehended in the sphere of ecclesiastical dispute, but it 37

THE ELIZABETHAN RECEPTION

was merely implicit in the gradual unfolding of the hidden rivalry between the king, the parliament, and the Common Law. The Elizabethan reception ensured that the French conflicts would not be forgotten in later periods of English political dis¬ sension. Moreover, it had provided a wealth of English and French comment ready to the hand of future controversialists. One con¬ temporary English analysis of the French scene expressed the hope 'that the afflictions of France may be Englands looking glasse, and their neglect of peace our continued labour and studie how to preserve it’.33 The Wars of Religion were indeed to be seen as the mirror of English dispute, but, instead of providing prece¬ dents to eschew, they afforded material to intensify the radical bent of English speculation. This, however, is to anticipate. Before the pulse of English politics quickened towards civil war, a new factor was interposed between French and English thought. 33 The Mutable and Wavering Estate of France . . . with an Ample Declaration of the Seditious and Trecherous Practises of that Viperous Brood of Hispaniolized Leaguers, 1597, Preface.

38

CHAPTER 3

The Intermediaries is a striking contrast between the haphazard English reception of the ideas of the Wars of Religion and the manner in which these ideas were carefully sifted and digested by German and Dutch jurists. Yet it was these writers, removed from the political stresses in which French doctrines had been formulated, who shaped and adapted opposing theories for later English con¬ sumption. They were concerned with French thought in so far as it modified traditional debates in Roman Law as to the nature of authority, its contractarian basis, and the definition of these questions in terms of Natural Law. It is not surprising that French views had a radical import for the academic discussions of civilians all over Europe. The authors of the most celebrated of the works provoked by the French conflicts were often famed as teachers and commentators in Roman Law. Such were Languet, Bodin, Gregoire, Barclay, and Hotman, though they belonged to various schools and some, like Hotman, preferred to stress national legal traditions at the expense of a universal system of jurisprudence. Even those known for their ability in theological rather than secular legal debates were often trained in the disci¬ pline of the civilians. Daneau, for instance, attended the Civil Law School at Orleans, while Calvin and Beza studied law both

There

at Bourges and Orleans. The French civilians who attained such eminence in the era preceding the Wars of Religion were not invariably the apologists of absolutism. Often they exalted the status of kingship, but they were aware of theoretical limitations to personal power implicit in the purposes for which political authority existed. The debates between the absolutist and populist interpreters of the meaning of sovereignty were in part anticipated by academic controversies 39

THE INTERMEDIARIES

in the first half of the sixteenth century. During the Religious Wars, however, these controversies were given practical applica¬ tion. Sovereignty in the abstract was associated either with the personal authority of the king or with those 'inferior magistrates’ who might act against him in the name of the community as a whole. Thus the way lay open to conflate sovereignty with mere power, and to regard it as in practice omnipotent. While present¬ ing antithetical views as to the repository of power, the exponents of monarchical and popular sovereignty were often agreed as to its hypothetical attributes. It was the task of those jurists who stood aloof from the scene of French conflicts to sever the theory from its factual application, and to observe the common ground occupied by the school of Bodin and that of the monarchomachs. ALTHUSIUS AND THE MONARCHOMACHS

Johannes Althusius, syndic of Emden and author of one of the most celebrated commentaries on Roman jurisprudence of his day,1 was one of the first to perceive that Bodin’s views on sove¬ reignty might be conscripted into the service of the enemies of absolute monarchy. Althusius was a Calvinist by religion, an acquaintance of Francois Flotman, and a sympathizer with the Huguenot cause. In his Politico, Methodice Digesta (1603) he professed his agreement with Bodin and his disciples that sove¬ reignty, though it might be said to have legislative, executive, and other functions, was in essence indivisible.2 But Bodin, he thought, had been misled by political bias when he stated that the supreme magistrate could possess the sovereignty. The very functions or attributes of sovereignty described by Bodin betrayed the fact that it was coeval with the community as a whole. The magistrate’s authority depended on the sanction of the people, who permitted him to administer the sovereignty, which they created and pos¬ sessed in a corporate capacity. To say that the magistrate had any 1 De Arte Jurisprudentiae Romanae, methodice digestae, 1586. 2 'Unde majestatis et regni jura individua et incommunicabilia, atque connexa jurisconsulti judicarunt, ita ut qui habet unum etiam reliqua habet.’ Politica Methodice Digesta, edited C. J. Friedrich, 1932 (the 1614 edition), c. ix, sec. 19, p. 92. See also sec. 22.

40

THE INTERMEDIARIES

personal title to the sovereignty was to admit an authority outside that corporate sanction. Similarly, to say that the people and the king each possessed an authority, but that the people’s was greater than that of the king, was to deny that corporate unity from which the one indivisible and inalienable sovereignty was derived. In short, to define sovereignty in terms of the warring segments of a community such as Valois France was to eviscerate the organic unity which gave it meaning. Thus Althusius transcended the position of the Huguenot monarchomachs. The only subject of sovereignty was the corporate people, the only object of it the individual citizen.3 With such views as these Althusius was able to cite Bodin and his disciple, Pierre Gregoire, and to set their precise definition of the nature of sovereignty beside ideas of popular sovereignty adapted from both Huguenot and Ligueur theorists of resistance, especially the Vindiciae, Daneau, Hotman, and Rossaeus. Perhaps the most important aspect of Althusius’s interpretation of French theory was his view of contract. One of the juristic arguments advanced by Languet and Mornay in the Vindiciae was derived from the concept of the universitas. The universitas was distinguished from another term used by civilians to describe a corporate association, societas. Whereas the former was an organic unity which could not be dissolved at will and which engrossed all the activities of its members, the societas was a mere partnership, formed and dissolved by contract, to serve some particular common need of those subscribing to it. The peculiar status of the universitas was defined by its three attributes: Universitas unius personae vicem sustinet; Universitas nunquam moritur; Quod universitas debet, singuli non debent.4 3 'Hoc jus regni, seu majestatis jus, non singulis, sed conjunctim universis membris, et toti corpori consociatio regni competit: ut enim non ab uno, sed universis simul membris universalis consociatio constitui potest, sic nec singulorum, sed universorum membrorum illud esse dicitur. . . . Nam ut se habet totum corpus ad singulos cives, atque ut totum corpus cuilibet membro imperare idque cohibere et regere potest, ita populus cuilibet civi imperat.’ Ibid., sec. 18, p. 91. 4 Digest 3. 4. 7. 1.

41

THE INTERMEDIARIES

By the first the universitas was endowed with a legal personality; by the second it was given immortality; and by the third it was granted a sphere of obligation distinct from that of its individual members. These attributes proved singularly convenient to the French advocates of popular sovereignty. If the people had a corporate unity, they possessed a legal personality by means of which they might enter into a contract with their ruler. If the people were in this sense immortal, it could not be objected that rulers, having received their authority from the ancestors of their subjects, were not responsible to the living. Finally, if resistance were undertaken in face of religious persecution, it might be justi¬ fied as obligatory for the whole people who had contracted with God to observe His truth, but as in no way obligatory for private individuals.5 Althusius also used the wording of this passage from the Digest, but he used it to prove that what Bodin called sove¬ reignty could not reside in any individual but only in the people as a whole.6 He cited Hotman to support this proposition. Further, kings were mere mortals, in contrast to the 'membra universalis consociationis, seu populum, qui nunquam moritur’.7 It is significant that Althusius should use the term consociatio. Despite his adaptation of the fictions of the universitas, he seemed at times to assume a pluralistic view of society, to regard it as a series of societates. This was implicit in Huguenot theory, as well as express in Huguenot political organization. The Vindiciae asserted that certain inferior magistrates, not necessarily all such magistrates, might lead a local resistance. Daneau glossed and expanded such arguments. He admitted that a political society had a certain conditioned order and unity which distinguished it from a formless multitude, but the bond of its unity lay in indivi5 'Primum ex foedere inter Deum et universum populum, ut sit populus Dei, singuli non tenentur. Ut enim quod universitati debetur, singulis non debetur: ita nec quod debet universitas, singuli debent’, Vindiciae, 1580 edition, q. 2, p. 56. On the immortality of the people see ibid., q. 3, p. 896 'Ita et quod universitati debetur, singulis non debetur . . . et quod universitas debet, non singuli debent. Unde sequitur usum et proprietatem hujus juris non unius, neque singulorum, sed universorum membrorum regni esse, quae communi consensu de illo disponere et constituere possunt’, op. cit., c. ix, sec. 18, p. 91. 7 Ibid., c. xix, sec. 12, p. 161.

42

THE INTERMEDIARIES

dual consent to the existence of authority and in individual reali¬ zation of a common purpose.8 It was thus possible to see the state itself as another s octet as on a grander scale, with its relation to lesser corporations undetermined by any inherent attribute of superiority. To see the commonwealth as a societas was to see it as an immense distributive network of relationships between real individual personalities and corporative fictitious personalities. Articulation came not from above, but from below. The common¬ wealth was a complex federation of social groups linked together by contracts. The consociatio was a voluntary association in which government was presumed to depend upon the consent of the governed. The contract theory which expressed this tended to present society as contrived artificially rather than as the natural product of human instinct. By impregnating the text of the 1614 edition of the Politica Methodice Digest a with the word symbio fi¬

cus Althusius tried to return to his Aristotelian premisses. The commonwealth was an organism with its essential unity resting in the sense of communal living. It provided the necessary con¬ ditions for the good life and removed obstructions which hindered its realization.9 There was, then, a certain dichotomy in the thought of Althu¬ sius between an organic view of society and an individualistic view, which saw society as created and organized by human reason to serve human needs. The juristic tendency to express problems of political obligation by the logic of contract theory rationalized what had seemed to thinkers trained in the Aristotelian beliefs of the scholastics to be an intuitive truth about the nature of society. Huguenot theory refurbished the classical Roman Law debate as to whether the power transmitted by the Roman people to the emperors was given irrevocably without conditions (translatio) 8 Politices Christianae, 1596,1. i, c. ii, p. 11. On the question of local resistance: 'Magistrates inferior potest pro modo suae jurisdictionis superiori imo etiam summo magistratui, si manifeste tyrannus erit resistere, verum intra sui duntaxat territorii fines’, ibid., 1. vi, c. v, p. 458. Cf. Vindiciae, q. 3, p. 167 ('Ergo licet regni officiariis aut omnibus, aut saltern pluribus, tyrannum coercere’). 9 'Communio symbiotica universalis est, qua a membris regni seu universalis consociationis omnia quae ad eandem sunt necessaria et utilia communicantur, et contraria removentur et tolluntur’, op. cit., c. ix, sec. 30, p. 94.

43

THE INTERMEDIARIES

or merely conceded conditionally (concessio). Its development hastened the rise of political individualism. The Huguenots drew their inspiration from the covenants described in the Old Testa¬ ment, and combined them with feudal ideas of the reciprocal obligations existing between lord and vassal. If the personal participation of Jehovah in human politics was to mean anything, it implied that man could shake off the trammels of Natural Law, that the regulation of political society was often determined by capricious human will, and even by arbitrary divine will. Man could, if he chose, break his contract with God, for the use of the terms pactum and foedus implied that the relation of man to God was in this context as person to person. The Creator might impose a tyrant on his chosen people as a visitation for their sins. Like¬ wise, the tyrant might wilfully break his contract with God. Hence the authors of the Vindiciae justified resistance to the tyrant who persecuted the church on the grounds of his dereliction of a divine contract, whereas they justified resistance to a tyrant who sup¬ pressed political liberties on the grounds that he had voided a contract between king and people.10 In the thought of Althusius the combination of Calvinist views with the traditional controversies of the civilians drew out and rendered explicit those radical implications contained in con¬ tract theory. Althusius described the contract of government as a

contractus mandati, a contract of commission, and held that under it power must belong ultimately 'ad corpus consociatum seu populum unitum’. He paraded the Old Testament covenants so familiar to the Huguenots. He used Hotman to marshal prece¬ dents for the institution of kings by the contract of government in 10 This oversimplifies the complexity of Huguenot contract theory. Six types of contract may be distinguished: that between God and the people as a whole [Vindiciae, edited H. J. Laski, 1924 (the 1648 and 1689 English editions), pp. 87, 96]; that between God and king [ibid., pp. 69—71]; that between God on the one hand and the king and people jointly on the other ['Archon et Politie’, Memoires de I’estat de France sous Charles IX, 1577, vol. iii, p. 97]; that between king and people [Vindiciae, p. 71]; that between king and each town and province separately [ibid., pp. 100-3]; and finally that between God and each individual citizen, whereby each was called to his vocation and the inferior magistrate to lead resistance [ibid., p. 110].

44

THE INTERMEDIARIES

nearly all the states of Christendom. He quoted Daneau on the manner in which such contracts were abrogated where kings ruled as tyrants. He cited the Vindiciae, Buchanan, and Rossaeus on feudal examples of voiding a contract. He repeated the monarchomach doctrine that fundamental laws were established as the conditions of the contract in order to bind the king, referring to Beza’s Du droit des magistrats and other Calvinist works, and adding the authority of Gregoire. He described the manifold local pacts mentioned by Daneau and the authors of the Vindiciae,u In addition to all this, Althusius explicitly developed the concept of the social contract as the prerequisite of the contract of govern¬ ment. By it the members of a society participated in the pactum

expressum vel taciturn which enabled the symbiotic community to act as one in the delegation of political power.12 It is sometimes observed with surprise that the social contract was anticipated in European thought by the contract of govern¬ ment. Logically, the social contract, by which men agreed to establish a political society, would seem the necessary presupposi¬ tion for a contract which set up a method of government. It is true that Althusius cited the canonist Salamonius, that this writer had described a social contract in his De Principatu (1544), and that this work was published in France in 1578, the year preceding the appearance of the Vindiciae. Yet the historical relationship of the two kinds of contract theory was quite otherwise. It is an historical anachronism, but a logical truth, to say that theorists such as Rossaeus, Daneau, and Buchanan accepted the doctrine of the social contract.13 It was never explicit in their writings, but those who came afterwards saw it implied there. The monarchomachs saw man as (frvaei 7toXltlkov t,coov. Only when they described the regulation of society apart from its origin or purpose did they prefer to speak in terms of human reason rather than in terms of human instinct. Indeed, there was no arbitrary distinction between instinct and reason. They were complementary aspects of Natural 11 Politica Methodice Digesta, c. xix, secs. 7, 9, 12, 18, 22; c. xx, secs. 20, 21; and c. xxi, sec. 1. 12 Ibid., c. i, sec. 2. 13 As in J. W. Gough’s The Social Contract, 1936, pp. 60, 61.

45

THE INTERMEDIARIES

Law. A political contract was often described as similar to a marriage contract, where God had established the rules relating to the institution of marriage, but man was allowed a certain free initiative in fulfilling the divine purpose.14 In Althusius’s ideas of contract there was a link between that Christian stress on the spiritual importance of the individual and that Stoic tradition that the reason of the individual man was the measure of social obligation.15 Thomist Natural Law had assumed that the human reasoning faculty was in harmony with the rationality of the Creator expressed in the working of the uni¬ verse. It had been thought that man could rationalize the impul¬ sion he felt to live in society, that he must inevitably co-operate with his instinct by what seemed a deliberate act of will. But now the Calvinist suspicion arose that sinful man might act against his higher nature, and with this came the belief that his reason should be seen in contradistinction to a human nature containing evil as well as good. There was a new realization of the meaning of Original Sin. With an increased awareness of human imperfec¬ tion there was doubt as to whether the state whose origin had been entirely natural would provide for the full development of indivi¬ dual good. So it was that Althusius could seize upon the radical implications of Huguenot contract theory, and could describe the hypothetical origin both of society and its government as the artificial product of human reason. Thus a Protestant theology which stressed the direct relationship between man and his Maker facilitated the growth of an individualist system of politics. Like man himself, a society of men was necessarily imperfect, and it had no higher end in itself than to provide the conditions whereby the individual might escape from the slough of despond and cross the river to that otherworldly city upon the other side. 14 e.g. Beza, 'Du droit des magistrats’, in Memoires de I’estat de France sous Charles IX, vol. ii, p. 775. 15 Thus the ideas of Althusius have been represented as a disaggregation of Buchanan’s Natural Law, Salamonius’s social contract, and Brutus’s contract of government (P. L. Leon, 'L’Lvolution de l’idee de souverainete’, in Archives de Philosophie du Droit et de Sociologie Juridique, 1937, p. 172).

46

THE INTERMEDIARIES ALTHUSIUS AND BODIN

If Althusius may be said to have developed fresh conclusions from monarchomach contract theory, it might be expected that these would not be consistent with the ideas he took from Bodin and Gregoire. This was not the case, however, for Althusius was quick to perceive that Bodin often began from the same premisses as did his opponents. In the very passage in which he denied that the Estates General possessed or shared the sovereignty, Bodin admitted that where a king was incapable of ruling a regency was to be appointed by the Estates General on behalf of the whole community. This was a common enough constitutional principle and one which had been debated at the Orleans Estates General in the minority of Charles IX. Bodin inserted the clause by way of an exception, and it was clearly an afterthought since it was contained in the 1586 and later editions of the Republique but not in the earlier editions.16 It was a dangerous sacrifice of prin¬ ciple in face of an acknowledged constitutional practice. The authors of the Vindiciae and Althusius made the same point, and they declared that a regency was appointed by the Estates because the sovereignty lay in the whole people as represented in the Estates.17 With some justification Bodin might be accused of sharing the premisses of the opponents of absolute monarchy while allowing his polemical intent to reach antithetical conclu¬ sions. Indeed, during the ascendancy of the Ligue Bodin wrote to a friend in Paris: 'Une rebellion universelle ne se doyt appeler rebellion.’18 Bodin did not disagree with the basic assumptions of those who used theories of contract against the cult of absolute monarchy. He agreed that authority entailed moral responsibility, but he 16 Republique, 1577, French version (Geneva), p. 209; 1586, Latin version (Paris), p. 89; 1593, French version (Paris), p. 138; 1606, Knoiles version, p. 95 (1. i, c. viii). 17 Vindiciae, q. 3, p. 133. Politica Methodice Digesta, c. xvin, sec. 86, p. 150. 18 J. Moreau-Reibel, ’Bodin et la Ligue d’apres des lettres inedites’, in Humanisme et Renaissance, 1935, vol. ii, pp. 422-40. The letter was written in March 1589. It also referred to ’ceste loi souveraine, salus popuh suprema lex esto , Cicero’s maxim, so often reproduced by Hotman and Buchanan.

47

THE INTERMEDIARIES

would not agree that such responsibility was enforceable by human agency. Contracts were distinct from laws. A contract between king and subjects such as that embodied in the formula of the coronation oath was binding upon both. If the king swore to observe the law (and by law, it may be suspected, Bodin here meant something more than the personal will of the sovereign) he must observe his oath unless his subjects released him from his contract to do so, or unless, 'that equitie of the law which he hath sworne to keepe ceasing, he is no more bound to the keeping thereof’.19 A king in such circumstances was still sovereign be¬ cause he was the interpreter directly of the continuing justice of the law and indirectly of his contract to keep it. Bodin generally avoided expressing problems of political obligation in terms of some contractual establishment or transla¬ tion of political power. It is unjust to draw an arbitrary distinction between some Herrschaftsvertrag in Bodin and the concept of

Gesellschaftsvertrag developed by the successors of the monarchomachs.20 Bodin refused to dogmatize about the origin of authority. He did not accept it solely as some conditionless aliena¬ tion of popular power as did Belloy and other later Politique writers. He followed Aristotle in remarking the possible patri¬ archal devolution of power, and in tracing the derivation of larger political associations from the family. In the Methodus he de¬ clared that some states were founded by force and the need of the weak to gain protection by acknowledging the power of the strong. Other states were founded upon equity, where free choice rather than necessity brought a political society into being. Though driven together by an instinctive yearning for society ('ut [homo] suapte natura societatis est appetens’), men realized that their corporate need for order was best satisfied in the endowing of one man with the authority to restrict individual liberty of action. Such authority, then, sprang from a general agreement to restrict individual freedom.21 19 Republique, 1. i, c. viii, p. 92. 20 Cf. R. Treumann, Die Monarchomachen, 1895, p. 38. 21 'Ex quo perspicum fit, etiam si ab historia destitueremur, plenam omnium

48

THE INTERMEDIARIES

In the Republique Bodin spoke of states founded by conquest and by the increase of families acknowledging the natural autho¬ rity of a patriarch." A shade of his commonwealth founded upon equity reappeared in a passage where he asserted that some states were established when men voluntarily had subjected themselves together with their libertie unto the power and pleasure of others, to be by them disposed of, as by a sovereigne power without any law at all, or else upon certaine laws and conditions betwixt them agreed upon.23 These latter laws and conditions, without which the passage would seem quite Hobbesian in tone, clearly did not emanate from the command of the sovereign king. The Salic Law might be included among them, for Bodin wrote: Touching the lawes which concern the state of the realme and the establishing thereof, forasmuch as they are annexed and united to the crowne, the Prince cannot derogat from them, such as is the Law Salique.24 Gregoire, too, though he cast his emphasis on patriarchal power, described such a covenant as the alternative means of establishing authority, and accepted fundamental laws as the conditions pre¬ scribed in it.26 To the opponents of absolute monarchy the bind¬ ing of the king by such laws implied not his sovereignty but that of the whole community. The king merely administered the sovereign power under strict conditions. Hence Althusius cited Gregoire, together with the Vindiciae, the Du droit des magistrats, the Pranco-Gallia, and Daneau’s Politices Christianae, to show that the whole community had agreed upon certain fundamental laws under condition of which power might be delegated to a ruler.26 To determine the direction of Althusius’s analysis it has been libertatem, id est potestatem vivendi ut velis, sine legibus aut imperio, a singulis ad unum esse delatam’, Methodus, c. vi, p. 191. 22 1. i, c. vi, p. 47 and 1. iii, c. vii, p. 361. 23 Ibid., 1. iv, c. i, p. 406. 24 Ibid., 1. i, c. viii, p. 95. 25 De Republica, 1596, 1. xxvi, c. i. 26 Politico. Methodice Digesta, c. xxi, sec. 1, p. 185. 6109

49

E

THE INTERMEDIARIES

necessary to examine afresh the French authorities upon whom he depended. It has been seen that Bodin never used juristic fic¬ tions to describe the translation of power from a corporate people to their ruler. But Bodin had hinted at a new explanation of the way in which a society had attained a corporate unity. The renun¬ ciation of complete liberty of action had been an individual act. In any case liberty, or, as he defined it, potestas vivendi ut veils, was relative to the social nature of man. So long as this intrinsic sociability were admitted, it seemed unwise to plead a stable monarchical sovereignty in terms of the hypothetical origins of such sovereignty. His opponents argued that, if the people had created political power, it was theirs to reassume when necessary. Hence Bodin preferred to discuss sovereignty dans le dernier etat, although he could not forbear from occasional speculations which detracted from the logic of his case. The inconsistencies to be found in Bodin, and also in Pierre Gregoire, allowed Althusius to enlist their ideas in support of the very cause they had opposed. Bodin had asserted the sovereignty of the king, but Althusius showed that his reasoning implied that of the people. Bodin had seemed to treat the rights of sovereignty as if they were property. Some could be passed to the ruler, but others were beyond his control. Were there, then, two sovereignties? But Bodin had described sovereignty as indivisible and supreme. In this way Althusius concluded that the only true sovereignty was that of the people, who allowed the ruler to exercise certain sovereign rights on their behalf.27 ARNISAEUS

In contrast to Althusius, who welded the ideas of absolutists and monarchomachs together to produce a theory of popular sovereignty anticipating that of Rousseau, other German jurists 27 'Unde efficitur, regem summam, perpetuam, legeque solutam potestatem non habere, et per consequens, nec illius jura majestatis esse propria, quamvis eorundem administrationem et exercitium ex corporis consociati concessione habeat. Atque eatenus jura majestatis ceduntur, transferuntur, et transeunt in alium, nequaquam vero quoad proprietatem, quod Bodinus defendit, d. lib. 1 c. 8 de Rep. et c. 7 praeced., ubi distinguit inter majestatem regni et regnantis’, ibid., c. ix, sec. 23, p. 93.

50

THE INTERMEDIARIES

set out to purge Bodin of his inconsistencies and to reassert his criticism of the Huguenot and Ligueur school. Outstanding among them was Heningus Arnisaeus, eminent for his treatises on medicine as well as for his writings on the Civil Law. Arnisaeus pointed out that much of the apparent ambiguity in Bodin was due to the twofold meaning of the word majestas. Sometimes it seemed to mean supreme power, at others the greatest honour or dignity."3 It was the latter meaning, the meaning of Machiavelli when he advocated the pomp and circumstance by which the ignorant were so easily led, that the enemies of monarchy seized upon to pervert the ideas of Bodin. Such were Buchanan, Hotman, Brutus, Rossaeus, and Boucher, regiae majestatis jurati hostes, as Arnisaeus described them. They selected kings who were only kings in name, and drew universal conclusions that all kings were restrained by laws and popular assemblies. Althusius and his French predecessors would argue that all states were democracies, and the facts belied such an assumption. Arnisaeus considered that Boucher had advanced the most persuasive case for popular sovereignty, since it stated the acknowledged truth that common¬ wealths were not created for kings, but kings for commonwealths. Rossaeus and Brutus also reached mistaken conclusions from such a premiss. If he found any favour with Boucher it was only 'quod unum fere hie inter tot nugas proferre potuit’.29 Arnisaeus believed that Bodin had rightly discerned the fact that sovereignty was indivisible, and Bodin had been wrong to qualify his condemnation of the mixed state by distinguishing between form of state and method of government.30 It was implicit in the definitions of Aristotle that every perfect commonwealth 28 De Jure Majestatis, 1635,1. i, c. i, p. 1. There were times indeed when Bodin spoke of majestas as if it were more appropriate to the controller of sovereignty than to the sovereignty itself: 'The word majestie is proper unto him who stirreth the helme of the soveraigntie of a commonweale’ (Repuhlique, 1. i, c. x, p. 158). There were many occasions when Bodin used majestas to mean what Cicero had meant in the phrase majestatem populi Romani defendere, or what medieval jurists intended in discussions of the crimen laesae majestatis. Cf. W. Ullman, The Development of the Medieval Idea of Sovereignty’, in English Historical Review, vol. lxiv (1949), p. 23. 29 Op. cit., 1. i, c. iii, p. 33. 30 Ibid.

51

THE INTERMEDIARIES

must contain an indivisible sovereignty. Gregoire, Barclay, and Kirchner31 had, like Bodin, really shown that the mixed state was a logical impossibility. Yet in aristocracies and democracies it was possible for the rights or marks of sovereignty to be shared among the magistrates, for these rights were 'ipsa in majestate unita inter magistratus diversa’.32 DOUBLE SOVEREIGNTY

Althusius refined the monarchomach exposition of popular sovereignty. Arnisaeus restated the arguments of Bodin for mon¬ archical sovereignty. Other German jurists sought a compromise solution in the doctrine of double sovereignty. The ruler had a personal sovereignty (majestas personalis) and the community a real sovereignty (majestas realis). This was not another way of expressing Althusius’s belief that the ruler was responsible to a sovereign community. It was rather an attempt to strike a balance. Personal sovereignty was considered as a distinct area of jurisdic¬ tion which had been separated from the once all-embracing sove¬ reignty of the people.33 There were many who expressed this view, the most celebrated being Johannes Limnaeus, the acknowledged master of Imperial Law. It was manifest that the opinions of Limnaeus were derived from a blending of the opposing schools of French thought. Not only was he thoroughly familiar with the better-known French writers such as Bodin, Gregoire, Pasquier, and Du Tillet, but he was also familiar with the polemics collected in the Memoires de la Ligue. Besides his general writings on sovereignty he composed a treatise on French constitutional law, Notitiae Regni Franciae (1655). 31 Hermann Kirchner was another illuminating German commentator on the theories of the French Religious Wars. In a series of spirited arguments, based on Bodin’s views on the Holy Roman Empire, he used Bodin’s attack on the concept of the mixed state to prove that the Empire was a pure aristocracy. Then, setting out to refute this opinion, he used Bodin’s concessions to the idea of a mixed administration to show that it was more properly a monarchy in which the exer¬ cise of government contained aristocratic and popular elements. Orationes XXVI, 1617, Oratio XV and Oratio XVI, pp. 200-17. 32 Op. cit., 1. ii, c. i, p. 155. 33 Cf. Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1934, vol. i, p. 54.

52

THE INTERMEDIARIES

The exponent of double sovereignty whose ideas were best known to Englishmen was Christopher Besold, who was Professor of Jurisprudence at Tubingen, and who died in 1638 while emperor and Pope were competing for his services. To Besold, struggling to harmonize the discordant themes which had emerged from the French Religious Wars, the fundamental laws of a commonwealth were those safeguards against tyranny agreed upon at the original institution of the state. He cited the authority of Daneau and Althusius to support this, and claimed that it was for this reason that Bodin had declared the leges imperii to be part of the sovereignty itself.34 This real sovereignty was coeval with the commonwealth, and endured through palace revolutions and interregnums so long as the body of the commonwealth endured. Personal sovereignty had no such permanence: 'Majestas personalis concidit cum persona et ad Rempublicam redit.’35 To real sovereignty belonged the rights of ownership, 'privilegia

dess Landes Maestatbriessto personal sovereignty those rights 'quae imperantibus competere solent’. Whatever its appearance, every commonwealth contained a real sovereignty, latent below the personal exercise of power. It was an error to represent, as Bodin did, that the rights of real sovereignty could be held by a prince. His was the personal, not the real sovereignty. He could be likened to the head but not to the whole body of the republic. Besold and his fellows achieved a working synthesis of the opposing French schools of popular and absolutist sovereignty. They stressed the similarities and glossed over the differences. It was inevitable that there should be such points of contrast when it had been the purpose of the monarchomachs to justify resist¬ ance, and the purpose of the Politiques to show that rebellion was unjustifiable. Yet there were also similarities, for both parties attempted a rational explanation of political power which ran counter to the medieval acceptance of the instinctive, the custom¬ ary, and the unquestioned mysteries of the divine wisdom. They 34 Dissertatio politico-juridica de majestate in genere, 1625, part i, c. i, 35 Ibid., sec. 4, p. 5- The following summary is taken from this and the ensuing paragraph.

53

THE INTERMEDIARIES

agreed in attributing to sovereignty those qualities of exclusive¬ ness, indivisibility, and omnipotence which the scholastics had attributed to the self-sufficing Aristotelian commonwealth. They agreed in the artificial explanation of social obligation by the analogy of contract. No continental jurist represented these tendencies so forcibly to English thinkers as did Hugo Grotius. GROTIUS

Grotius was the central figure in European controversies of international law and of theological problems of free will. His Arminian opinions compelled him to seek refuge in France where he showed himself to be the supporter of absolute monarchy. For all this, he was greatly influenced by Althusius and his French predecessors. He did not accept the doctrine of double sovereignty, though he believed that sovereignty must be associated with the commonwealth as a whole, and not directed by one part against another. It was his intention to remove the logical difficulties im¬ plicit in Bodin’s treatment of sovereignty, and to apply his own definition of the term to the observable status of the various Euro¬ pean monarchies. To Grotius the possession of sovereignty was either common or proper: as the body is the common subject of sight, the eye the proper; so the common subject (subjectum commune) of supreme power is the state . . . the proper subject (subjectum proprium) is one or more persons, according to the laws and customs of each nation.36 But while the ruler held the sovereignty, he could not be legally dispossessed of it. If there were means of resisting authority, then that authority could not be sovereign. Like Arnisaeus, he did not wish to concede the right of resistance. He continued: Here we must reject their opinion who will have the supreme power to be always and without exception in the people: so that they may restrain or punish their kings as often as they abuse their power. Nevertheless, Grotius was so impressed by the kind of argument advanced by Althusius that he conceded that there might be 36 De Jure Belli ac Pacts (1625), 1738,1. i, c. iii, sec. 7, pp. 63, 64.

54

THE INTERMEDIARIES

extraordinary circumstances in which the whole community might take action to discipline or dethrone a tyrannous ruler. In this passage Grotius took as his text the concessions to theories of resistance allowed by that earlier and more virulent critic of the monarchomachs, William Barclay. Bodin had said that an oppressed people might call in a foreign prince against their ruler, and that a king who was no absolute sovereign might be opposed in a state that was properly an aristocracy. Barclay had gone further and allowed resistance by the community as a whole when a legitimate sovereign, hostili anirno, set about the destruction of the very bases of society. Now Grotius defined seven grounds on which resistance was permissible.37 These admissions by the sup¬ porters of absolute monarchy were to be important debating points in English political controversy. More than this, Grotius made new use of the contract theories of the French Religious Wars and presented them in the form in which they became the centre of English dispute. He defined a political society as 'a compleat body of free persons associated together to enjoy peaceably their rights, and for their common benefit’.38 Like many of the writers of the time, he admitted three possible methods for the establishment of political power. His stress was not on conquest or patriarchal devolution, but on those doctrines of contract which seemed most in accord with his defini¬ tion of the nature and aims of political association. He asserted that individual men had renounced their liberties by a unanimous agreement to accept the will of the majority as if it were the will of all. This majority had thus been empowered to establish a form of government and irrevocably to bestow power on the ruler by a contract of subjection. Althusius had re-interpreted the ancient concept of concessio, while Grotius thus gave new life to that of

translatio. Both employed the logical device of the social contract, and both had reached new positions under the stimulus of French thought. 37 Ibid., 1. i, c. iv, secs. 8-14, pp. 119-21. Cf. Bodin, Republique, 1. ii, c. v, pp. 219-21. Cf. Barclay, De Regno et Regali Potestate, 1. iii, c. viii, p. 159. 38 Op. cit., 1. ii, c. v, sec. 26.

55

THE INTERMEDIARIES

These arguments, to which Hobbes, Locke, and others were later to be so indebted, produced a new attitude to Natural Law. Grotius is said to have escaped from his anti-Arminian persecutors by consigning himself in a box supposedly filled with books. The Thomist attitude to Natural Law accepted the universe as a box whose contents had been devised by a rational Creator. Man might read something of the Creator’s method, but where his reason failed to match that of his Maker he might leave the books unread and use faith to complement the deficiencies of his reason¬ ing mind. But now man alone filled the universe. The box no longer contained a library so vast and mysterious that it could never be mastered. The box contained man, and man alone. It was calculable and measurable in every dimension, and the reason of the individual man was there to study and apprehend its design. Grotius used an ancient Stoic phrase to describe Natural Law as 'the dictate of right reason’ (dictatum rectae rationis). It indicated 'whether an act is morally right or wrong according as it complies with rational nature itself’.39 This enabled the individual reason¬ ing mind to calculate the utility of a political action and to make a moral judgement by one and the same mental process. Further, it implied that the Creator of rational nature was Himself bound by its rationality. Natural Law, for the Deist, had lost touch with the idea of a personal God. It became anthropocentric rather than theocentric. All these rationalizations of the nature of political power in terms of sovereignty, and of political obligation in terms of con¬ tract, were at once a consequence and a cause of this transformed attitude to Natural Law. It is more than a coincidence that a vein of Stoicism flowed strongly through French thought in the later sixteenth century.40 Through the political and religious thought 39 Ibid., 1. i, c. i, sec. 10. 'Dictatum rectae rationis’ was a phrase much used by Hobbes. 40 This theme is traced in detail in L. Zanta’s La Renaissance du Stoicisme au XVIe siecle, 1914. There was a desire to adopt a Stoic attitude to the passions engendered by religious and civil war. There was a craving to give morality a rational basis, to show that 'toute la moralite depend de la clarte de l’entendement’. Guillaume du Vair, referred to in the preceding chapter, was perhaps the fore¬ most exponent of Stoic philosophy in this period.

56

THE INTERMEDIARIES

of the Politiques it entered and controlled the ideas of continental jurists and was transmitted thence to the English scene. We are already entering the climate of later seventeenth-century English thought. The influence of the intermediaries was not to be felt until the late Interregnum and the Restoration. Under the early Stuarts English political debate was still directly in touch with the ideas of the French Religious Wars. To this period we must now return.

57

CHAPTER 4

Prelude to Qivil War THE IMMEMORIAL LAW

The conviction that law is the settled and ordered expression of the wisdom of the past is put to searching tests by the anarchy of civil war. The French Wars of Religion were not a field in which political action might for long be justified in terms of traditional beliefs. The Protean fluctuations in power made it difficult for political thinkers to take their stand upon unchanging laws of the constitution. It seemed more profitable to rationalize the contest for power in terms of sovereigns and sovereignty rather than of the sovereign law. Those who, like Frangois Hotman, outwardly clung to constitutional precedents, often allowed such rationaliza¬ tions to distort their historical vision. Moreover, the mystique surrounding the concept of an immemorial law was likely to be dispelled as the interpreter set out to trace its origins and to arrange its principles in rational order. English political disputes in the first three decades of the seven¬ teenth century were not concerned with a conscious struggle for power so much as with a desire to clarify the meaning of the immemorial law. It has been asserted that these English dissen¬ sions were an overt contest for sovereignty between king and Parliament, a contest in which French ideas sharpened English perception of the idea of law as the will and decision of the legis¬ lator.1 It is true that the ideas of Bodin can be shown to have played some minor part in the early constitutional struggle between the Stuarts and their parliaments. But, as it has already been stated, the period when the opinions of the schools repre¬ sented by Bodin and the authors of the Vindiciae contraTyrannos 1 Cf. G. L. Mosse, The Struggle for Sovereignty in England from the Accession of Queen Elizabeth to the Petition of Right, 1950.

58

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

became of crucial importance in the development of English thought was the period of the Civil War and its aftermath. There was in fact a direct link between English thought in the Jacobean age and the political speculation of the French Religious Wars, but this, strangely enough, was almost unconnected with the con¬ stitutional struggle which served as the prelude to the Civil War. This link was occasioned by the Oath of Allegiance controversy, to which the second part of this chapter is devoted. To men like Sir Edward Coke the arbiter of the constitution was the immemorial Common Law. Perhaps it should have been obvious that in the preceding century the king in Parliament had changed the constitution out of all knowledge. It was not obvious because these changes had proceeded with a seeming legality which obscured their revolutionary character. To Coke and the Common Lawyers Parliament remained a law-declaring and not a law-making body. As the highest court in the land its function was simply to interpret and apply the Common Law. Out of this attitude it came slowly to be realized that by interpreting the old law, Parliament must inevitably make law anew. Yet civil war and revolution were required before this implication came gene¬ rally to be accepted. When Coke set out to describe the functions of the High Court of Parliament he remarked: Of the power and jurisdiction of the Parliament, for making of laws in proceeding by Bill, it is so transcendent and absolute, as it cannot be confined either for causes or persons within any bounds.2 Similarly, he contended that there was no previous statute, how¬ ever it might be hedged about with fundamentals, which a subse¬ quent Parliament might not override.3 This was the closest he came to asserting the legislative sovereignty of Parliament, but it never occurred to him that such sovereignty might be in conflict with the supremacy of the immemorial law. He would describe statutes as 'declaratory of the Common Law’, even in the case of 2 The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, 1669 edition, p. 36. The passage is the subject of Blackstone’s celebrated gloss. 3 Ibid., p. 43.

59

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

the Henrician statute which, he said, had subordinated the powers of convocation alike to custom, statute, and the royal prerogative.4 The prerogative itself was defined by the Common Law. The law protected the rights of property and controlled the levying of taxation. In the matter of subsidies Coke referred to the remarks of Commines on the immemorial custom of the English to give their assent in Parliament before subsidies might be exacted.5 Many of the disputes between the early Stuarts and their par¬ liaments arose out of attempts to raise money without parliamen¬ tary sanction. The typical response to these alleged extensions of the prerogative was that of the lawyer William Hakewil, who declared during the 1610 debate on impositions: 'First I hold it necessary to consider whether custom were due to the King by the Common Law.’6 There were exceptions to this attitude, as when the counsel opposing the Crown in Bates’s Case based his argu¬ ment on the principle of sovereignty. The right to tax rested with the sovereign, and the dispute concerned the power of the king to levy customs dues without parliamentary approval. Since the king in Parliament was superior to the king out of Parliament, and since there could only be one sovereign power, the king alone, it was asserted, had no such extra-parliamentary authority.7 Some thirty years later the doctrines of Bodin were again invoked in the equally celebrated case of ship-money. Giving judgement, Sir Edward Crawley pointed out that both Commines and Bodin agreed that the king might levy extra-parliamentary taxation in cases of national emergency. The king alone determined when such circumstances existed. 'I could vouch these two authors’, said Crawley, concerning the right of sovereignty which they gave to kings to impose charges on the subject without consent of parlia¬ ment, in time of necessity.’ He observed also that they 'wrote not according to the law of any one kingdom, but according to the law of reason’.8 4 The Fourth Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England, 1669 edition, p. 74. 5 Ibid., p. 28. 6 The Libertie of the Subject against the Pretended Power of Impositions main¬ tained by an Argument in Parliament Anno 7 Jacobi Regis, 1641, p. 4. 7 Howell’s State Trials, vol. ii (1809), p. 482. 8 Ibid., vol. iii, p. 1084.

60

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

Here, it would seem, was an explicit avowal that the king’s will was the source of law. Yet this was far from clear in the original passage which Crawley had consulted. Bodin had written that in England it had been established since the time of Edward I that there could be no taxation whatever without parliamentary consent. He had continued: Other kings have in this point no more power than the kings of England: for it is not in the power of any prince in the world at his pleasure to rayse taxes upon the people, no more than to take another mans goods from him.9 He had cited Commines to show French constitutional precedents for this belief, and it was only at this point that he had admitted that extreme necessity might justify taxation without consent. Even then he had been doubtful of such a doctrine. In a later passage he had held that the right of ownership was established by Natural Law, and since the ruler was bound to observe Natural Law he could not deprive a subject of his property without just cause. There were circumstances when private men must suffer in the interests of the public welfare, though the king must remem¬ ber that the public good consisted of the welfare of individuals and the sanctity of their estates. Bodin had then quoted two maxims from Seneca: 'Ad reges potestas omnium pertinet, ad singulos proprietas’ and 'omnia rex imperio possidet, singuli dominio’.10 Indeed, Bodin’s treatment of the matter was a typical example of his frequent refusal to allow the logical definition of sovereignty to result conclusively in a voluntarist view of law on any specific issue. He could not cut loose from medieval principles, and he could not ignore medieval precedents. It is the less surpris¬ ing, therefore, that Englishmen who opposed the pretensions of the first Stuart kings were equally unable to perceive how incom¬ patible was their view of law as custom with their implicit claim that Parliament was the supreme legislative organ. Nor is it sur¬ prising that those who supported monarchical pretensions often failed to see what was implied by placing the king above the law. 9 Republique, 1. i, c. viii, p. 97.

10 Ibid., pp. 109,110.

61

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

The tendency to cling to the rule of traditional law was again evidenced in the debates in which the Petition of Right was formulated. In answer to the forced loan imposed by Charles I and the arrest of those who refused to pay it, Coke suggested that both houses should agree upon a petition declaratory of the sub¬ ject’s liberties as established by Common Law. The elder Sir Dudley Digges illustrated the attitude of the Petition’s managers when he described the laws of England as 'so ancient that from Saxon days notwithstanding the injuries and ruines of time, they have continued in most part the same’. 'Be pleas’d then to know’, he concluded, 'that it is an undoubted and fundamental point of this so ancient Common Law of England that the subject hath a true propriety in his goods and possessions.’11 Magna Carta, it was alleged, had merely affirmed the law, and the Petition was intended to re-affirm it. In the committee which drew up the Petition, Alford raised the manner of Bodin’s employment of the term sovereignty. Pym observed: 'All our petition is for the laws of England, and this power seems to be another distinct power from the power of the law.’ Coke added: 'Magna Charta is such a fellow that will have no sovereign’, and Wentworth continued: 'These laws are not acquainted with sovereign power, we desire no new thing.’12 The inability to distinguish between the making and the declar¬ ing of law was supremely evident in Sir John Eliot, the man whose intractability led to the 1629 dissolution of the third Parliament of Charles I and to the ensuing eleven years of non-parliamentary government. Eliot spent much of the imprisonment he suffered in expiation of his opinions in making an abridged translation of Ar nisaeus’sD^ JureMajestatis. From the excisions which he made itwas clear that the implications of the theory of sovereignty were obscure to him. The disjointed notes that resulted were in part included in the prisoner’s own treatise, The Monarchie of Man. It was signi¬ ficant that where he referred to Bodin itwas to reproduce opinions that the subject’s obligation to obey was no less than the ruler’s to 11 Rushworth, Historical Collections, 1692, part i, vol. i, pp. 527, 528. 12 Ibid., p. 562.

62

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

be just, that a senate was as necessary in a commonwealth as a mind in a body, or that a tyrant was one who placed his private interest before the public good. He delighted, moreover, in the maxims which Bodin had taken from Seneca, the maxims which Mcllwain has regarded as the mark of the medieval mind. Had there been a greater knowledge of the voluntarist prin¬ ciples of Roman Law, the theory of sovereignty would, no doubt, have been more readily comprehended. As it was, the influence of Roman Law was less insignificant in early-seventeenth-century England than is commonly supposed.13 A system of Praetorian equity was dispensed in the Court of the Chancellor. Roman Law was practised in the ecclesiastical courts, in the Court of Admir¬ alty, and in the tribunals of the universities. The advocates who pleaded and the judges who presided in these courts were trained in institutions of Roman Law, such as Doctors’ Commons and Gresham College, and they often held degrees granted by con¬ tinental schools. An ability to interpret the Jus Gentium in the style of the civilians was necessary in diplomacy and especially in maritime disputes. Not only English ambassadors, but also chan¬ cellors, masters of requests, and secretaries of state were frequently schooled in Roman Law disciplines. Chairs of Civil Law had been established in Oxford and Cambridge in 1540, and their incum¬ bents, John Cowell and Albericus Gentilis, for instance, some¬ times took part in political controversies as well as in the unending stream of academic disputes in which jurists throughout Europe participated. The advent of James I quickened an influx of Roman Law influence from Scotland. One of the replies to Parsons justifying the king’s accession was composed by Sir Thomas Craig, the eminent civilian and pupil of Charles du Moulin. The others, as it has been noted earlier, came from the pen of two English civilians, Hayward and Sutcliffe. James’s grandfather, James V, had stimulated the reception of Roman Law in Scotland by found¬ ing the Court of Session, where the Civil Law was administered. 13 The extent of this influence is demonstrated by E. Nys, Le Droit romain, le Droit des Gens et le College des Docteurs en Droit Civil, Brussels, 1910.

63

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

It had long been the practice of Scottish lawyers to obtain their degrees at French universities. James I so offended the Common Lawyers by his praise of the Civil Law that he found it necessary to sooth the hostility his words had aroused in his address to both houses in March 1609- He admitted that the Common Law governed the extent of the royal prerogative, but he must have hurt English sensibilities further by remarking that without an element of Roman Law national law would degenerate into bar¬ barism. England, he said, was not unlike Scotland, Spain, or France in that it practised Roman Law in some courts while retaining customary law in others.14 On the whole, James I was chary of promoting an English 'reception’, and he acceded to the request of the Commons in the proceedings taken against Cowell for his definitions of subsidy, parliament, and prerogative in his

Interpreter. The supporters of the Common Law keenly resented the appli¬ cation of Roman Law principles to the working of the constitu¬ tion. They were conscious, too, of the criticisms by civilians of the disordered bulk of English law. The indignation expressed by Coke, in the preface to his treatise on Littleton, at the gibes of Francois Hotman was early evidence of this. Some civilians tried their hand at codifying the Common Law or eliciting its principles by Roman Law methods. Cowell himself attempted this in his

Institutiones Juris Anglicani (1605). William Fulbecke com¬ posed his Parallel or Conference of the Civil Law, the Canon Law and the Common Law of this Realm of England (161S) to extol the advantages of the Roman Law and to point out that English law already contained an infusion of it. Bacon, in his Elements

of the Common Lawes of England, praised the codification of Justinian and confessed that the objects of his own work could only be achieved through the use of Roman Law terminology. It has been seen that it was largely the French jurists who shaped the political theories of the Religious Wars, and that the doctrines of sovereignty which they enunciated had long been implicit in the debates of their predecessors. The anger aroused 14 Works, edited Mcllwain, 1918, pp. 310, 311.

64

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

by the views of Cowell and Gentilis among the parliamentary opposition, the incomprehension evident among the supporters of the prerogative, and the common failure of Englishmen to appreciate the significance of constitutional change, all intensify the contrast between French and English thought at this time. But if Roman Law principles could make little progress by frontal assault against the entrenched position of the immemorial law, the historical disposition of the new French law schools could sap its hold upon English thought by more subtle means. Since the era of Cujas the legal humanists had come to dominate the French study of Roman Law. The Bartolists, who were content to study the original law beneath its feudal accretions, for long continued, it is true, to fight a rearguard action, and in England their strongest advocate was Gentilis himself. The followers of Cujas sought to restore the Roman and Byzantine texts to their original purity. Hence they saw the original texts as suited to a particular society, and subsequent infusions of Germanic law, together with the work of the glossators and commentators, as adaptations made necessary by the different historical circumstances of other socie¬ ties. At the same time they were liable to betray their objective historical criteria by a search for universal principles of jurispru¬ dence. This legal historical sense affected two Englishmen in a way which contributed to the eventual overthrow of the Common Law myth of the immutable constitution—John Selden and Sir Henry Spelman. In his Titles of Honour (1614) Selden assumed a parallel development between French and English institutions, and he was consequently able to make full use of his wide reading of recent French jurists. The civilians, he remarked in his preface, were men of little mark until the age of Bude, Alciat, Hotman, Cujas, Brisson, and others, 'before whom the bodie of that profes¬ sion was not amisse compared to a faire robe, of cloth of gold or of richest stuff and fashion qui fust (saving all mannerly respect to you, reader) brodee de merde’. Selden used the words of Rabe¬ lais’s vigorous denunciation of the commentators, for his own methods were in tune with the questioning spirit of legal human6109

65

F

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

ism. The critical note in certain French historical writers during the Religious Wars reflected the attitude of their fellow jurists who restricted their field to the classical age. Selden referred often to the works of Pasquier and Du Haillan, and like them he began to see the constitution as a changing, evolving thing. He admired Pierre Pithou, the pupil of Cujas who had taken refuge in England after the massacre of St. Bartholomew, and had been incorporated as a Doctor of Civil Law at Oxford. Under Henri IV Pithou had become a leading exponent of the Divine Right of Kings. Though Selden was out of sympathy with his politics, scholarship meant more to him than political colour. He even accepted the autho¬ rity of his contemporary, Charles Loyseau, whose Traicte des seigneuries (1614) destroyed the last constitutional legends of the origin of feudal dignities. Selden had not had the benefit of this work when he composed Titles of Honour, but in his second edition (1631) he rearranged and expanded his treatise so that it seemed remarkably similar to Loyseau’s.15 In reply to Grotius’s assertion of the freedom of the seas in

Mare Liberum (1608) Selden composed Mare Clausum in 1618 (published 1635). He showed an ability to marshal the arguments of continental jurists rivalling that of any trained civilian. This is not, of course, the character in which Selden appears as a parliamentary committee man and opponent of the Stuarts. Like Hotman, whose opinions he greatly respected, he was persuaded at times to submerge his critical faculties in the tide of political sentiment. Yet even in this he was never so crudely unhistorical as his associates. His pamphlet tracing the origin and develop¬ ment of legal custom, Jani Anglorum Facies Altera, accepted profound differences between Saxon law and the existing Com¬ mon Law. He also attacked French absolutist myths, including Bodin’s treatment of the Salic Law. It may be that Selden’s refusal to accept the Common Law as immemorial was prompted by the 15 It is interesting that in the second edition Selden omitted his prefatory specu¬ lation on the origin of government. He had referred to the opinions both of Bodin and of Machiavelli in the Discorsi. He had concluded that though primitive society might be patriarchal, the first organized commonwealths were democracies, not monarchies.

66

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

historical bent of the French jurists with whose writings he was so familiar. A greater scholar and a man less influenced in his scholarship by the political disputes of his day, was Sir Henry Spelman. Spelman was also interested in the comparative study of French and English feudalism, and he was the correspondent of French antiquaries of equal eminence. Like Selden, he was one of the few Englishmen to appreciate the new horizons revealed by the methods of the legal humanists. His study of The Original... of Feuds and Tenures by Knight Service in England relied on Cujas, Pasquier, and Loyseau for its interpretation of the nature and growth of the feud. In his Ancient Government of England he banished the myth that a body of customary law could be traced back virtually unchanged to the mists of antiquity: As the day and night creep insensibly one upon the other, so also hath this alteration grown upon us insensibly, every age altering something, and no age seeking more than what themselves are active in, nor thinking it to have been otherwise than as themselves discover it by the present.16 The same sentiment was expressed with similar eloquence in his criticism of the view that Parliament had descended, invariable in form and function, from Anglo-Saxon institutions: When states are departed from their original constitution, and that original by tract of time worn out of memory, the succeeding ages, viewing what is past by the present, conceive the former to have been like to that they live in; and framing thereupon erroneous inferences and conclusions.17 Much of Spelman’s work remained unread and unpublished during his lifetime, and his antiquarian discoveries seemed largely unrelated to the main stream of political controversy. A belief in a national customary law continued to dominate the habits of English political thought in a way which was quite alien to French 16 Works, 1727, p. 49.

17 Of Parliaments, ibid., p. 57.

67

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

experience. In France the theorists of sovereignty accepted the existence of custom but would not grant it the status of law until it received the tacit or express sanction of the sovereign. By this fiction it was held to be equivalent to his will. This had been the opinion of Bodin, although at times he had seemed to express reservations.18 It was not easy to see the logical opposition between the doctrine of sovereignty and the cult of the immemorial law. Sir Roger Twysden, the Kentish antiquarian and friend of Sir Robert Filmer (though not of his politics), believed that Bodin had subordinated the sovereign to a French equivalent of the Common Law as well as to Divine and Natural Law:

There is then, as Bodin rightly notes, no Soveraigne upon earth, all kings being subject to the lawes of God, nature etc. and the severall constitutions of the kingdoms, as the French of the Salic Law, the English that wee call the Law of the Land, or the Common Law, the which are annexed and united to the crowns of England and France as conditions with which they are received.19 Twysden’s concluding phrase in this passage betrays how narrow the boundary line was between the worship of tradition and the plunge into a priori reasoning. If law had grown through the accretion of custom, then, it would seem, it must accept the precedents offered by the immediate past. But men like Coke could not see the Common Law as anything but immemorial. Its origins lay in remote antiquity. However far back it were sought, in time it would be found substantially as it was in the present. Its history was only the repeated manifestation of certain eternal principles. Two medieval Roman Law precepts explained how 18 The relation of custom to law was discussed by Bodin in Juris Universt Distributio (CEuvres Pbilosophiques, edited Mesnard, 1951), p. 72. The same opinion was expressed by the legistes Chasseneuz and Rebuffi. (Cf. W. F. Church, Con¬ stitutional Thought in Sixteenth Century France, 1941, pp. 65, 110.) For some of Bodin’s reservations see Republique, 1. i, c. viii, p. 95. Bodin had written that the sovereign might only alter such customs 'which concerne not the establishing of the estate of the realm’. In his Les Lois fondamentales de la monarchie frangaise (1907, p. 122) Andre Lemaire has convincingly represented Bodin as a tradi¬ tionalist whose view of sovereignty was alien to his instinctive preferences. 19 Certaine Considerations upon the Government of England, 1849, p. 17. Cf. preceding note.

68

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

adherence to custom seemed to induce innate attributes—'quod consuetum est, est velut innatum: similis est consuetudo naturae’. It was but a step to say that the Common Law contained selfevident principles perceptible to reason. It was but a further step to say, as Twysden said, that the law must have been established on rational principles at the time when the commonwealth was itself instituted by some general and hypothetical social act of its members. This was the position of the later opponents of the Stuarts. Yet the modification of early parliamentary theory did not proceed as a logical development of opposition doctrine, but rather as a response to the stress of civil war. It can be seen that the period preceding the recourse to arms offered little scope for the direct application of French theory. The French concept of sovereignty was unsuited to English poli¬ tical circumstances. French standards of historical criticism acted slowly as solvents of constitutional legend, although their direc¬ tion was as yet unperceived. Beside the conflict between the Common Law and the prerogative, however, a very different type of controversy led Englishmen to employ ideas and precedents from the French Religious Wars. THE OATH OF ALLEGIANCE CONTROVERSY

When the Oath of Allegiance was imposed on English Roman Catholics after the Gunpowder Plot, there were many who appeared ready to subscribe to it. The archpriest Blackwell advised the taking of the oath affirming loyalty to king before Pope, but his suppression of Papal injunctions to the contrary involved him in controversy with Bellarmine, the Papal cham¬ pion. James I himself took up his pen and before long the debate spread to every court and university in Europe.20 Its fires were kept burning both by the murder of Henri IV by Ravaillac in 1610, 20 A survey of the extent of the controversy is given in Mcllwain’s introduction to The Political Works of James I. Here only a few of the more important French and English works are considered. Many of these works, together with Gallican treatises against Papalism from the period of the Religious Wars, were published in Melchior Goldast’s Monarchiae (vol. iii), 1613.

69

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

and an attempt in the Estates General of 1614-15 to promote the taking of a similar oath in France. These events increased French interest in the controversy, and fostered the belief that it was merely a continuation of the conflict between ultramontaneLigueurs and Gallican-Politiques. In this way the resurrection of the political attitudes of the Religious Wars led to their re¬ appraisal by English writers. In addition the need to re-examine the medieval disputes between Pope and temporal ruler caused Englishmen to employ ideas from which many of the theories current in the Religious Wars had been derived. In England the controversy followed directly from the earlier refutations of Robert Parsons which justified the accession of James I. Bishop Morton’s Exact Discoverie of Romish Doctrine in the Case of Conspiracie and Rebellion appeared, as the author put it, 'not without direction from our superiors’ in the year of the Gunpowder Plot. Morton laid the blame for English treason and French rebellion on what he called Romish doctrines justify¬ ing the deposition of kings either by their subjects or by the Pope. He claimed that the Ligueur opinions of Boucher, Rossaeus, and Dorleans were indistinguishable from those of Parsons. Parsons replied with his anonymous Treatise tending to Mitigation to¬ wards Catholicke Subjectes in England (1607), one of the first of Catholic pleas against the Oath. Parsons astutely adopted a more moderate attitude than that displayed in his earlier polemics. Like Bellarmine, he argued that the Pope claimed no direct temporal power over kings but only an indirect power in virtue of the superiority of the spiritual arm. Catholics had never preached against monarchical authority. Calvinism was the source of such sedition. Not the Ligue, but the Huguenots deserved condemna¬ tion during the Religious Wars. Morton perverted Boucher’s meaning in asserting that the latter had advocated tyrannicide. The Huguenots had invented this monstrous doctrine, and there had been Anglicans, such as Bancroft, who had condemned them. Parsons subtly represented Barclay as his ally, for Barclay, he said, had expressed a true Catholic attitude in his attack on the monarchomachs. He had been mistaken only in ranking Boucher 70

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

among them. Morton answered with A Preamble unto an In¬ counter with P. R. the Author of the Deceitful Treatise of Miti¬ gation (1608). It was mere equivocation, he maintained, to describe Boucher and Rossaeus, whom he identified as William Reynolds, as the friends of monarchy. By this time Bellarmine and James I had joined in conflict. At first the king viewed the Oath as 'merely civil’, and thereby he seemed to be following the Elizabethan treason procedure which implied a distinction between the secular and ecclesiastical spheres. But, like Hooker, he would not accept the separation of church and state as if they were two societies. This was the doc¬ trine in which Jesuits and Calvinists concurred. 'Jesuits are nothing but Puritan-Papists’, he wrote in his Premonition to all Most Mightie Monarches (1609). James clearly believed that the Anglican and Gallican churches had much in common, and he used the works of Gallican writers against Papal interference in things temporal. He conceded that the Pope had a certain spiri¬ tual authority, but in this he was 'primus episcopus inter omnes episcopos’. Moreover, James was anxious to show that the Church of England was the true child of the primitive church. He per¬ suaded Casaubon, acknowledged as the first scholar in Europe since the death of the younger Scaliger, to present the necessary theological arguments in The Answere of Master Isaac Casaubon to . . . Cardinall Peron (1612). He also engaged the services of the elder Pierre Du Moulin, a Huguenot of Anglican persuasion, to compose A Defence of the Catholicke Faith . . . against . . . N. Coeffeteau (1610) and other works. From the Anglican viewpoint the most penetrating account of opposing positions was that given by David Owen, in his Herod and Pilate reconciled, or the Concord of Papist and Puritan . . . for the Coercion and Killing of Kings (1610). Owen saw that there were three schools of Roman Catholic thought—the few who, like the canonist Carerius, gave the Pope absolute universal power, spiritually and temporally; those who, like Bellarmine, held that the Pope had an indirect power over kings; and those who, like the Gallican William Barclay or the English archpriest 71

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

Blackwell, denied the Pope direct or indirect temporal power over kings, while admitting the power of excommunication. Papalists commonly claimed both that the Pope had the right to absolve the subjects of a heretic king from their allegiance and that a ruler might be deposed by his subjects for purely secular reasons. This last doctrine, Owen declared, had been developed by Calvinists and borrowed by Jesuits for their own purposes. Calvinists had derived it from medieval writers such as John of Paris or Marsilius of Padua, who had employed it on behalf of king or emperor against the Pope. Then it had not threatened monarchical autho¬ rity, for its object had been to show that temporal rulers were empowered by their people, and not by the Pope. But in the French Religious Wars it had become the theory of popular sovereignty, the principal justification of rebellion. Owen re¬ garded the contemporary dispute as a revival of doctrines de¬ veloped during the French wars. Like William Barclay, he based this conclusion on a close comparison of the writings of Hotman, Beza, Daneau, Buchanan, the Jesuits, and Boucher. His work was reissued in 1642 as A Persuasion to Loyalty, when it suggested that the Long Parliament had inherited the views of the monarchomachs.21 When Ravaillac struck down Henri IV, it was at once the purpose of French opponents of the Jesuits to associate the assassin with Jesuit teaching. Mariana’s De Rege et regis institutione, with its support for the tyrannicide of Henri III, was commonly re¬ garded as the tailpiece of Ligueur propaganda and the inspiration of Ravaillac. In 1610 the book was publicly condemned by the Sorbonne and burnt by order of the Parlement de Paris. Both the decree and the arrest set forth the iniquity of resistance and the king’s absolute possession of the civil sword by Divine Right. 21 A similar work by Owen, the Anti-Paraeus (1622), was republished in 1642 with like intent. Paraeus was a German Calvinist who reproduced the principles of the Vindiciae. In 1622 the Vindiciae became the subject of an acrimonious debate at Oxford, which resulted in the condemnation and burning of the book by the University authorities. The controversy spread to Cambridge, where the Vindiciae was also censured. Owen's Anti-Paraeus was regarded as the official view of the University authorities towards the monarchomachs. Cf. A. Seller, The History of Passive Obedience, 1689, pp. 15, 16.

72

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

Nothing could have better suited the needs of English supporters of the Oath. The English translation” began with a preamble referring to the Gunpowder Plot and likening Mariana’s 'false, lewd and traitorous opinions’ to those of Boucher. Another French work with a ready English application was the Anti-Coton, or a Refutation of Cotons Letter Declaratorie, lately directed to the Queene Regent for the apologizing of the Jesuites Doctrine touch¬ ing the Killing of Kings (1611).23 Coton had been confessor to Henri IV and a member of the Jesuit order. A quip occurring in many contemporary writings was that 'les oreilles du Roy sont buschees de Cotton’. The author of the pamphlet recalled how the Ligue had published the oration of Sixtus V welcoming the murder of Henri III. He described Boucher’s tirade against the last Valois and his justification of the attempted assassination of the first Bourbon by Jean Chastel. He was at pains to associate Ravaillac with the Jesuits who accepted these doctrines, and he also examined the relations of the Jesuit Garnet with the English plotters to show how ill-founded were Coton’s attempts to ex¬ onerate his order. Edward Grimeston’s version of Matthieu’s Heroyk Life and Deplorable Death of the Most Christian King Henry the Fourth (1612), and his earlier translation of Jean de Serres’s historical works,"4 did much to familiarize Englishmen with Bourbon achievements and much to enhance the status of kingship. James I publicly professed his admiration for Henri IV and his horror at the manner of his death, while his elder son regarded the French king with something close to hero-worship. James found it expe¬ dient to doubt the sincerity of those French writers who, having condemned the Oath of Allegiance, tried to dissociate themselves from extreme ultramontane political doctrines. One of the king’s 22 The Copie of a Late Decree of the Sorhone at Paris, for the condemning of that Impious and Haereticall Opinion touching the murthering of Princes: generally maintained by the Jesuites and amongst the Rest of Late by Johannes Mariana, a Spaniard. Together with the Arrest of the Parliament. . . . 23 Attributed to Cesar de Plaix, and sometimes to Pierre Du Moulin. 24 Edward Grimeston, Sergeant-at-Arms, was a profuse translator of French historical works. His General Inventorie of the History of France (from de Serres and Matthieu) was first published in 1607 and ran through many editions.

73

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

antagonists, Pierre Pelletier,25 explicitly denied that the Jesuits had ever promoted or sanctioned doctrines of rebellion and tyran¬ nicide. This work appeared in English as A Lamentable Discourse upon the Paricide and Bloudy Assassination committed on the Person of Henry the Fourth (1610). Pelletier feared a relapse into the anarchy which France had so recently experienced. 'Let us not forget’, he wrote, 'that we are yet wet with our last ship wracke, that it is not many yeares since we were freed from civill wars.’ At this stage in the controversy one of the most powerful of the many answers to Bellarmine appeared in English, William Bar¬ clay’s Of the Authorise of the Pope, published posthumously in 1611 and later defended by John Barclay against his father’s denigrators. Barclay developed the theme that the Papacy acted against the true interests of the Catholic Church in assuming the power to depose kings. This induced temporal rulers to favour heretics, and promoted civil war. Bellarmine’s doctrines, he pointed out, were those which the Ligue had maintained. There was a remarkable resemblance between a Ligueur tract of 1588 refuting Pierre de Belloy’s justification of Henri of Navarre and Bellarmine’s recent works. Indeed, there were many who main¬ tained that this 'Franciscus Romulus’ was the earliest of Bellar¬ mine’s many

pseudonyms.

Certainly

Bellarmine

had

been

involved in the affairs of the Ligue. He had been a member of the Papal legation during the 1590 siege of Paris. Barclay insisted upon the complete separation of the temporal from the spiritual, and denied that the Pope might intervene indirecte or casualiter. He might excommunicate, but had no secular jurisdiction. The relationship between Pope and king was like that between a father and a son, where the latter happened to be a civil magistrate. The father must counsel and discipline the son according to his parental rights, but he could not interfere with the son’s actions in his magisterial capacity. Barclay was concerned in this work with Papal claims to depose a king for 25 Other French critics of the Oath were Nicholas Coeffeteau, Cardinal Du Perron, and Eudaemon-Johannes. Like Coton, Pelletier was a confessor to Henri IV.

74

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

heresy, but, as in his De Regno et Regali Potestate, he referred also to secular theories of resistance, and again admitted that in extreme circumstances it was permissible for the whole com¬ munity to depose a tyrantU He illustrated his arguments by references to the Religious Wars, and employed the usual medie¬ val precedents from the deposition of Chilperic to the activities of the University of Paris in the Papal schism at the end of the fourteenth century. Another significant work against Bellarmine appearing in English at this time was The Right and Prerogative of Kings (1612) by Jean Bede, an advocate in the Parlement de Paris. This was both a defence of Gallican liberties and a manifesto of abso¬ lute monarchy. Like Barclay, Bede picked his way among the politics and polemics of the Religious Wars, and he, too, exalted the status of kingship in terms of Divine Right and Bodinian sovereignty. Unlike Barclay, however, Bede made no concessions whatever to the theory of public resistance. Moreover, he added to absolutist thought the concept of the patriarchal basis of power, in which at every point he anticipated the views of Sir Robert Filmer. The tone of these Gallican works was closely imitated by English Catholic writers such as Richard Sheldon and William Warmington.27 Another member of this group supporting the 26 Op. cit., p. 55. Cf. above, Chapter 3, p. 55. 27 Sheldon’s Certain General Reasons proving the Lawfulnesse of the Oath of Allegiance was issued bound up with the English text of Barclay’s De Potestate Papae in 1611. Warmington’s Moderate Defence of the Oath of Allegiance (1617) contained the full English text of Sixtus V’s notorious oration on the murder of Henri III. Warmington positively identified Rossaeus as William Reynolds (op. cit., p. 147). The identity of the author of De justa reipublicae Christianae in reges impios et haereticos authoritate was at this time a matter of concern to English Catholics. In the most complete survey of the problem yet attempted Mcllwain shows convincingly that Reynolds was the author (Constitutionalism and the Changing World, 1939, pp. 178-82). However, a contemporary manuscript note in the”Emmanuel College copy of the 1592 Antwerp edition reads: Wm. Reynolds the author—Ch. Paget. But Parsons saith it was made by Dr. Gifford. A Manifest, fol. 99.’ Parsons, in A Manifestation of the Great Folly of Certayne Secular Priestes (1602, p. 99), does declare that William Gifford wrote De justa . . . authoritate. Gifford studied under Bellarmine and was for a time principal chaplain to Cardinal Allen. He held a pension from the Guises, and is said to have written an unidenti-

75

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

Oath was Thomas Preston, writing under the name of Roger Widdrington. Preston was a member of the Benedictine order and a pupil of Vasquez. He relied on the work of the Barclays and Pithou, and found arguments to retail from the encyclopaedic writings of Gregoire, Barclay’s colleague at the University of Pont-a-Musson. So much did he regard the controversy in terms of the theory of the Religious Wars that he devoted a chapter of his Cleare Sincere and Modest Confutation of... Fitzherbert now an English Jesuite (1616) to an examination of the opposing views of the French constitution which the wars had evoked. French writers, he thought, were so often willing to concede the right of public resistance and deposition of kings because of the precedent of Chilperic. Among medieval theorists he esteemed John of Paris most highly, and made much of his argument that the spiritual arm could not be held superior to the temporal since this was to compare things dissimilar in their natures.28 Anglican defenders of the Oath also came increasingly to rely on Gallican theory, even though its medieval antecedents fre¬ quently included the right of secular deposition by the whole community. Robert Burhill, for instance, examined alike the opinions of Barclay and his school, the late-fifteenth-cenmry views of John Major and James Almain, and the early-fourteenthcentury ideas of John of Paris.29 As he surveyed the growth of Gallican traditions he perceived that the tragedies of Henri III and Henri IV had occasioned a turning point in the relations of the French Church, the king, and the Papacy. Gallican theorists, fied 'treatise in favour of the League’ (D.N.B.). He completed the CalvinoTurcismus (1597) which Reynolds had commenced. This book evoked Sutcliffe’s De Turco-Papismo in 1599. In 1603 Parsons was answered by A Reply unto a Certain Libell latelie set Foorth by Fr. Parsons intitled a Manifestation. . . . This tract affirms Gifford’s loyalty to the English crown, and answers all the points made by Parsons except that concerning the authorship of De justa . . . authoritate. It may be that Gifford and Reynolds collaborated in the work. Charles Paget, who is mentioned by the unknown annotator as suggesting that Reynolds was Rossaeus, was a Catholic writer concerned in the archpriest controversy and in the debate with Parsons. 28 Roger Widdrington’s Last Rejoynder, 1619, pp. 31, 64. 29 In Burhill’s De Potestate Regia et Usurpatione Papali, 1613. This defended a work by Lancelot Andrewes, itself a criticism of Bellarmine, against the criticism of the French ultramontane, Eudaemon-Johannes.

76

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

he thought, no longer denied the right of Papal deposition of kings by asserting the right of their secular deposition by the community. Now the French Church defended the monarchy, against Pope and people alike, by the theory of Divine Right. In this, however, Burhill had under-estimated the strength of French ultramontanism, as new events in France were to demon¬ strate. In December 1614 the Estates General met for the last time before the Revolution, and the unprecedented spectacle occurred of deep and bitter division between the three orders. The nobility and the Third Estate quarrelled over the taxation of hereditary office. The clergy attacked the Third Estate for trespassing upon what was held to be a matter of ecclesiastical doctrine. This was the proposal of the Third Estate to establish a fundamental lav/ declaring that the king held his sovereign power from God alone, and that no power on earth, spiritual or temporal, had the right to deprive him of it. The spokesman of the clergy who opposed this intention in an address to the Third Estate was James I’s old antagonist, Cardinal Du Perron. Du Perron asserted that the Papacy had never sought the assassination of kings, but it was right that a Pope should be able to prevent a heretic king from turning his kingdom against the true faith. For this reason a Pope might absolve a king’s subjects from their allegiance, although the actual deposition of a king was effected by his people. The proposal of the Third Estate to the contrary would promote schism and civil war. Arguments could be found in the works of all the theologians of the past to support the indirect power of the Pope. Only during the Wars of Religion had a school of French lawyers arisen to deny this doc¬ trine, and it was thence that the English supporters of the Oath of Allegiance derived their iniquitous opinions. Yet even the works of Gregoire and Barclay, upon whom English writers were so dependent, contained admissions which betrayed their inconsis¬ tency. They made concessions to the seditious Calvinist views of Buchanan and the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. The Third Estate were following the example of the English government, and 77

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

would transfer English heresies and dissensions to French soil.30 In his reply to Du Perron, A Remonstrance for the Right of Kings, James I observed: Faire was the hope which I conceived of the States assembled at Paris: that calling to mind the murthers of their noble kings, and the warres of the League which followed the Popes fulminations, as when a great storme of haile powerth downe after a thunder-cracke, and a world of writings addressed to justifie the parricides and dethronings of kings.31 Point by point the king answered Du Perron. His opponent had misinterpreted French historical precedents and misrepresented the opinions of John of Paris, Gerson, Major, and Almain. It was fruitless to associate English opinion with the monarchomachs or to assert that Barclay had contradicted himself. The Vindiciae had been 'perhaps of purpose patcht up by some Romanist, with a wyly deceit to draw the reformed religion into hatred with Christian Princes’. The violent Buchanan, pupil of Major and James’s own former tutor, would 'ranke among poets, not among divines’. Barclay had written not of the deposition of kings but of their abdication. Further, the ideas of the Calvinists were not responsible for the onset of the Religious Wars. The Huguenots had never opposed their king. They had fought either in selfdefence in face of extreme persecution or else to support the just constitutional rights of the princes of the blood. For the most part they had been the principal support of the monarchy against the Ligue, and 'if credit might be given to their faithfull advertise¬ ments, the crowne of their kings should bee no longer pinned to the Popes flie-flap’.32 For five years after the issue of James I’s Remonstrance the Oath of Allegiance continued to evoke thrust and counter-thrust, and echoes of the disputation were to sound across the remainder 30 Du Perron’s oration appeared in print as Harangue faicte de la part de la Chambre Ecclesiastique (1615) and was reported in the Mercure Frangois. 31 Works, p. 169. 32 Ibid., p. 263.

78

PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

of the century. It caused a number of Englishmen to reappraise the history and thought of the French Religious Wars. It induced them to depend upon the past political attitudes of the Gallican Church. It led them to employ Politique theories to formulate more precisely the Divine Right of Kings. It compelled them to examine and compare Jesuit and Calvinist doctrines of resistance, and it renewed their knowledge of the writings of medieval canonists and civilians from which such doctrines had been derived. Although the controversy gave breadth and coherence to the opinions of those who upheld the transcendent nature of the royal prerogative, it was regarded almost with indifference by the interpreters of the Common Law. There were few who were conscious that the theories of the French Religious Wars, which the debate had recalled, bore any direct relevance to the growing rift between the king and parliament. Yet it preserved the memory of the French wars, and when the Civil War came there were many who began to seek precedents for their own predicament in that anarchic epoch of French history.

79

CHAPTER 5

The Qivil War During the eleven years of prerogative government some of the strongest criticism of the king and his ministers came from exiled Puritans who had found refuge with Dutch and German Calvin¬ ists. When the Roman Catholic Lord Baltimore, the founder of Maryland, travelled on the Continent in this period he took par¬ ticular note of their activities, and used them to dissuade his royal master from supporting the cause of his brother-in-law, the Calvinist Elector Palatine. The king had already intervened in Europe on behalf of Calvinist rebels in the ill-fated attempt to aid La Rochelle. Intervention in Germany would lead to further association with the seditious doctrines preached by exiled Puri¬ tans and their allies. In this vein Baltimore wrote: They currlishlie barke against Kings and councells, and spitt upon the crown like friends of democracies, of confusion and irregularitie: who after the example of their Master Bezas Reveille-Matin do here as maliciously defame your father as he there your majesties grand¬ mother.1 The king had no means of embarking on foreign war, but it was war which eventually brought the period of prerogative government to an end and led to revolution. Rebellion in Scotland compelled Charles I to summon the Short Parliament, and rebel¬ lion in Scotland provoked the first of those reappraisals of the French Religious Wars which were to affect the course of English politics. During the Oath of Allegiance controversy James I had employed the learned Huguenot theologian, Pierre Du Moulin, to defend the Protestant position. Now Pierre Du Moulin the younger set out to demonstrate that the revolt of the Covenanters had nothing in common with the politics of French Calvinism. His 1 The Answer to Tom-tell-Troth (written c. 1630), 1643, p. 3.

80

THE CIVIL WAR

Letter of a French Protestant to a Scotishman of the Covenant (1 March 1640) retraced the history of the French wars, stressing the constitutional rights and loyalty of the Huguenots, the villainy of the Guises, and the iniquitous sedition of the Ligue. Calvin and Beza had preached non-resistance, and the only real departure of the Huguenots from this principle had been their temporary opposition to Louis XIII. THEORISTS OF THE LONG PARLIAMENT

Once the Long Parliament had been convened, five months after the dissolution of its predecessor, it began to appear that the cult of the immemorial constitution and the supremacy of the ancient law were no longer adequate for the expression of parlia¬ mentary claims. Pym and his following successfully impeached the king’s most able minister, secured themselves against the royal power of dissolution, and swept away the machinery of prerogative government. The resolutions of the House and the speeches of Pym were printed and circulated in defiance of the royal authority. In one such speech Pym referred ominously to the fate of Henri III and Henri IV.2 In the midst of the passions engendered by the Irish massacre of October 1641, he persuaded the Commons to accept the Grand Remonstrance. The abolition of episcopacy was suggested, and a bill was promoted to give Par¬ liament control of the militia. If there had been an immemorial constitution, clearly it was beginning to crumble. In desperation the'king tried in person to arrest the leaders of the opposition, but his methods lacked the finesse with which the last Valois had achieved a similar coup against the leaders of the Ligueur Estates General. The Commons responded to the attempt to arrest the five members by ordering the printing of Buchanan’s play Bap¬ tistes in prose translation. The new version, said to be by the hand of Milton,3 was entitled Tyrannical Government Anatomized, and suggested that the Baptist’s head had fulfilled a sacrificial 2 A Speech delivered in Parliament . . . concerning the Grievances of the Kingdome by I. P-[ym\, 1641, p. 9. . 3 New Memoirs of the Life and Poetical Works of Mr. John Milton, by Francis Peck, 1740, pp. 268 et seq. 6109

81

G

THE CIVIL WAR

function for which the new Herod and his queen had intended those of Pym and his fellows. As war drew nearer new editions of former English works approving resistance began to appear. Parsons’s Leycesters Com¬

monwealth (1584), with its account of the French wars, was reprinted in 1641: Bishop Ponet’s Short Treatise of Politique Power (1556), which had anticipated the theories of the French monarchomachs, in 1642: and Bishop Bilson’s True Difference between Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (1586), justifying Huguenot resistance, in the same year. Then, in the outburst of political comment and speculation which accompanied the war, supporters of king and Parliament alike began to refer to French precedent, to quote earlier French theory as well as English, and to identify themselves with the political opinions of their French predecessors. The polemical battle could no longer be waged solely in terms of the immemorial law. It was fought also in terms of opposing French ideas of sovereignty. A few weeks after war was made inevitable by the king’s rejec¬ tion of the Nineteen Propositions, Henry Parker published his

Manifold Miseries of Civill War (2 July 1642). This was a short account of the French Religious Wars, with an occasional refer¬ ence to dissensions in Germany and Ireland, which was intended as a warning to Englishmen who were fated to undergo similar tribulations. At the same time Parker advanced the first English statement of the theory of parliamentary sovereignty in his Obser¬

vations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses.4 The king’s power, he wrote, was fiduciary, and in the last resort 'the sovereign power resides in both houses of Parliament, the King having no negative voice’. The fundamental upon which Parker based this argument was the precept which in the hands of French theorists had claimed for the community a sovereignty over its king: rex singulis major, tmiversis minor. To Parker Parliament was the community, and as such it might resist and discipline the king. 4 Cf. M. A. Judson, 'Henry Parker and the Theory of Parliamentary Sovereignty’, in Essays . . . in Honor of C. H. Mcllwain, 1936, p. 153.

82

THE CIVIL WAR

The most prolific of parliamentary writers showed that he had appreciated the implications of the concept of sovereignty. Bodin had described the marks of sovereignty. Parker anticipated Locke and Montesquieu by dividing them into legislative, executive, and judiciary.5 In Jus Populi (1644) he declared that these functions of sovereignty were divisible in so far as they were exercised personally, but in so far as sovereignty pertained to the whole community (and here he invoked the authority of Grotius) its functions could not be divorced one from another. In this sense of the distinction made by Bodin between form of state and method of government,6 monarchy and aristocracy were no more than derivative forms. All commonwealths were democracies in essence, as the study of the Roman Republic and Empire would show. Barclay, Grotius, and Arnisaeus had admitted that, in an aristocracy or a mixed democracy, he who bore the title of king was less absolute than a king in a pure monarchy. England, Parker continued, was not a pure monarchy, but a mixed state. Power came from the people, who remained sovereign in an ultimate sense. Parker remarked that Bodin, though 'very zealous for paternall empire’, had never intended to assert the patriarchal basis of kingship. Political power did not arise naturally in society but by a reasoned and conscious act of will. Bodin, for instance, had held that slavery was unnatural.7 Parker clearly preferred the logical approach to problems of political obligation, rather than a mystic reverence for the custom of the past. Parliament was for him the source of law, and Parliament need not be bound by precedent. It may be that French theorists, and their Dutch and German interpreters whom he quoted, enabled Parker to express these views with a new precision. Like Parker, William Prynne was a lawyer and a voluminous 5 The True Grounds of Ecclesiastical Regiment, 1641, p. 86; The Contra Replicant, 1643, p. 3. The attribution of the latter tract to Parker is sometimes disputed. 6 See above, Chapter 2, p. 22, and Chapter 3, p. 51. 7 Jus Populi, pp. 34, 39. Bodin’s remarks on slavery had been employed in a similar fashion by Lambert Daneau, Politices Christianae, 1596, p. 104.

83

THE CIVIL WAR

exponent of parliamentary sovereignty in church and state. A large proportion of Prynne’s Soveraigne Power of Parliaments and Kingdomes was given over to quotations from French writers. He explained his reason for this: I have the longer insisted on these histories of the Kings and King¬ dom of France (which clearly demonstrate the Realm, Parliament and three Estates of France to be the soveraigne power in that king¬ dom, in some sort paramount their kings themselves, who are no absolute monarchs, nor exempted from the laws, jurisdiction, re¬ straints and censures of their kingdom and estates assembled, as some falsely averre they are), because our royalists and court doctors paral¬ lel England with France, making both of them absolute monarchies, and our greatest malignant councellors chief designe hath been to reduce the government of England to the late modell and new arbi¬ trary proceedings of France.8 Prynne made much play with rex singulis major, universis minor. He pointed out that a similar doctrine had been pronounced during the Conciliar Controversy to show that the whole body of the church was superior to the Pope. He adduced from the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos that the whole kingdom, parliament and laws themselves be above the King or Emperor, and they [kings] receive their sovereign authority from the people, as their public servants.9 He saw a similar view in Beza’s Du droit des magistrats, in Hotman’s Franco-Gallia, in Buchanan’s De Jure Regni apud Scotos, and in Mariana’s De Rege et Regis Institutione. He might, he said, have cited Catholic writers such as Parsons and Rossaeus, 'but we need not fish in these unwholesome Romish streams’. He em¬ ployed the Vindiciae, the Du droit, and the last paragraphs of Calvin’s Institution to illustrate the Huguenot doctrine of the role of the inferior magistrates to lead public resistance against a tyrant. He cited Grotius beside the Vindiciae on the point that the underlying sovereignty of Parliament was manifest in its direction of affairs during the minority of a ruler.10 Most of the 8 Op. cit., Appendix, p. 51. 10 Ibid., part 4, p. 23-

9 Ibid., p. 161.

84

THE CIVIL WAR

third question of the Vindiciae, and much of the Du droit, were translated and reproduced in long extracts in the appendix to his Soveraigne Power. Like Parker, Prynne regarded Bodin as the friend rather than the enemy of his cause.11 He cited the opinion of Bodin, Barclay, and Grotius that resistance by the whole community might in some circumstances be justified. In this connexion he pointed also to Bilson’s sanction of Huguenot resistance, and filled out the argument with references to Grimeston’s translation of De Serres’s History.12 Prynne described Bodin as 'a famous learned French lawyer of great experience in state affaires, surpassing all who writ before him of republikes’.13 He cited him more than fifty times on his analysis of the Roman constitution and the role of the Senate. He reproduced Bodin’s observation: the chiefe marke of an absolute and soveraigne prince is to give lawes to all his subjects and to every one of them in particular without consent of any greater, equall or lesse than himselfe. In England, Prynne continued, the Parliament in this regard is the most soveraigne authority, and greater in jurisdiction than the King. . . . The Kings of England . . . are no absolute sovereigne princes . . . but meere mixt politique kings, inferior to their laws and parliaments.14 All parliamentary theory was not as clear as this, for the belief that Parliament was the interpreter of the ancient constitution lingered. This was evident in that admirer of the despotism of Louis XIII, James Howell, who, having been imprisoned in the 11 It is interesting that Ligueur theorists should have made a similar use of Bodin’s storehouse of political curiosities. Cf. Rossaeus, De Justa Authoritate . . . , 1592, pp. 12, 50; and Andre de Rossant, Les Meurs humeurs et comportemens de Henry de Valois, 1589, p- 44. 12 Soveraigne Power . . . , part 3, pp. 144—7. Bodin s concessions to resistance theory, which were those cited by de Rossant (note 11, above), referred only to the summoning of a foreign prince and resistance to a non-absolute king (Republique, 1. ii, c. v, pp. 220-2). Barclay’s and Grotius’s were far more sweeping (see above, Chapter 3, p-55). 13 Soveraigne Power . . . , appendix, p. 10. 14 Ibid., part 1, p. 46.

85

THE CIVIL WAR

Fleet as a malignant in 1643, extolled what he took to be the principles of his captors in order to secure his release. In his Pre¬ eminence and Pedigree of Parliament he spoke of Parliament as 'the bulwark of our liberties’, and traced its descent from RomanoBritish comitia and Saxon and Danish institutions. In France, he held, the Estates General had possessed a similar power to tax and to legislate, but their function had been usurped by the monarchy since Louis XI. Howell contrasted the position of English yeomen with the lot of French peasants, 'reduced ever since to such an abject, asinine condition that they serve but as sponges for the King to squeeze as he list’.15 In another work written at this time Howell compared the English anarchy with that which France had experienced. He recalled how Chancellor L’Hopital had diagnosed the sickness of the French body politic in his address to the 1560 Estates General. Now the diagnosis applied to Eng¬ land. France could say 'that whereas she was wont to be the chief theatre where Fortune used to play her pranks, she hath now removed her stage hither’.16 So much were French precedents to mind that when the parlia¬ mentary cause began to flag at this time, and there were some who spoke of peace, a new edition of Hotman’s De Furoribus Gallicis, first published in English in 1573, reappeared under the title A Patterne of a Popish Peace. Charles IX had made peace with the Huguenots only so that he might lure them to destruc¬ tion on St. Bartholomew’s night. The same might be expected from royalists who associated with papist Irish murderers: Let the patterne of this peace, made by French popery, stand like a pyramid before your eyes [stated the preamble]. And when you see it, heare it also: for it speaks, and that which it speaks is this, pray and 15 In Somers’ Tracts, vol. v, p. 50. This contrast was frequently drawn. Cf. Parker, 'The asanine peasants of France . . . whose wooden shoes and canvas breeches sufficiently proclaim what a blessednesse it is to be borne under a mear divine prerogative’ (Some Few Observations . . . , 1642, p. 15). The expression asinine’ appears to derive from La Primaudaye (see above. Chapter 2, p. 21). Englishmen could, of course, be scornful of their own labouring class. Cf. Samuel Butler on ’The low proletarian tything-men’ (Hudibras, line 719). 16 England’s Tears for the Present Wars, in Somers' Tracts, vol. v, pp. 38, 39.

86

THE CIVIL WAR

provide that the peace of French popery be not translated into Eng¬ land by English protestants. The parliamentary alliance with the Covenanters introduced a new element into English theory. It was significant that an Erastian such as Prynne should have based his argument on the third question raised in the Vindiciae, giving secular grounds for resistance, and ignored the first two questions, allowing resistance for religious reasons. In his Lex Rex (1644) the Presbyterian Scot, Samuel Rutherford, identified himself with all the principles of the Vindiciae. To Rutherford, as to the Huguenots, the inferior magistrates who led the resistance of the community were minis¬ ters of God as well as representatives of the people. He drew the same inferences from the Old Testament covenants between God and people as had his French predecessors. He represented him¬ self as the champion of the contract theory of the Vindiciae against the criticism of Barclay. He did so because he felt that in his own day the royalist writer, Bishop Maxwell, was reproducing Bar¬ clay’s opinions against the Covenanters and the Long Parliament. Barclay had held that the biblical covenants with God obliged 'the King to God, but not the King to the people’. Similarly Arnisaeus, said Rutherford, had asserted that the divine covenant did not apply to the relations of ruler and subject, and that the people were not responsible for the preservation of the true religion. But the Vindiciae had shown that there were not two parties to the covenant, but three. A king who endangered the true faith failed to fulfil his part of the contract and was no longer king. It was the function of the people, and the inferior magis¬ trates on their behalf, to uphold the true religion and withdraw power from an idolatrous ruler. Furthermore, said Rutherford, even Grotius and Barclay had allowed resistance where covenants entered into by the king under the sanctity of the coronation oath had been utterly dishonoured.17 Rutherford also turned his attention to more general questions 17 Lex Rex, q. xiv, pp. 97-99: q. xl, pp. 398, 403. The latter reference was to the concessions made by Barclay and Grotius to resistance theory.

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THE CIVIL WAR

of the nature of political power. He cited Althusius and Salamonius to show that regal power was not naturally despotical, but a trust responsible to the community as a whole.18 He quoted Bodin’s opinion that the heads of families had renounced paternal power to the ruler: Politick power of government agreeth not to man simply, as one man, except in that root of reasonable nature; but supposing that men be combined in societies, or that one family cannot contain a societie, it is naturall that they joyn in a civill societie, though the manner of union in a politick body, as Bodin saith, be voluntary.19 All power came from God: 'And this or that definite power is mediately from God, proceeding from God by the mediation of the consent of the communitie, which resigneth their power to one or more rulers.’20 Thus the contract theory of Calvinist monarchomachs provided the particular justification for resistance, while the views of their opponents and interpreters provided general definitions of political obligation. ROYALIST THEORY

Royalists were quick to derive advantage from the manifest association of their enemies with the theory of French rebellion. One of the writers attacked by Rutherford in Lex Rex was an Essex clergyman, Edward Symmons, who had been moved to express in print his condemnation of Stephen Marshall, the vicar of the neighbouring parish of Finchingfield and one of the most ardent supporters of the Parliament. Who that hath observed in the French story [wrote Symmons], the waies and doings of them that call’d themselves the Holy League in the daies of their Henry the 3d, but must needs say, that the prac¬ tice of some associations in this our nation against their soveraigne doth most notably in many particulars go parallel with them.21 18 Lex Rex, q. xvi, p. 116. 19 Ibid., q. i, p. 2. Cf. above, Chapter 3, p. 49. 20 Ibid., q. iii, p. 5, referring to Suarez and Soto. Rutherford was also familiar with the works of Gregoire and Gerson. Bellarmine, he said, went too far when he described monarchy as 'but an human invention’ (p. 6). 21 A Loyall Subjects Beliefe, 1643, p. 79.

88

THE CIVIL WAR

Symmons held to scorn the order of sequestration brought against him for preaching against the Long Parliament. He could think of nothing more damning to his neighbour of Finchingfield and his party than to associate them with the Ligue as 'enemies to God, rebels to the state, and perturbators of the publicke good’. In his widely read Vindication of King Charles (1648) he renewed the parallel. Recalling Jesuit-Ligueur doctrines of tyrannicide, he said of the Long Parliament: Yea Ravilliack-like they have affirmed that he [the King] was against the parliament, and so by consequent against God, and there¬ for it would be a work not only lawful, but also pious, for to kill him. The younger Sir Dudley Digges was another royalist writer to remark both real and imagined parliamentary dependence upon French precedent. His Unlawfulnesse of Subjects taking up

Armes against their Soveraigne (1643) remained throughout the Civil War the best known of royalist manifestoes. He perceived the origin of the theory of the inferior magistrates and denied its relevance to English circumstances. Since it was more profitable to compare the Long Parliament with Catholic rebels than with the Huguenots, he followed Symmons in relating it to the Ligue: The method of that rebellion in the reigne of Henry the third which made France extreamely miserable is very observable. A fac¬ tious party of the nobility and gentry, a seditious party of the clergy, and an unfortunate party of the seduced Commonalty, entred into a Holy League against their lawful 1 soveraigne, upon a pretence he was mis-led by evil counsellors, and favoured the reformed doctrine.22 Digges saw that the parliamentary theorists had broken away from their reliance on the law, and sought to override tradition by interpreting Cicero’s famous phrase salus populi suprema lex

esto as though it meant 'necessity knows no law’. He called it 'the engine by which the upper roomes are torne from the foundation and seated upon fancy onely, like castles in the air’.23 It was a 22 Op. cit. (1647 edition), p. 117. 23 Ibid., p. 7. Cf. Selden: There is not anything in the world more abus’d than this sentence, salus populi suprema lex esto, for we apply it as if we ought to

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THE CIVIL WAR

phrase with which Hotman had generously interlarded the

Franco-Gallia. Now Digges was to oppose it with the criticism which Barclay had already levelled against it. It is true that much royalist theory was based on the funda¬ mentals of the ancient constitution, which might with justice be declared to have been imperilled by parliamentary practice.

Nolumus leges Angliae mutare, ran the king’s reply to the Nine¬ teen Propositions. Digges himself declared that 'the right of nature cannot be pleaded against a positive constitution’. But in response to the parliamentary theory of sovereignty over the king, Digges and his associates began to assert that sovereignty lay in the monarch. If they were inconsistent in this, they were no more inconsistent than Bodin had been. Consider, for example, how Digges re-interpreted the idea of the mixed constitution. It did not mean, he argued, that the Lords and Commons were co¬ ordinate with the king and might resist him when they chose. It meant that the king had agreed to abide by accepted customs. If we speak properly, there cannot be such a thing as mixtum imperium, a mixt monarchy, or mixt aristocracy, or mixt democracy. Because if there are divers supreame powers it is no longer one state.24 There were others who went further than this. Digges had been suspicious of the precept quod principi placet, legis vigorem habet, for to him that the king’s will was the law savoured of arbitrary government. But Archbishop Usher openly supported another Roman Law dictum, Ulpian’s princeps legibus solutus est, making only the reservation that the king’s supremacy to law applied to mutable and not immutable law.25 Usher, too, recognized the source of the opposing claim that the people, and not the king, were sovereign, and that the inferior magistrates might make forsake the known law when it may be most for the advantage of the people, when it means no such thing.’ Table Talk, 1689, p. 40. 24 Unlawfulnesse of Subjects . . . , p. 68. See also pp. 138, 139. 25 Power communicated by God to the Prince and the Obedience required by the Subject (written c. 1640), 1661, pp. 59, 62, 73. The distinction between mutable and immutable law had also been made by Bodin. It is a reflection on the continuity of political ideas that Usher should have discussed the point in terms of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus.

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THE CIVIL WAR

such sovereignty effective. Recalling its condemnation by French theorists at the time of the Oath of Allegiance controversy, he branded it as a Jesuit and Calvinist principle: 'Buchanan and the faymed Junius Brutus are infamous for this doctrine.’26 Rutherford had accused John Maxwell of plagiarizing Barclay, and the charge was not undeserved. Yet Maxwell saw more clearly than Barclay that the theory of popular sovereignty had antece¬ dents much older than its recent expression by Huguenots and Jesuits. As soon as he saw parliamentary writers reproducing its French version, Maxwell declared: 'The like tenets were never taught nor believed by sound Protestants of the reformed churches.’ The opponents of the king had borrowed them from Boucher, Rossaeus, Hotman, and others. These in turn had de¬ veloped them from fifteenth-century writers such as Gerson and James Almain. Before them, William of Occam, John of Paris, and Marsilius of Padua had suggested the responsibility of the ruler to the sovereign community. All these, said Maxwell, 'were prior to Luther or Calvin. Our rabbies, then, have drawn these doctrines out of their polluted cisterns’.27 These references to the medieval antecedents of monarchomach theory recall similar French analyses made during the Oath of Allegiance controversy. Then there had been suggestions in the works of Barclay and, more especially, of Jean Bede that mon¬ archy was the only government ordained by God, that natural power was patriarchal, and that kings by hereditary descent might be literally as well as metaphorically the patriarchs of their people. Maxwell was the first English royalist to state unequivo¬ cally the patriarchal theory in print,28 though Sir Robert Filmer’s

Patriarcba may well have been composed before the publication of Sacro-sancta Regum Majestas. Parker and Prynne devoted some space to its refutation, but the theory does not appear to have been widespread in royalist writing at this period. The younger Digges rejected it as absurd.29 But Maxwell’s exposition 26 27 28 29

The Soveraignes Power and the Subjects Duty, 1644, p. 19Sacro-sancta Regum Majestas (1644), 1680, pp. 18—25. Ibid.,pp. 128-37. Unlawfulnesse of Subjects . . . , p. 15.

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THE CIVIL WAR

of monarchical sovereignty was a new element soon to be found in many royalist works. 'Review and consider all politicians’, he wrote, 'when you will find they will grant that... supremacy and sovereignty is an indivisible and undivided entity.’30 If this Bodinian definition were accepted the only answer which could be made to rex singulis major, universis minor was, as Maxwell and Bishop Morton both averred, that 'every absolute king ... is in power super totam rempublicam .31 Sir John Spelman, the son of the antiquary, also expressed this view. Sovereignty lay in the king, and he was therefore sovereign over his subjects both individually and in the aggregate. Legisla¬ tive power was 'inseparably incident’ to sovereignty, and, if Par¬ liament had by custom come to consent to legislation, this was allowed by royal concession which might be withdrawn in emer¬ gency. 'Peeres and Commons, being merely instruments and qualifications of the Kings legislative absolutenesse, are no sharers with him in the sovereigntie.’ Parker’s view of sovereignty was dismissed as 'that Jesuitique depth of Sathan that the sovereigntie over the sovereigne is placed in the bodie representative of the subject’.32 Another writer who adopted Maxwell’s position was Henry Hammond, the king’s chaplain. In his Of Resisting the Law full

Magistrate upon Colour of Religion (1643) he, too, maintained that true Protestantism had no room for a doctrine subversive of monarchical authority. Brutus and Buchanan were no Protestants in their politics. They were 'perfect Jesuits in their principles’. Bodin had shown in his Republique that Luther had been unwill¬ ing to sanction the rebellion of the princes of the Empire against Charles V. England was an absolute monarchy, for Bodin had said so: It seems Master Dale, our Embassador, from whom he [Bodin] had 30 Op. dt., p. 150. 31 Morton, Christus same Morton who had Discoverie of Romish Prynne and Parker. 32 The Case of our 1643, pp. 1—16.

Dei, 1643, p. 12. Cf. Maxwell, op. cit., p. 75. This was the compared Calvinist and Ligueur doctrines of sedition in his Doctrine (1605). He now associated these concepts with Affaires in Law, Religion and other Circumstances . . . ,

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THE CIVIL WAR

received his advertisements of the state of this kingdome, had not then heard that our king, though singulis major, is universis minor, which certainly had divested him of all sovereignty... ,33 Perhaps the most trenchant criticism of the theory of parlia¬ mentary or popular sovereignty was that expressed by John Bramhall in his Serpent Salve (1643). Bramhall succeeded Usher as Archbishop of Armagh, and he is best remembered for his controversy with Hobbes. He remarked the use of the central tenet of Brutus, Buchanan, and Mariana by parliamentary theo¬ rists. He attacked the association of the idea of sovereignty as active power with the concept of the people as some kind of corpus

mysticum: First your ground-work (that the people is the fountain and effi¬ cient of power) totters and is not universally true. Power in the abstract is not at all: power in the concrete is but sometimes in the people, which is rather the application of power than power itself. The maxim rex singulis major, universis minor might be accept¬ able if the king were included in the collective body of the people. But without the king the whole body of the people was at best reduced to a majority, and this was further reduced by the fiction which equated this majority with their alleged representatives. Commenting on Parker’s remark that 'the whole community in its underived majesty shall convene to do justice’, he observed: Here we have it expressly; that the Parliament is the whole com¬ munity, that it hath a majesty, that this majesty is underived, that it hath a power to try Princes, yea to do justice upon them.34 The supporters of the king were tending more and more to openly identify themselves with French Politique theorists. When that fighting chaplain, Michael Hudson, whose sword proved more damaging to the parliamentary cause than his pen, was awaiting his fate in the Tower in 1647, he occupied himself in writing a political treatise, The Divine Right of Government, wherein he professed his intention to emulate the achievement 33 Op. cit., pp. 23, 24. 34 Serpent Salve, in Works, 1676, pp. 530, 531, 556.

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THE CIVIL WAR

of 'those masters in the mysteries of their own art, Bodin and Barclay’. But of all the writers who reproduced French absolutist theory as their own, none did so with such unashamed directness as Peter Heylyn and Griffith Williams. Heylyn was also a chaplain to the king. In his Stumbling Block

of Disobedience and Rebellion cunningly laid by Calvin in the Subjects Way (written 1644), Heylyn took as his text the enuncia¬ tion of the theory of the inferior magistrates in the last paragraph of Calvin’s Institution, 'the herb that spoils the pottage’. He ex¬ plained how in the hands of the French monarchomachs this theory had given a new force to the alleged sovereignty of the people over the king. Now Prynne and others were reproducing French sedition, but the French critics of such opinions had already revealed their fallacy. Heylyn then quoted passages from the Republique to illustrate the true nature of the English consti¬ tution. 'Bodin, as great a politick as any of his time in the realm of France hath ranked our kings amongst the absolute monarchs of the western parts.’35 Seeing the irony of the fact that 'Mr Prynn hath honoured Bodin with the title of a grand politician’, he pro¬ ceeded to show that Prynne had at every point misunderstood the master. Bodin had shown that the consent of Parliament to the king’s law did not derogate from his possession of sovereignty. Bodin had proved that France was an absolute monarchy, and that England, though differing in the manner in which law was promulgated, was the same. In his Aerius Redivivus Heylyn traced the history of Calvinist rebellion from the publication of Calvin’s Institution in 1536 to his own day (1647). He followed the spread of the Calvinist disease to Germany, Scotland, and England. He discussed in turn the Reveille-matin, the Du droit des magistrats, the Vindiciae

contra Tyrannos, the Branco-Gallia, and the De Jure Regni apud Scot os. He recounted the history of the French Religious Wars, assuming that the Ligue had been inspired by the model of Huguenot sedition. He lost no opportunity to reproach the 35 Stumbling Block Heylyn, 1681, p. 715.

in Historical and Miscellaneous Tracts of .. . Peter

94

THE CIVIL WAR

Huguenots, and even accused them of stirring up revolt in the Netherlands in their own interests. In every case where he assailed Huguenot doctrine his criticism was that of Bodin and Barclay. As he surveyed the course of events in the French wars and those in England after 1637, he could only conclude that the Civil War was based on French models and inspired by the theories that had accompanied them. Griffith Williams, Bishop of Ossory, was as determined as Heylyn to see French opinions beneath parliamentary propa¬ ganda, but in his view the counter-suggestions of Bodin did not go far enough. His Discovery of Mysteries, or the Plots and Prac¬

tises of a Prevalent Paction in this Present Parliament (1643) ranked the parliamentary leaders with Herostratus, Nero, and Oedipus, and, to make such company complete, Ravaillac. They took refuge under the erroneous theories of Beza, Knox, and the Huguenots. They pretended that the king was but a subordinate part of the Parliament, but Bodin had shown that the English Parliament was subject to the undivided sovereignty of the king.36 Yet though Bodin had asserted that England was an absolute monarchy, he had made a dangerous and false distinction between form of state and method of government: Though I deny not Bodin’s distinction of a lordly monarch, a royall monarch, and a tyrannicall monarch, which sheweth onely the power and the practise of the monarch, yet I say that the distinction of an absolute and mixed monarchic which designeth the manner of government, is a meer fopperie and a ridiculous distinction; because that government which extendeth it selfe to more than one, can never be a monarchy, as every man knoweth that understandeth the word monarch.37 In his Vindiciae Regum, published in the same year, Williams remarked that Bodin denied the right of resistance against an absolute king.38 Calvin, Beza, Brutus, Althusius, and Daneau, whose ideas, said Williams, were being employed by English rebels, would not allow private resistance but only that led by inferior magistrates. But Bodin had proved that all inferior 36 Op. cit., p. 80.

37 Ibid., p. 83.

95

38 Vindiciae Regum, p. 37.

THE CIVIL WAR

magistrates were empowered by the sovereign. Hence they were to him but private citizens and could not oppose him.39 Williams surpassed all his fellows in his zeal to show that the king was

legibus solutus. He produced a regiment of civilians and canon¬ ists to affirm this doctrine, and quoted a passage from Barclay which, he held, maintained that the king was limited by no law whatsoever. In actual fact Williams assembled a number of con¬ venient phrases from Barclay’s De Regno, omitting connecting passages which significantly moderated the meaning he gave them.40 These instances of the royalist use of the Politique theory of monarchical sovereignty have been illustrated to the point of surfeit because of the erroneous belief that in the Civil War royal¬ ist theory took its stand on the fundamental mixed constitution and the clerical doctrine of non-resistance.41 The significant thing is that it came nearer to the claim that the king was above the law whenever it was faced with the French theory that the law and the king were alike subordinate to the supposed representatives of the people. Hence the opinions of French monarchomachs and Politiques could reappear in English setting, and in some cases, as with Bishop Williams, English theory could attain more extreme conclusions than its earlier French counterpart. INDEPENDENTS AND MODERATES

Three elements have so far been observed in English thought which were directly connected with the ideas of the French Reli¬ gious Wars. The Erastian parliamentarians adopted the secular theory of the Vindiciae; the Presbyterians added the Huguenot justification of resistance to a ruler who had broken religious 39 Vindiciae Regum, pp. 39, 45, 46. 40 Williams’s version of the passage ran: 'Principem ex certa scientia supra ius, extra ius et contra ius omnia posse: principem solum legem constituere universalem. Princeps soli Deo rationem habet. Princeps solutus est legibus et temerarius est velle, majestatem regiam ullis terminis limitare’ (p. 71). In the original passage (De Regno, 1. iii, c. xiv, p. 194) Barclay had made it clear in the sentences omitted by Williams that he was referring merely to the king’s power condere statuta and tollere leges positivas. 41 e.g. J. W. Allen, English Political Thought, 1603—1644, 1938, pp. 482-97.

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THE CIVIL WAR

covenants with God as well as political covenants with his people; and royalists reproduced the ideas of Barclay and Bodin. After the defeat of the king by the New Model Army a fourth element intervened in English politics which owed no conscious debt to the ideas and example of French conflict. There was nothing in the French wars quite to parallel the role of the English Indepen¬ dents. There are, however, certain striking similarities. The sectarian ministers played a part in Cromwell’s army which resembled that played by the Parisian preachers of the Ligue. After the rift be¬ tween army and Parliament deepened, the radical outburst of opinion manifest in the Leveller tracts and the Putney and White¬ hall debates had its counterpart in the radicalism of the supporters of the revolutionary Council of Sixteen, who challenged Mayenne for the leadership of the Ligue. If the English demands for greater political and social equality seem strangely anachronistic, so, too, does the class hatred evident beneath the satire of the Dialogtie

d’entre le Maheustre et le Manant. There was not, of course, the remotest factual link between the two, but the same anarchic circumstances seemed to throw up similar anticipations of modern thought. In some degree the Independents borrowed the political weapons of both their Erastian and Presbyterian rivals. Some, such as Roger Williams, drew precisely the same political infer¬ ences from the Old Testament covenants which the Huguenots had drawn,42 and others such as John Goodwin reproduced the doctrine of the inferior magistrates.43 When the army purged the Long Parliament, Goodwin justified its action by asserting that the army was more truly representative of the people than the Commons. He was able to employ against the ejected members the very arguments which Prynne had borrowed from the monarchomachs to direct against the king.44 42 Cf. J. W. Gough, The Social Contract, 1936, p. 85. 43 Cf. P. Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution, 1954, p. 82. 44 Puritanism and. Liberty (Clarke MS. and tracts selected by A. S. P. Woodhouse), 1951, p. 215. 6109

97

H

THE CIVIL WAR

It would be unjust to complete this summary of English thought in the Civil War without some reference to opinions more temperate in character than those which have so far been mentioned. As it might be expected, men of moderate views had less reason to resurrect the theories of the French Religious Wars, but such was the breadth of French influence that even here it is sometimes possible to distinguish a debt to French experience. This may be illustrated from two writers differing widely from one another in their methods. One, Philip Hunton, sought a logical reconciliation of the monarchical and parliamentary views of sovereignty, and exerted so wide an influence that his Treatise

of Monarchy (1643) was the object of much royalist criticism and earned republication in the period of the Glorious Revolution. The other, writing under the soubriquet of 'D. P., Gent—a well wisher to peace’, adopted an empirical and less dogmatic approach in his Severall Politique and Militarie Observations (1648), a work which excited little notice at its publication in the midst of the emotions aroused by the second Civil War, and has since been entirely forgotten. Hunton retained a respect for the proper role of the king in the constitution, but he was clearly influenced, whether directly or indirectly, by French views of sovereignty. If the community which had constituted the sovereign retained a power to resist him and rebel against him, then, to Hunton, it had not empowered him with sovereignty at all. Sovereignty had two primary func¬ tions, the legislative and gubernative. In England legislative sovereignty lay jointly in king, Lords and Commons: the king was the personal holder of the executive part of the sovereignty. England was therefore a mixed monarchy, and the king was limited and not absolute. Nevertheless, he was superior to the other elements in Parliament, for England could not otherwise be described as a monarchy. In a mixed monarchy the power of each element in the multiple sovereign was fixed by the original constitution, established by 'the consent and fundamental contract of a nation of men’. Only by such a contract could sovereignty in the abstract be associated with the person of the ruler: 'This is 98

THE CIVIL WAR

the root of all sovereignty individuated and existent in this or that person or family.’4' Mixed monarchy must, by the nature of the legislative sovereign, be limited, but limited monarchy need not always be mixed.46 Presumably Hunton thought Bodin was describing the French monarchy as limited but not mixed when the king was said to be sole legislative sovereign, yet limited by fundamental laws which were part of sovereignty in the abstract. All this was far from clear, as Filmer was to point out in his

Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy (1648). Its confusion was due to Hunton’s endeavour to set side by side the opinions expressed by Bodin and the monarchomachs. When another royalist critic, Henry Feme, accused Hunton of restating the views of Brutus and Buchanan, he denied that he held the extreme views of such writers, but agreed with what was 'neither against the reason or authority of the monarch’.47 Hunton’s achievement bears comparison with that of the German theorists of double sovereignty. His successors were to use such ideas in the working out of an English variant of that compromise achieved by the intermediaries. The author of Severall Politic[ue and Militarie Observations displayed a more direct dependence upon French writers and French history than did Hunton. He caught something of the critical tone of the French historical school, an attitude which was as destructive as was the theory of sovereignty to belief in the supremacy of an unchanging, immemorial law. He cited Belleforest, Du Haillan, Commines, and de Serres on the limitations which French institutions had once imposed on the monarchy. He compared the advantages of elective and hereditary monarchy, and, though he preferred the latter, he did not hesitate to stress its drawbacks. He admired Venetian institutions, and referred also to Bodin’s discussion of the rotation of office in Ragusa. The Eng¬ lish monarchy was a mixture of the three forms of government, and sovereignty rested in the state as a whole. The greater the 45 Op. cit., p. 12. 46 Op. cit., p. 27. , 47 A Vindication of the Treatise of Monarchy, 1644, p. 6.

99

THE CIVIL WAR

public participation in the appointment of legislators, and the greater the respect for individual liberties, the more perfect was the commonwealth. England had much to learn in this respect, but the present dissensions were not due to any inherent defect in the form of government. The same might be said of the French wars, whose cause lay in the sins of the people, the incapacity of the rulers, and the ambition of those in high places. The writer’s favourite authority was Bodin, but Bodin in his professorial, and not in his propagandist, character. This was an attempt to stand aloof from the cut and thrust of contemporary political debate. It was a call to reasonableness, a rejection of dogmatism in politics, and a dispassionate appeal to the lessons of the French conflicts. Views such as these were not, however, suited to the violence of the controversy which the Second Civil War and its outcome occasioned. With the publication of an English version of Davila’s

Historie of the Civill Wanes of France in 1647, a work which was later described as 'Hampden’s Vade Mecum ,48 French pre¬ cedents became even more the centre of English debate. The opposing French views of sovereignty seemed to dominate the poli¬ tical scene when, in the year before the Regicide, there appeared Filmer’s selections from Bodin’s Republique, The Necessity of

the Absolute Power of all Kings and in particular of the King of England, and the first full English text of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. For the moment the principles of the latter seemed to be in the ascendancy, even if there is no truth in the story that the man who translated the Vindiciae was also he who decapitated the king.49 48 'The first time I ever saw that [the history] of D’avila of the Civil Warrs of France it was lent me under the title of Mr. Hampden’s Vade mecum\ and I believe no copy was [more] like an originall than that rebellion was like ours.’ Sir Philip Warwick, Memoires of the Reigne of King Charles I, 1701, p. 240. Davila had been a page at the court of Henri III, and much of his account was based on personal experience. 49 A manuscript note in a British Museum copy of this edition reads: 'This translation was the work of Mr William Walker of Darnal near Sheffield, the person who cut off King Charles’s Head.’ The translation differed from that of Prynne’s extracts and also from the 1588 edition of the fourth question.

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CHAPTER 6

Regicide and Interregnum 'They did not’, wrote Hobbes in Behemoth, 'challenge the sovereignty in plain terms and by that name until they had slain the King.’1 This was doubtless true of the majority of the king’s enemies, although, as it has been seen, there were many who had held that the only true sovereignty was that of the community as a whole, in whose name they acted. But the finality of the act of regicide forced men to see sovereignty as Hobbes saw it, the mere exercise of power. The monarchy had gone, and no man knew quite what would replace it. At this climacteric English political thinking decisively cast aside its traditional forms. The violence of this new radical phase had no parallel in the recent English past, but it was precisely similar to the turbulent atmosphere created by the massacre of St. Bartholomew and also by the murders of Henri de Guise and his royal assassin. Hence in the justification of the Regicide and in the reaction of royalists there was a conscious relationship to the attitudes of extreme French opinion in the Religious Wars. THE DEFENCE OF THE REGICIDE AND HUGUENOT OPINION

Nowhere was this more evident than in the vindicators of the Regicide. Early in January 1649, when the king’s fate was still uncertain, there appeared a tract entitled The Armies V indication by 'Eleutherius Philodemus’. The precedent that was uppermost in the author’s mind was the treachery of Charles IX, and he therefore described in detail the horror of St. Bartholomew’s night. Monarchy was the worst form of government. Daneau, Buch¬ anan, and Mariana had shown that the people might judge and 1 Behemoth (1679), 1682, p. 43.

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REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

condemn their king. Calvin had prescribed the role of the inferior magistrates who were to execute justice upon him. The safety of the people was the supreme law. Even Bodin, the most extreme of the supporters of monarchy ('I mention him the oftener because he is a great kingsman’), had admitted the inconveniences of monarchy. He had said that no man might dispense another from a crime he had committed against divine law. He had shown that in Rome the sovereignty had been in the people, as it was in England. No credit should be given to Bodin’s 'senseless distinc¬ tion . . . that the supreme magistrates, howsoever bound by the laws of God, of nature and nations, yet are free from all civil laws prescribed by themselves’. His preference for hereditary succes¬ sion before an elective form of government was contrary to the opinion of 'the greatest politicians’, Aristotle, Tacitus, Lipsius, Gregoire, and Machiavelli. If the marks of sovereignty which Bodin granted monarchy were ever possessed by human rulers, their people were but slaves. Daneau had shown in his Politices

Christianae that the form of government might be altered by the edict of the Estates. Daneau and Bodin were again frequently cited in Teveais kclI reAo? i^ovacas, The Original and End of the Civil Power, a work published four months after The Armies Vindication and written, apparently, by the same hand.2 The Vindiciae and Althusius were the author’s primary authorities. He reproduced Buch¬ anan’s views on tyrannicide and represented the concessions of Barclay, Bodin, and Grotius as if they were unqualified approvals of the punishment of evil kings. Bodin’s assertion that an op¬ pressed people might summon a foreign prince to preserve them against tyranny was represented as the freedom of the people to choose any avenger who might rid them of a tyrant. All common¬ wealths were in reality democracies, since the sovereignty of the 2 The Original and End was by 'Euctatus Philodemius’, who has been identified as Antony Ascham, the representative of the Commonwealth murdered by royalists at Madrid. This attribution appears, however, to be mistaken. Cf. P. Zagorin, op. cit., p. 83. It appears to be based on the fact that this work seems to answer Hammond’s plea to Cromwell to reprieve the king, and Ascham did write a refuta¬ tion of Hammond’s case.

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people was indivisible and inalienable. The rights of sovereignty described by Bodin could repose nowhere but in the community as a whole. The writer had imitated the argument of Althusius and had welded the definitions of Bodin to the popular sove¬ reignty of the Vindiciae. The concept of popular sovereignty was the main prop of Regicide theory. In the published version of his case against the king,3 the prosecutor, John Cook, argued that there could not be two supreme powers in one commonwealth. In peace the Com¬ mons allowed the king a veto in minor matters, but theirs was the true and undivided sovereignty, and when they declared the king¬ dom to be in danger nothing might prevent its exercise. Another Regicide tract, The Peoples Right briefly Asserted (January 1649), referred to the ancient French constitution and the manner in which the French had deposed and disciplined their kings. The Vindiciae had suggested from a passage in Jeremiah that King Manasses of Judah should have been deposed by his people for the crimes that led to their betrayal to the Assyrians. The Parliament of England had acted justly in preventing a like betrayal by Charles I. Beside the Old Testament appeared that other source of monarchomach theory, Roman Law. Bartolus had demonstrated that the whole people were greater than a king and might depose him for treason against them. Bartolus was cited to the same effect by the Fifth Monarchist, John Canne, in his Golden Ruled The Vindiciae was quoted to support the justice of the sentence against the king: A tyrant (saith he) is more outragiously wicked than any thief, highway-robber, murderer or sacrilegious person, and therefore deserves a far greater, heavier punishment. Canne referred to the opinions of Althusius, Daneau, Hotman, Buchanan, Mariana, and others in support of the right of the 3 King Charles his Case, in Somers’ Tracts, vol. v, pp. 214-37. 4 The Golden Rule, or Justice advanced, wherein is shewed that the Represen¬ tative Kingdom or Commons assembled in Parliament have a Lawfull Power to Arraign and Adjudge to Death the King, for Tyranny, Treason, Murder or other High Misdemeanours, February 1649.

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inferior magistrates to do what they would with kings. Ulpian, Baldus, and Bodin were wrong in their view that the ruler was

legibus solutus. Bodin had said that subjects could not kill their king, but their agent might do so. He had admitted the weakness of the absolutist case by allowing that it was just for a non¬ absolute king to be executed for misrule. Further, Grotius and Barclay allowed the killing of a tyrant absque titulo by private men, and admitted grounds for the punishment of a tyrant in

exercitio. Of all the works supporting the Regicide only those of Milton have been remembered. Milton, too, was aware of French pre¬ cedents. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (February 1649) he observed that the treason of Charles I was like that of Charles IX in 1572. He quoted Calvin, Buchanan, and Paraeus on the power of the community to resist and overthrow a king. Buchanan had shown that the allegiance of subjects was con¬ ditional on the king’s observance of laws which they, or their ancestors, had made. In his vituperative dispute with the royalist Huguenots, Salmasius, and the younger Pierre Du Moulin,5 he recalled the observations in the Tranco-Gallia that the Estates General had often deposed and elected their rulers, and that they had done so as the representative body of the sovereign people. Like his French predecessors, Milton stressed the significance of the coronation oath as expressing the king’s intention to preserve his covenant with his people. The fact that the first condemnations of the Regicide were written by Huguenot supporters of absolutism further stimulated 5 Milton, Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio (April 1650), against Salmasius: Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio Secunda (May 1654), against Du Moulin. Claude.de Saumaise, Apologie Roy ale pour Charles I, 1650. Du Moulin, Regii Sanguinis Clamor ad Coelum adversus parricidas Anglicanos, 1652. Note also another con¬ tinental work in defence of Charles I, by 'Gulielmus Ursinus’, Vindiciae pro Capite Regis Angliae contra rebelles parricidas (1649), blaming the English tragedy on the Vindiciae, and refuting its theories with the aid of Bodin. Two of the sardonic quips which Salmasius set against Milton’s torrent of abuse became a commonplace in English debate. The Presbyterians, he said, had deposed Charles as a king, and the Independents had then executed him as a man (op. cit., p. 835). The regicides had claimed to act in the name of the sovereignty of the people, yet they had suppressed ’les Niveleurs’ within their own ranks (ibid., p. 451).

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REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

its defenders to recall French precedent and French resistance theory. The Huguenots never supported the politics of English Puritanism. At the start of the Civil War a Huguenot pasteur visited London and proclaimed after his return: 'II n’y a de souverainete qu’en 1’estat monarchique ... la souverainete estant indivisible comme un poinct.’ Another, Moses Amyraut, described the resistance of the Long Parliament as an iniquity comparable only to the Ligue.6 The memory of the lesson which Richelieu had taught them at La Rochelle deterred the Huguenots from participating in the civil wars of the Fronde at the time when Cromwell was establishing the new regime in England.7 Hugue¬ not political thinking remained staunchly royalist. In his Discours

de la Souverainete des Roys (1650) Amyraut condemned the doctrines of his predecessors inimical to royal authority. Sove¬ reignty, being indivisible, could only repose in a single ruler. Monarchy was the only perfect form of government. The attempts to assert the authority of Parliament and to allow co-ordination in government were responsible for the dissensions and miseries which England had experienced.8 English Puritanism resented this Huguenot attitude and represented French Protestants as deceitful and untrustworthy.9 CROMWELLIAN RATIONALIZATION

The new English regime received theoretical justification from the mercenary pen of Marchamont Nedham, whose principles were adaptable enough to fit every situation. His Excellencie of

a Free State developed the view that 'de jure the original of all 6 A. Galland, 'Les Pasteurs franfais, Amyraut, Bochart. . . et la royaute de droit divin’, in Bulletin de la Societe de I’Histoire du Protestantisme frangais, 1928, vol. lxxvii, p. 111. 7 Few followed the example of the Frondeur theorist, Claude Joly, in resurrect¬ ing the ideas of the Franco-Gallia and the Vindiciae. It is interesting that there are some instances of a reversal in the direction of the stream of influence, as when the Frondeurs at Bordeaux studied Lilburne’s manifestoes against Cromwell. Cf. Gooch, History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 1898, p. 204. 8 Op. cit., pp. 142, 143. 9 e.g. The Next Way to France, or a Short Dialogue between two Zealous Wellwishers for the Advancement of the Kingdom of Christ, 1651.

105

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power and government is and ought to be in the people’.10 He remarked that in France fundamental changes had been effected by popular consent, but the engrossing of both executive and legislative power by the later Valois kings had diminished liberty just as it had been diminished under the Stuarts. In 1650 it was obvious that universal consent was not the basis of Cromwellian power. In his Case of the Commonwealth of England Stated, published in that year, Nedham turned to the ideas of Grotius to show that the consent of the whole community was really a fiction: 'A government erected by a prevailing part of the people is as valid de jure as if it had the ratifying consent of the whole.’11 If an anarchic democracy were allowed to develop, and no strong directing hand raised to check it, its tyranny would be worse than that of the Stuarts. Bodin had shown the inconvenient factious¬ ness of democracies. 'The high road to licientiousnesse and tyranny’, which Bodin had exposed was now, said Nedham, the path of the Levellers and Diggers.12 Government originated from the power of the sword, not from positive agreement. Besold, Grotius, and Arnisaeus had all attested, so Nedham claimed, that the real meaning of consent was tacit acceptance of the con¬ queror’s will. The ideas of Bodin appeared in a new light, where the distinction between de jure and de facto power was obscured. In a word allegiance is but a politicall tie, for politick ends, grounded upon politicall considerations, and therefore, being politi¬ cally determined, when these considerations are altered by new cir¬ cumstances (be it in relation to Caesar or the Senate) the old allegiance is extinct, and must give place to a new.13 The wheel had turned full circle. Bodinian sovereignty had been used by the defenders of the Stuarts, by the advocates of popular sovereignty, and now by the apologist of Cromwell. Cromwell himself was the personification of the Calvinist 10 Op. cit., 1767 edition, p. 90. 11 Case of the Commonwealth, p. 19. Cf. De Jure Belli ac Pacts, 1. ii, c. v, sec. 17. 12 Case of the Commonwealth, pp. 80—87. 13 Ibid., p. 25. Perhaps it is significant that Nedham frequently referred to Machiavelli in this work.

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ideal of the inferior magistrate.14 He had expelled the last rem¬ nant of the Long Parliament, dissolved the nominated 'Parlia¬ ment of Saints’, and authorized the election of a new legislature under the provisions of the Instrument of Government, by which he assumed the dignity of Lord Protector. 'If my calling be from God, and my testimony from the people’, he told the new assembly in September 1654, 'God and the people shall take it from me, else I will not part with it.’15 The Calvinist doctrine of vocation was translated into political action in the person of Cromwell. So, too, was the Huguenot concept that the fundamental laws of the constitution were established by, or in the name of, the people, and could not be invaded by the legislature. For Calvin the in¬ ferior magistrates were the guardians of the constitution, and this was the role assumed by the Lord Protector. There were those in the first Protectorate Parliament who asserted that if they truly represented the sovereign people, they might make and unmake constitutions at will. Cromwell denied their right to tamper with the Instrument of Government. 'It is true, as there are some things in the Establishment which are fundamental’, he said, 'so there are others which are not, but are circumstantial.’16 Nothing in Cromwell’s attitude allows the inference that he regarded the law as equivalent to his sovereign will. It was not his will, but that of God made manifest through His instrument. No human law could be truly fundamental, just as no human authority could be absolutely sovereign. As one of his apologists put it: The principall duty of the Soveraigne visible power in regulating the actions of mans society, is not to make new lawes, but to declare the will of the Grand Legislator (even God in his word), for the right governing of that society.17 These were the words of Louis Du Moulin, the brother of the younger Pierre Du Moulin, the royalist. In 1650 he was Reader in 14 15 16 17

Cf. Troeltsch, Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, 1931, vol. ii, p. 648. Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, edited by Carlyle, 1888, part viii, p. 41. Ibid., p. 33. The Power of the Christian Magistrate in Sacred Things, 1650, p. 2.

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REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

History at Oxford, and his The Power of the Christian Magistrate

in Sacred Things was intended to place his loyalty to Cromwell beyond the doubts of those who sought to deprive him of his post. Though more of a Calvinist in his theology than his brother, Louis Du Moulin denied the separation of church and state, and denied it in terms of the theory of sovereignty: If two supreame magistrates were constituted, sharing betwixt them the supreame power, the one being over certain actions they call ecclesiastical, the other over civill; such a state cannot be conceived without a great deal of confusion.18 Yet, like his brother, Du Moulin would not condemn the precepts and practice of his Huguenot ancestors. In France, he asserted, it had been just for independent Huguenot congregations to resist a king who obstructed the reformation of their church. God was to be obeyed before man. But in England the circumstances were otherwise. He who wielded the indivisible sovereignty had no one to judge him save God: 'Pastors or congregations must either acquiesce to his judgement or decision as being onely legall, or they must suffer for righteousnesse sake.’ The attitude of both the Presbyterians and new sects such as the Quakers compelled Cromwell, the inferior magistrate, to assume the position of the Politiques. He claimed no power to direct the consciences of Englishmen, but it was necessary for churches of all denomina¬ tions to obey the civil magistrate in externals. He was 'to look to the outward man, but not to meddle with the inward’.19 Du Moulin’s version of this policy was that of a Huguenot turned Politique by the upheavals of the English political scene. 18 The Power of the Christian Magistrate in Sacred Things, 1650, p. 102. Louis Du Moulin later engaged in a lengthy controversy with his relative, Pierre Jurieu, who upheld the orthodox Calvinist doctrine of the separation of church and state. Du Moulin went so far as to say that if Henri IV had remained a Calvinist and had permitted the French establishment of his church on the Genevan model, the Religious Wars would have been more bitter and prolonged than in fact they were (Essay de renfermer la refutation entiere et solide du traite de Monsieur Jurieu touchant la puissance ecclesiastique, 1679, pp. 54, 55). For the influence of Jurieu in the interaction of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the Revolution, see below, Chapter 8, p. 151. 19 Speeches, part viii, p. 23.

108

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

THE DEFENDERS OF ABSOLUTISM: FILMER AND HOBBES

To royalists the opinions of writers such as Nedham and Louis Du Moulin seemed nothing less than arch hypocrisy. William Sancroft, who in the year of the Regicide was deprived of his fellowship at Emmanuel College, epitomized the royalist view in the title of his tract Modern Policies, taken from Machiavel,

Borgia and other Choise Authors, by an Eye-witnesse (1652). The future primate of England, the critic of James II, and the leader of the non-jurors, relied in these early days upon the politics of William Barclay. Barclay’s references to the factious Huguenot and Ligueur aristocracy, his contempt for the use of religious dissensions to further political interests, were quoted by Sancroft as a commentary on recent events in England. The royalist habit of using French precedents for sedition as the whipping post for the practice of their opponents continued unabated in the Interregnum. This was illustrated by the publi¬ cation in French in 1650 and in English nine years later of The

History of the English and Scotch Presbytery, written by the younger Pierre Du Moulin during the Civil War.20 Du Moulin made the familiar observation that the English rebels followed the theory of the Vindiciae and the Du droit and the practice of the Ligue. They attributed 'majestie to the commaltie and not to the King’: They maintain this their new sovereignty by a maxim of Stephanus Junius Brutus, rex est singulis major et universis minor, that is to say (as they expound it) that the king is the sovereign of the particulars, 20 This work has also been attributed to Bramhall, but the readiness of the author to defend the Huguenots and to associate them with the Anglican church rather than with the Presbyterians suggests Du Moulin’s Letter of a French Pro¬ testant to a Scotishman of the Covenant. The Address to the Ministers of the Reformed Church at Paris, printed with the 1659 edition, contained references to Huguenot loyalty during the Fronde and to Salmasius, and may well have been delivered by Bramhall in the Huguenot church at Charenton, where exiled royal¬ ists worshipped. It is clearly a later addition to the work.

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but the representative body of the state is greater than he and have sovereignty over him.21 Once again it was Bodin who was called into service to refute this proposition. Bodin had declared the King of England an absolute sovereign. The English Parliament and the French Estates General had no power except during a royal minority. Their assembly was a sign of obedience to the king’s command and the utmost they could do was dutifully to present their requests and petitions. Bodin had also shown that there was no way of executing justice against a king, 'although he were guilty of the crimes a man could imagine in a tyrant’. Bodin had described and refuted the grounds of English resistance, though it had been French rebellion which he had had in mind: 'Behold here the form of state of our coven¬ anters in their beginning so drawn to the life by this learned person.’ Du Moulin developed detailed parallels between English rebellion and the Ligue. 'In brief,’ he concluded, 'it appears at this day that the devil marches abroad and walks in the same paths as he did about fifty years since.’22 It will be recalled that Heylyn’s works drawing parallels be¬ tween the Long Parliament and Huguenot rebellion were also appearing in print at this time. It is not, however, for the develop¬ ment of these parallels, but rather for the logical relationship between French and English absolutist thought that this period is significant. The Interregnum witnessed the publication of works by Heylyn’s friend, Sir Robert Filmer, and by Thomas Hobbes, which, though the theories they contained had assumed their final shape some years before,23 indicated new directions in English political thought. 21 The History of the English and Scotch Presbytery, p. 6922 Ibid., p. 89. 23 In his introduction to Filmer’s works Mr. Laslett has shown that Patriarcha was composed between 1635 and 1642. Though it was not published until 1680, its arguments appeared in Filmer's other works. The Freeholders Grand Inquest touching our Soveraigne Lord the King and His Parliament and The Anarchy of a Limited or Mixed Monarchy appeared in the same year as his selections from Bodin’s Republique (1648). His Observations concerning the Original of Govern¬ ment upon Mr. Hobs Leviathan, Mr. Milton against Salmasius, H. Grotius De Jure Belli and his Observations upon Aristotles Politiques touching Forms of Govern-

110

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Filmer was well aware of the importance of comparative views of the French and English constitutions. In his preface to

The Freeholders Grand Inquest he examined procedures in the Estates General to show that that body, like the English Parlia¬ ment, in no way impaired the absolute sovereignty of the king. Like Hobbes, he set out to close the gaps left by French theorists of absolutism, through whose admissions the exponents of popu¬ lar sovereignty were able to derive valuable arguments. Filmer was in sympathy with his French predecessors. He appreciated the achievement of Blackwood and Barclay, and also of Hayward, the English purveyor of Politique theory, and referred to their refuta¬ tions of Buchanan or Parsons. But Bodin, after the Scriptures, was his greatest authority. Like Salmasius, whom he defended against Milton, Filmer stated the Bodinian concept of monarchical sovereignty beside the patriarchal theory. The doctrine that the king was literally the patriarch of his kingdom had already been expounded by Max¬ well, and before him by Gregoire. But Filmer was the first to say unequivocally that this was the only legitimate basis of power. He never, it is true, said precisely that the Stuarts were descended in unbroken line of primogeniture from one of Noah’s sons, and he was also compelled to admit that a conqueror assumed the patriar¬ chal status of his predecessor by virtue of his usurpation.24 Filmer made much of the Roman Law view of paternal autho¬ rity, and cited Bodin’s admiration for it. Another Roman Law doctrine, however, presented him with a problem. The famous passage from Ulpian, asserting that the king’s will was the law, stated that he possessed this power because the people had origin¬ ally bestowed the sovereignty upon him, and not because it had ment were first published in 1652, the year before his death. Hobbes’s Leviathan was published in 1651, but the opinions expressed in it were contained in De Cive in 1642. As Harrington pointed out (Prerogative of Popular Government, 1658, p. 1), Hobbes translated Thucydides in 1628 as holding that, before government, society was but an anarchy of thieves. Neither for Filmer nor for Hobbes did the Civil War provide the stimulus for the theory of absolutism. 24 Patriarcha, in Works, 1949, p. 60. Filmer’s greatest critic seized upon this inconsistency as expressed in Observations upon Aristotle (Locke, First Treatise, sec. 78).

Ill

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

originated in him naturally. Filmer was therefore compelled to reinterpret two of Ulpian’s formulae: 'Jure naturali omnes homines liberi nascuntur’ and 'Populus ei [principi] et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem confert.’ Ulpian, said Filmer, had not meant that all men were born free of obligations to their fathers and rulers. Fie had merely wished to say that slavery was unnatural. As for the transference of power, this had applied only to the lex regia and not in general. The principle princeps legibus

solutus est was, nevertheless, universal.25 At the same time Filmer admitted that if it were impossible to determine the next heir, then the heads of families must elect the king’s successors. Now Bodin had suggested that a commonwealth might be founded in this way, and it was this opinion which Rutherford and, later, Edward Gee seized upon when they cited Bodin in refutation of the patriarchal theory.26 Yet Filmer went further than Bodin and virtually maintained that the only alter¬ native to absolute monarchy was anarchy, a position more ex¬ treme than that of Hobbes. Filmer applied Bodin’s remarks on the concept of mixed government advocated by Polybius, Machiavelli, and Contarini to his own denial of Hunton’s thesis. Mixed government might be inconvenient, but mixed monarchy was impossible. If the king were not supreme, then the only judge of his disputes with his individual subjects must be the whole com¬ munity, who then would seem to be sovereign. But this, too, was impossible, although Bodin had admitted that a democracy, though inferior, was nonetheless a valid form of state.27 In his

Observations upon Aristotle Filmer denied Bodin’s claim that sovereignty might rest in the people. Sovereignty was indivisible. The people could never be sovereign, because so long as there was one dissentient voice they were not unanimous.26 It was one thing to talk of the indivisibility of sovereignty in the abstract, but if 23 Patriarcba, in Works, 1949, pp. 73, 74, 106. 26 Anarchy, in Works, p. 288. See Chapter 5, p. 88, and below, p. 121. 27 Ibid., p. 295. For Filmer’s use of Bodin on the inconveniences of democracy, see Patriarcba, in Works, p. 86. The passages of the Republique referred to were those employed in different context by Nedham. 28 Observations upon Aristotle, in Works, p. 211.

112

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

this were to have concrete application then the only logical reposi¬ tory for sovereignty was a single ruler. If the theory of sovereignty were given this extreme interpretation, then it was fully in accord with patriarchalism. Filmer declared that aristocracy and demo¬ cracy were disguised forms of anarchy. They were not natural, nor could they be justified on the grounds of some hypothetical con¬ tract. They existed only where the stealthy sedition of ambitious men had overthrown the natural form of government, monarchy.29 Filmer’s ability to develop logical implications in Bodin’s theory of sovereignty has been neglected by those who have regarded his entire theory as a set of dogmas based on revelation rather than reason. No one could make this error with Hobbes. Unlike Filmer, Hobbes never referred to recent writers on politics, and such was the logical consistency of his argument that it is not easy to determine his debt to the ideas of others.30 Filmer had not been entirely successful in closing all the doors against the reason¬ ing of his opponents. He had admitted the principle of election when the line of succession had been lost, and he had conceded the right of conquest. Except for Locke, Filmer’s critics failed to take advantage of these chinks in the armour of their adversary. Hobbes’s armour was less vulnerable at the joints, but more suspect in its material. Hobbes justified absolute monarchy—not, like Filmer, hereditary absolute monarchy. Bramhall, Clarendon, and others accused him of vindicating Cromwell rather than the Stuarts, and royalists and commonwealthsmen agreed in con¬ demning his basic premiss, that beneath the skin of the political man dwelt a selfish and unsociable animal. Hobbes was the only individualist of his age. He denied its first political principle. Man was not ucrei ttoXltlkov £coov. Aristotle had been mistaken, for the society of men was not like that of ants and bees. The agree¬ ment of these creatures is natural: that of man is by covenant only, which is artificial.’31 29 Anarchy, in Works, p. 311. 30 If Hobbes owed much to any one predecessor, then it would seem that he was indebted to Grotius. Cf. Raymond Polin, Politique et philosophie chez Thomas Hobbes, 1953, pp- 183, 184. 31 Leviathan, c. xvii. 6109

113

I

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

Bodin had been studiously vague about the origin of authority. Filmer espoused patriarchalism and denied the theory of contract. Hobbes based himself upon the latter, and applied it even to the right of conquest and to patriarchal dominion. Men had either escaped from the brutish state of nature to the 'commonwealth by institution’ by voluntarily renouncing their liberty, or they had emerged into the 'commonwealth by acquisition’ by tacitly con¬ tracting with a conqueror or a patriarch to accept his rule in return for their complete obedience.32 Since liberty had been abandoned to the sovereign in every case in order to avoid anarchy, resistance was impossible, for it implied a return to anarchy. The sovereign was above the law, and was empowered with all the marks of sovereignty which Bodin had defined. And there were no incon¬ venient restraints, no immutable laws belonging to the sove¬ reignty and not to the sovereign. The resemblance of Hobbes’s conclusions to those of Bodin was purely superficial. There was a profound difference between their views of human nature. Bodin believed in a certain element of altruism. Man was not complete except as he lived in the family and the wider society of which it was a part, and unless he recognized the natural obligations im¬ posed by communal life. Hobbes saw man as an individual com¬ plete in himself. In the Methodus Bodin stated that if a multitude of men joined together merely to advance their private interests they would form non civitas sed amp^ta.33 For Hobbes such a union was the means of avoiding anarchy. It is significant that the theory of the Leviathan was associated with the Roman Law view of legal personality. The monarchomachs had regarded the people as a universitas with a 'fictitious’ personality, indivisible, immortal, and supreme over the 'real’ per¬ sons who composed it.34 Like Filmer, Hobbes insisted that the attri¬ butes of sovereignty, which were derived from this legal fiction, must have a direct and concrete representation. Hobbes discussed 32 Leviathan, c. xvii. Note that in every case a contract was entered into indivi¬ dually. To allow the community as a whole to contract with a ruler would be to admit the monarchomach grounds for resistance in the event of misrule. 33 Methodus, in Qiuvres Philosophiques, c. vi, p. 168. 34 See above, Chapter 3, p. 41.

114

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

the legal meaning of persona with reference to Cicero, explain¬ ing that 'he that acteth another is said to bear his person or act in his name’. One who represented the words or actions of another was termed 'a "feigned” or "artificial” person’. Hence the people could be said to attain the attributes of a universitas only in virtue of their representation by a real person, and this person was the sovereign. Without such representation they were a formless multitude: A multitude of men are made 'one’ person, when they are by one man or one person represented; so that it be done with the consent of every one of that multitude in particular. For it is the 'unity’ of the representer, not the 'unity’ of the represented, that maketh the person 'one’. And it is the representer that beareth the person, and but one person; and 'unity’ cannot otherwise be understood in multitude.35 This was clearly directed at the monarchomach view of popular sovereignty. The people were not some corpus mysticum, a unity of which the king was a subordinate part. They were a unity only in the sovereign, and the inferior magistrates were empowered by him and could not represent the people directly.36 By reinterpreting the legal fictions of the French theorists of resistance, Hobbes reduced their central principle to absurdity: This great authority being indivisible and inseparably annexed to the sovereignty, there is little ground for the opinion of them that say of sovereign kings, though they be singulis majores, of greater power than every one of their subjects, yet they be universis minores, of less power than them all together. For if by 'all together’ they mean not the collective body as one person, then 'all together’ and 'every one’ signify the same, and the speech is absurd. But if by 'all together’ they understand them as one person, which person the 35 Leviathan, c. xvi. It is also to be noted that Hobbes accepted the Roman Law opinion that only the sovereign could create other fictions. In De Cive he admitted that there were other subordinate associations beside the community as a whole which also were formed by contract and possessed personae. But only the persona civilis of the state represented in the will of the sovereign could authorize their existence. De Cive, 1647, c. v, secs. 9, 10, pp. 85, 86. Cf. Bodin, Republique, 1. ii, c. vi, on the theory of corporations. 36 Behemoth, p. 297.

115

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

sovereign bears, then the power of all together is the same with the sovereign’s power, and so again the speech is absurd, which absurdity they see well enough when the sovereignty is in an assembly of people, but in a monarch they see it not; and yet the power of sovereignty is the same in whomsoever it be placed.37 The fictions of the universitas had been cleverly inverted. The subject was the author of the sovereign’s every action. He could never be wronged by the sovereign, because this amounted to his injuring himself. Thomas White, the Roman Catholic friend of Hobbes and a disinterested advocate of the Lord Protector, took up this sophism and developed it at length in his Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655).38 Bodin had stolen the attributes which the French monarchomachs had applied to the sovereignty of the people and bestowed them on that of the monarch. Althusius had restored the position by using Bodin’s terminology to redefine popular sovereignty. Now Hobbes had refashioned the contract theory of his opponents and turned the tables on Althusius.39 In the light of this 'dialectical’ process it would seem that Hobbes was not working in isolation of the events and ideas of his time. He had answered the represen¬ tative fiction of the inferior magistrates, just as he had made nonsense of the maxim rex singulis major, universis minor. The theories which he set out to refute were those of the French Reli¬ gious Wars, and he refuted them in the Leviathan because of their reappearance in English politics. It has been seen that some of the Regicide tracts had already reproduced the position of Althusius. Under the stimulus of the tour de force achieved by Hobbes and his imitators the same unequivocal view of popular sovereignty appeared in a work entitled De Monarchia Absoluta (1659).40 All commonwealths, the author asserted, were in essence democracies, however they 37 Leviathan, c. xviii. 38 Op. cit., pp. 130 et seq. Cf. Leviathan, c. xviii. 39 This was not, of course, the end of this process, for after Hobbes came Rousseau, and, after Rousseau, Hegel. 40 Attributed to the elder Edward Bagshaw. Wood’s Athenae Oxoniensis, vol. iii, p. 618.

116

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

might be administered. Sovereignty lay in the whole community or in its representative body: 'Populi, quem [senatus noster] representat, semper esse debere supremam majestatem.’41 Mon¬ archy was the worst form of administration. Mixed monarchy as a form of state was a contradiction in terms. As a method of government it should properly be called aristocracy or imperfect democracy. Bodin and Hobbes, who had attempted to transfer the inalienable sovereignty of the people to the ruler, were humani generis hostes.A1

HARRINGTON AND THEORISTS OF COMPROMISE

These were the theories of extremism. It is time to turn to more moderate opinions expressed in the Interregnum. One such attempt to transfer the controversy from the interpretation of sovereignty to other ground was that of Harrington. He was the most brilliant representative of a school of thinkers who have recently been called 'The Classical Republicans’.43 His models lay in classical antiquity and in Florentine and Venetian institu¬ tions. His ideal was one of constitutional and social balance. Thus there is little in his Oceana (1656) which is relevant to the present theme. It is interesting, however, that when Harrington sought to vindicate his work against its critics he should illustrate his prin¬ ciple of social balance by reference to the French Religious Wars and their aftermath. Before the reigns of the last Valois, wrote Harrington in his Prerogative of Popular Government^ the Estates General re¬ tained a primacy in French politics and served to balance the power of the classes they represented. This balance was less per¬ fect than that of the English Parliament because the Third Estate 41 Op. cit., p. 16. 42 Ibid., p. 2. 43 Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans, 1945. 44 The Prerogative of Popular Government containing the First Praeliminary of Oceana inlarged, interpreted, vindicated from all such Mistakes or Slanders as have been alledged against it, 1658. The following summary is taken largely from 1. i, c. ix.

117

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

represented only lawyers, tax-collectors, and merchants, and the miserable peasantry had no political power commensurate with the taxation imposed upon them. In the Religious Wars the mon¬ archy had sought to turn the nobility and the church against the Third Estate, where Protestantism was strongest. The excess of power granted the church by the Valois had increased its factious spirit and provoked it to turn against the monarchy during the ascendancy of the Ligue. The nobility, too, had been tempted by the increase of privilege to seek the establishment of a political hegemony. Thus the monarchy had disturbed the balance of French society and civil war had been the result. Monarchy could never provide stable government since it tended to upset the social balance in its own interests. Plausible as were these economic generalizations as to the causes of the Religious Wars, they assumed too readily that reli¬ gious dissensions followed the pattern of social stratification, and they failed to observe that the militant strength of the Huguenot movement lay in the lesser nobility. Harrington did not lack humour in the presentation of his economic analysis of French history. The wealth of a nation, he declared, lay in the land, not in the amount of money minted. Nevertheless, it was in the interests of kings to keep their fortune in ready money, in case, like Henri of Valois in Poland, they wished to run away. It was not, however, for Harrington’s principle of social equi¬ poise but for a different theory of political balance that the last years of the Interregnum were significant. In the years when it came to be realized that the stability of the Protectorate depended on the life of the Protector, a group of Puritan divines sought an answer to English problems in the works of the intermediaries, and advanced an English variant of the concept of double sove¬ reignty. George Lawson, Richard Baxter, and Edward Gee accepted the implications of sovereignty but strove to find a middle way between the two extremes of its interpretation. Their compromise solution in many ways anticipated the theory accom¬ panying the revolutionary settlement in 1689Lawson took up the threads of Hunton’s Treatise of Monarchy

118

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

but he enjoyed a familiarity with the works of Grotius, Arnisaeus, and Besold which Hunton may not have possessed. His views were expressed in An Examination of the Political Part of Mr.

Hobbs his Leviathan (1657) and later in Politica Sacra et Civilis (1660). Like Bodin, Lawson distinguished between the form and administration of a commonwealth, and perceived the confusion between the theory of sovereignty and the idea of mixed govern¬ ment which arose in the absence of this distinction. He observed that Bodin, Grotius, Besold, and Arnisaeus agreed as to what the rights of sovereignty were, but disagreed as to whether they might rest in one or in several organs of state. Arnisaeus had suggested that there were major and minor rights of sovereignty. The former must be exercised personally by the sovereign; the latter need not. Lawson divided these rights into legislative, judicial, and executive, and declared that the law-maker must be the sove¬ reign. Besold had laid it down that there was a majestas realis and a majestas personalis. Lawson accepted this distinction, and saw that it explained how indivisible sovereignty might be exercised by several persons. He had no doubt that the 'real sovereignty’ was indivisible: 'For as in philosophy essentia est indivisibilis\ so in politicks majestas est indivisibilis et sic majestatis jura sunt

inseparabilia.’45 Lawson believed that the maxim rex singulis major, universis minor was true, but it did nothing to explain how sovereignty was exercised personally. It offered no grounds for resistance, and Brutus and Buchanan were wrong to assert that it did. The monarchomachs had mistakenly described majestas realis in terms of active sovereignty over the king. But Bodin and Arnisaeus were also in error in granting the attributes of real sovereignty to the personal sovereign, and in forbidding resistance in any circum¬ stances. They, and Besold also, erroneously described England as an absolute monarchy. Indeed, Bodin might even be mistaken in the opinion that France was an absolute monarchy, for Hotman had shown it to be otherwise. 43 Politica, p. 41. It is understandable that Lawson should quarrel with Hobbes the nominalist.

119

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

Lawson thought that personal sovereignty might be transferred without the dissolution of society into anarchy. 'As for real sove¬ reignty it alwayes continues, whilest the community remains a community: and subjection to this is due till it be destroyed.’46 The Parliament might be the personal sovereign if the people had made it so in a fundamental constitution. In such circumstances the Parliament could not tamper with the constitution, but if the government were dissolved and the community remained united, such an assembly could empower a new government. This last observation had a direct relevance to the anarchic situation before the Restoration. Richard Baxter venerated Lawson as a political thinker, and acknowledged that their association had led to his own political speculation. Grotius was Baxter’s primary authority, although Grotius was also the object of a good deal of abuse from Baxter as the supporter of Arminian theological opinions.47 In A Holy

Commonwealth (1659) Baxter quoted Grotius, and, through him, Bodin, to show that the summum imperium was neither in king nor estates, but jointly in them both as representing the whole body of the commonwealth.48 He, too, used the terms real and personal sovereignty, but in a different sense from that of Lawson and Besold. To Baxter personal sovereignty was a mere title: real sovereignty meant actual legislative power. Baxter defined the marks of sovereignty in the form in which Grotius had acquired them from Bodin. A Parliament, he thought, had one function as a part of a corporate sovereign legislator which included the king: it had another as the representative body of the people who were parties to the contract defining the constitu¬ tion. If all the parties to the contract agreed to alter the form of the constitution, then such alteration might be made.49 Edward Gee achieved a compromise which resembled those of 46 Politico., p. 214. 47 As in Baxter’s The Grotian Religion Discovered, 1658. Grotius’s De Jure Belli ac Pads was published in English in an abridged form in 1654. 48 Op. cit., p. 466. In this passage Baxter also quoted the concessions of Barclay and Grotius to resistance theory. 49 Ibid., pp. 195-9.

120

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

Baxter and Lawson, but he realized more clearly than they that it was one thing to recognize the existence of power and another to describe the reasons for which men consented to its exercise. The term sovereignty was often applied to both these things and given the same intrinsic meaning in each. Looking back over a century of French and English debates in his Divine Right and Originall of the Civill Magistrate (1658), he could only conclude: In all the controversies that have risen, there is nothing (to my observation) that hath been so universally, really and continually insisted on as this matter of power. This hath been singled out as the Helena of Contention, the bone of strife, the bull of Litigious Agita¬ tion, and that which men may be noted to have most generally, cor¬ dially and constantly prosecuted.50 Gee distinguished between potestas and potentia, between natural and moral power. Natural power was based on force, whereas moral power was a method of describing sovereignty in the abstract. It was Grotius, said Gee, who thus related the personal and the real sovereignty.51 Like Lawson, Gee developed the ideas of Hunton, but he was also very close to Rutherford’s views of the Old Testament covenants. He cited Gregoire, one of his favourite authorities, on examples of how fundamental constitutional law originated in contract, and he referred several times to Gregoire’s general exposition of the principle of consent. Gee concluded that before a contract of government there must be a social contract in which men associated voluntarily to form a state. Among those listed to support this opinion were Bodin, Althusius, and Grotius.52 Gee did not include Hooker in his list of authorities on the social contract, but earlier he quoted the same words of Hooker as did Locke in the Second Treatise. This was the passage in which Hooker referred to the two operative forces in the foundation and maintenance of political societies: the one, a natural instinct for social life, the other, a reasoned perception of the utility of ordered communal existence. The result of the latter was Hooker’s 'social 50 Op. cit., p. 25. 51 Ibid., pp. 15, 16, 25. Cf. De Jure Belli ac Pads, 1. i, c. Hi, sec. 6. 52 Op. cit., pp. 174,175. 121

REGICIDE AND INTERREGNUM

composition’.53 Gee was substituting for the continental forms in which sovereignty had been discussed a convention whereby double sovereignty was described in terms of power and of trust. The period of the Interregnum saw the conscious reproduction by the regicides of the most forthright French assertions of popu¬ lar sovereignty. It saw, too, the most unequivocal of English inter¬ pretations of monarchical sovereignty based on, or related to, French absolutist theory. Finally, it saw an attempt to achieve a compromise between these two extremes, an attempt which owed much to the earlier Dutch and German endeavours to reconcile French views. It might be thought that the logic of sovereignty had banished for ever the sentiment of the immemorial law. But this was not the case, and the Restoration saw, for a time, the return of those traditional doctrines which had dominated Eng¬ lish thinking before the Civil War. 53 Op. cit., p. 138. Cf. Second Treatise, sec. 135, and Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 1. i, c. x, sec. 1.

122

CHAPTER 7

^Restoration and Exclusion Qrisis The Restoration brought a return to the constitutional position of 1641. The relation of Charles II to his Parliament was not defined in terms of sovereignty, but obscured beneath the old conventions of the mixed constitution and the supremacy of cus¬ tomary law. Hence all the conflicts of the preceding age were implicit in the new settlement, and only the king’s political genius kept them temporarily quiescent. The position of Charles II was not unlike that of Catherine de’ Medici before the onset of the Religious Wars. The balance of the constitution was far from clear and religious hostilities threatened its uneasy equilibrium. Like the militant policy of French Catholicism when it sensed a threat to its own supremacy, the attitude of restored Anglicanism was severe and uncompromising. It rejected all attempts to em¬ brace the dissenting Protestant bodies, and displayed an irrational fear of resurgent Roman Catholicism. The ejection of Presby¬ terian and Congregational clergy in England and Scotland, and the persecution of dissent under the Clarendon Code, resulted in the reappearance of French theories of resistance. Similarly, the Test Act and the torrent of Protestant abuse against the Jesuits evoked memories of the Ligue and the Jesuits in France. In the midst of these religious dissensions the tortuous statecraft of the king proved as successful as that with which the Medici Queen Mother had pursued her conciliatory path by the balancing of faction against faction. But just as in France this policy had ulti¬ mately resulted in an outburst of religious and political hysteria which reduced the monarchy to temporary impotence, so in Eng¬ land the sudden explosion of the Popish Plot left the court defenceless. And in the same way that the French monarchy had emerged from the conflict more powerful than ever, so Charles II

123

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

was able to turn the results of the Exclusion Crisis to the advan¬ tage of the crown. Although the Restoration Settlement imposed limitations on the monarchy, royalist theory continued to claim for the king a power far in excess of the prerogatives which he felt safe to exer¬ cise. This was evident in a work by Roger Coke, the grandson of Sir Edward, intended to disprove the dangerous grounds on which Hobbes, White, and Grotius would establish the authority of kings.1 In his dedication to Charles II, Coke remarked that His Majesty had been triumphant through adversity even as Davila had described Coligny’s accession to power after the early Reli¬ gious Wars. Coke’s ideas, however, came not from the Huguenots but from the Politiques. Bodin’s Republique was used to refute the opinions of the three false advocates of monarchy. Coke de¬ clared it unnecessary to establish the origin and principles of government by abstract hypothesis and ratiocinative logic. In his Elements of Power and Subjection (also 1660) he advanced more positive views. If anarchy were to be avoided it was essential to define accurately the repository of supreme power. The authority of the king was defined in terms of Bodin’s marks of sovereignty, including the right to observe or disobey the law as he chose, the right to call and dissolve Parliament at will, and the right of taxa¬ tion. The sovereignty of the king was inalienable and the law was equivalent to his will. In illustration of this principle Coke referred to the death of Henri de Guise. Although there had been no judicial process, his murder had been just, for it had been com¬ manded by Henri III. Kings were the patriarchs of their people, and held the same unlimited power over subjects as Bodin had granted fathers over their children. Only in one respect was Bodin mistaken. He had asserted that the inheritance of power through women in default of the male line was unnatural. The Salic Law, said Coke, was itself contrary to nature. 1 Justice vindicated from the False Fucus put upon it by Thomas White Gent., Mr. Thomas Hobbs and Hugo Grotius, 1660. Coke acknowledged in the preface his use of the 1586 Latin edition of the Republique.

124

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS ORTHODOXY AND DISSENT

Coke was reviving Politique theory. There was a tendency in much royalist speculation to regard Gallican Catholicism as Bar¬ clay had regarded it, the ally of absolute monarchy. A work of John Cragge, The Royal Prerogative Vindicated (1661), took the form of a dialogue between an Anglican clergyman and a Roman Catholic layman, and pointed out that in France ultramontanism had traditionally been opposed by the supporters of the mon¬ archy. A notorious plea to this effect was Philanax Anglicus (1663). This pamphlet was largely a plagiarism of a Roman Catholic attack on Protestant political principles, The Image

of Both Churches by Matthew Pattenson, published in 1623 and 16532 In 1669 it was republished under the false title of

The Jesuites Policy to Suppress Monarchy. The author carefully avoided reference to the Jesuits or to the politics of the Ligue. He violently attacked Huguenot rebellion, and analysed the works of Calvinist monarchomachs with the aid of Barclay’s earlier criti¬ cism. He suggested that the principles of Brutus, Daneau, and Buchanan were responsible for Protestant sedition in France and in England. Rebellion in the name of religion and the sovereignty of the people had been unknown before the Reformation. Its Calvinist form threatened both the true church and the secular power. Bodin had shown that in Geneva ecclesiastical change had been accompanied by a shift in the sovereign power. The con¬ spiracy of the League of Schmalkalde had anticipated the seditious associations which Calvinist political theory had provoked in France: This egg of the consistorian cockatrice [was] first hatched at Smalkald, then fostered and nourished at Geneva, and from thence took wing over most of the European continent and at last arrived upon the fag-end of our island called Scotland.3 With some subtlety Philanax Anglicus was dedicated to the 2 The author of Philanax Anglicus took the pseudonym of 'Thomas Bellamy’. It has been attributed to Sir Henry Janson. 3 Op. cit., p. 1.

125

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Bishop of London, but so clearly was it a Roman Catholic work that the Dean of Canterbury arranged for it to be answered on behalf of the church. His choice fell upon the younger Pierre Du Moulin, who entitled his response A Vindication of the Sincerity

of the Protestant Religion in the Point of Obedience to Sove¬ reigns, opposed to the Doctrine of Rebellion authorised and prac¬ tised by the Pope and the Jesuits, in Answer to a Jesuitical Libel entituled Philanax Anglicus (1663). Later he parried a counter thrust with A Replie to a Person of Honour, his Pretended Answer to the Vindication . . . (1675). In these works Du Moulin, as he had done in the reign of Charles I and during the Interregnum, demonstrated his case in terms of the French Religious Wars. English conspiracy was based on the example of the Ligue and its Jesuit principles. He once more defended Huguenot action and vilified the motives of the Guises. The Vindiciae had not been written by Beza, as Philanax Anglicus suggested, but rather by a Jesuit. Philanax Anglicus pretended to quarrel with Presby¬ terianism, but the work was levelled at Protestantism in general. The continuing effect of Jesuit propaganda was to be seen in the endeavour of Hobbes’s Roman Catholic friend, White, to vindi¬ cate Cromwell’s replacement of the Stuarts. Du Moulin even contrived to associate the Regicide with Jesuit agents. He com¬ pleted his criticism of Jesuit influence in England by printing the alleged papers of the Ligueur emissary to the Papacy, the lawyer David, which contained the details of Guisard intentions to place themselves upon the throne of the Valois. The politics of the Religious Wars seemed directly relevant to the English scene. So fevered was the state of popular imagination that the Jesuits were blamed for starting the Great Fire of London in 1666. In reply to this allegation the Roman Catholic, Roger Palmer, the unwilling recipient of an earldom in virtue of his wife’s liaison with the king,4 published A Late Apology for the Catholics of

England in the following year. William Lloyd, the friend of Gilbert Burnet and Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, and later one 4 Castlemaine survived his trial in 1680 for complicity in the Meal Tub Plot and subsequently became James II’s envoy to the Curia.

126

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

of the investigators of the Popish Plot, responded with The Late Apology in Behalf of the Papists reprinted and answered in Behalf of the Royalists (1667). Castlemaine, the 'person of honour’ against whom Du Moulin’s second work was directed, returned to the attack with A Reply to the Answer of the Catholique Apology (1668). Like the debate occasioned by Philanax Anglicus, this second controversy was disputed in terms of the Wars of Religion. Lloyd defended the Huguenots and calum¬ niated the Ligue. It was absurd for the author of the Apology to preach Catholic loyalty to monarchy when the Ligueur priests had reproached Henri III with every conceivable form of treason and abuse. 'Rossaeus, one of your predecessors, calls him a thou¬ sand times worse than Mahomet.’5 Castlemaine denied Lloyd’s claim that all Roman Catholics had approved the massacre of St. Bartholomew. He branded Coligny as a traitor, who with Beza had been responsible for the murder of Francis of Guise. In oppo¬ sition to Lloyd’s use of the historian J. A. de Thou, he re-examined the course of the Religious Wars with reference to Davila, 'an author thought by Protestants so authentick and so impartial (sparing no body of what rank or faction soever) that among his¬ torians none hath a clearer fame’.6 In 1674 a collected edition of Castlemaine’s works defending English Roman Catholics was printed at Antwerp. Among these tracts was a rebuttal of an antiCatholic sermon by Edward Stillingfleet, the future critic of Locke and also of the non-jurors. At this time Stillingfleet was one of the foremost among the Anglican clergy in advancing the view that all Catholics were potential Jesuits and hence the sworn enemies of monarchy. In The Jesuits Loyalty (1677) he remarked the relationship of the regicides to the Ligue and examined the poli5 Lloyd, op. cit., p. 20. Lloyd saw the events of the Religious Wars through the eyes of J. A. de Thou. In this period de Thou’s Historia sui Temporis came to be widely known. Those parts of it which were translated into English did not, how¬ ever, accurately reflect the impartiality of the original. In a translation entitled The History of the Bloody Massacres of the Protestants in France in the Year of Our Lord 1572 (1674) the translator, Edward Stephens, mutilated the text of the portions he selected, and interspersed them with anti-Ligueur passages taken from later sections of the work. 6 A Reply to the Answer of the Catholique Apology, p. 153.

127

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

tical tenets of Boucher and of Reynolds (Rossaeus), 'a furious English papist who with his brethren contributed their utmost assistance to the rebellious leaguers in France’.7 No one made such a point of the relevance of the rebellion of the Ligue to English conflicts as did Henry Foulis, a fellow of Lincoln College. In his History of the Wicked Plots and Con¬

spiracies (1662) he had already associated Puritan opposition to the monarchy with Jesuit politics. His History of the Romish Treasons and Usurpations (1671) traced the origin of what was held to be the Jesuit doctrine of the sovereignty of the people over their ruler to medieval canonists and civilians. Foulis did not observe the appearance of this concept in the period of Huguenot opposition to the Valois, and regarded the theory of the Ligue as its first application to modern politics. All subsequent English dissensions had followed this unfortunate example, and, since English rebels had followed its theory and policies, it was natural that the pattern of English events should be similar to that of French events in the time of the Ligue. Foulis listed a series of elaborate parallels to illustrate this. The Westminster Assembly was like the Sorbonne when it supported the Guises: the Rump resembled the purged Parlement de Paris, Cromwell Mayenne, the Council of State the Seize.

They had their priests and Jesuits sacrilegiously to abuse the pulpit and people with their seditious lying and treasonable discourses, as our rebels had their blasphemous lecturers, ignorant and imputent tub-thumpers.8 The Long Parliament had copied the Ligueur Estates General in claiming the power to depose kings and to choose their successors. William Reynolds and Robert Parsons had been among the first of those Englishmen who had acquired the evil precepts of Ligueur sedition. The reprinting of Parsons’s works in later times betrayed the dependence of English rebels on Ligueur practice.

In short [Foulis concluded], our covenanters and rebels followed 7 Op. cit., p. 9. Note the reappearance of Watson’s royalist Catholic tract at this time under the same title. Cf. Chapter 2 above, p. 35, note 29. 8 Op. cit, p. 599.

128

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

and trod in the footsteps of the French League (a war which first occasioned the multiplicity of pamphlets and from which all later rebellions have taken their items, rules, principles and methods).9 Foulis’s work was reprinted in 1681 when it proved doubly useful to the court party in the Exclusion Crisis. It not only re¬ butted Whig accusations of Popery in high places, but it linked the Whigs themselves with Jesuit conspiracy and rebellion. The Whig opposition was to find powerful support in dissenting circles, but even before Shaftesbury had gathered his party to demand the exclusion of the Duke of York, it was a common royalist practice to recall the old parallel between Calvinist and Jesuit political attitudes. Some defenders of the Stuart prerogative followed Heylyn in stressing the Huguenot rather than the Ligueur inspiration of English sedition. Thus John Nalson’s

Countermine, or a Short hut True Discovery of the Dangerous Principles and Secret Practices of the Dissenting Party (1677) stressed the Genevan origin of the maxim rex singulis major, universis minor and its corollary salus populi suprema lex esto. There was much in the opposition of English and, more espe¬ cially, of Scottish dissent to support this view. A tract published in 1663, Mene Tekel or the Doumfal of Tyranny, by 'Laophilus Misotyrannus’ (Roger Jones), claimed the power of the people to depose an unjust ruler. It issued a warning against 'flattering and covetous priests and lawyers’, and described the court party in the Cavalier Parliament as 'a company of proud, lazy, drunken, debauched courtiers, filthy idle drones who will not work’. In England picturesque abuse of this kind was seldom translated into action, but in Scotland rebellion was never far from the surface. After the suppression of the Pentland Rising in 1666, there appeared one of the most notorious of contemporary pamphlets advocating armed resistance—Naphtali or the Wrestling of the

Church of Scotland for the Kingdom of Christ, by a minister of the kirk, James Stirling. The author reproduced the contract theory of the Vindiciae and asserted that the covenants of 1637, 1643, and 1648 were material illustrations of such theory. Royal9 ibid., P. 601. 6109

129

K

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

ist refutations of Naphtali were answered by Sir James Stewart, the conspirator who was sentenced to death in absentia and was subsequently appointed Lord Advocate of Scotland by William III. Stewart’s Jus Populi Vindicatum (1669) repeated on nearly every page the opinions of Althusius and the Vindiciae. He also quoted other continental civilians and approved of Rutherford’s criticism of Arnisaeus. He made use of the admissions of Barclay and Grotius on resistance, and criticized the monarchical views of Bodin. Even if it were allowed that Barclay, Grotius, and Arni¬ saeus had answered the Vindiciae, Rossaeus, and Boucher on some points, the former writers had considered only absolute monarchy. In England and Scotland, however, the king was a limited and not an absolute monarch. He was subordinate to the true representa¬ tives of the people. The Anglican assertion that Presbyterians were preaching the anti-monarchical doctrines which had originated during the French Religious Wars was at least partially true. The accusations which were made against English Roman Catholics were, how¬ ever, wildly inaccurate. But whether they attacked Papists or dis¬ senters, Anglican writers, like their opponents, still retained the habit of seeing their own religious troubles in terms of those in France a century before. This reliance upon the French past attained its climax in the era of the bogus Popish Plot. In the year in which its dramatic revelations changed the course of Eng¬ lish politics, the royalist Sir Philip Warwick was composing A

Discourse of Government, an appeal to moderation which, though it reflected the current use of French theory, presented a striking contrast to the polemical tone of political controversy. Warwick described his treatise in a sub-title as 'the weights and measures between sovereignty and liberty’. All Calvinists were not, in Warwick’s view, the enemies of monarchy, but there were some extremists, especially Brutus and Buchanan, who had drawn un¬ warranted inferences as to the sovereignty of subjects over kings from the 'gap in the hedge’ of Calvin’s theory of non-resistance. There were also some Papists who would place the people above the ruler. For Warwick, however, sovereignty lost all meaning

130

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

when it was used in this context. Sovereignty referred to the exer¬ cise of political power, not its sanction. At the same time it was necessary to examine carefully the opinion that sovereignty lay in the king alone: We all know that our government is a mixed monarchy, and yet by all foreigners (as Bodin, Grotius and others) is reputed an absolute monarchy: for limitations which transfer not the power unto any other divest it not of the title of monarchy, or of the Kings being an absolute, tho’ not an arbitrary monarch.10 Sovereignty had to be absolute to fulfil its purpose, for 'Co¬ ordination in government is like to prove the mother of a civil war’. Sovereignty must include the power to make and execute the law, and also to dispense from its penalties. Mixed monarchy was simply a convenient phrase to describe a situation where absolute sovereignty lay virtually in the king. He was 'like a man that is bound or is sleeping’, and accepted limitations such as the consent of the Estates to legislation. He did so freely because he recognized that government fulfils its ends only when it proceeds with the consent of the governed and a due respect for the value of individual liberty. This, said Warwick, was what Bodin had meant by the concept of 'harmonick justice’.11 The king held the sovereignty because he was the only effective representative of the people. If the Estates or 'inferior magistrates’ were the people’s primary representatives, then the state was a 'common weal’ and not a monarchy at all. The role of the nobility was to maintain a balance between king and people. The civil wars of the French Ligue had been caused by the nobility forgetting its proper func¬ tion, and destroying government through the prosecution of private feuds.12 THE EXCLUSION CRISIS

If partisan interpretation of the French Religious Wars was a feature of religious dispute before the Exclusion Crisis, it subse¬ quently became the principal theme of political debate. To all 10 Op. cit., 1694, p. 41. 12 Ibid., pp. 101,113.

11 Ibid., pp. 49,106.

131

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

the parallels which had been drawn between English politics and the Ligue, there was now added a similarity so striking that it became a central topic of political controversy. The Catholic Ligue had opposed Henri III on the recognition of the Protestant heir, Henri of Navarre, and advanced the claims of his Catholic uncle, the Cardinal of Bourbon. Now the Whigs opposed the succession of the Catholic Duke of York, and sponsored that of the Protestant Duke of Monmouth against the will of the king. Such a parallel was a strong weapon in the hands of Shaftesbury’s critics, but at the same time French history provided his party with precedents which seemed equally appropriate. If James did suc¬ ceed his brother and tolerated Protestantism, then he would be likely to meet the fate of Henri III and Henri IV. The Popish Plot had been an intended English version of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. The joyful acceptance by the Papacy of the news of the massacre and of the murder of Henri III was a warning to Englishmen of Papal intentions in present circumstances. In this way the French past became the sounding board of English poli¬ tics. While the court party anathematized Whig sedition as the counterpart of the Ligue, those who made political capital out of the fertile imagination of the ex-Jesuit informer, Titus Oates, bespattered the pages of their propaganda with references to French tyrannicide and persecution. When anti-Catholic hysteria was rising swiftly after the murder of the magistrate, Godfrey, to whom Oates had divulged his information, a new account of the horrors of the massacre of 1572 appeared in print—Gilbert Burnet’s Relation of the Barbarous and Bloody Massacre of about

an Hundred Thousand Protestants. New editions were issued of Davila’s History and the oration with which Sixtus V had wel¬ comed the death of Henri III. While polemical writing continued to debate the precedents of the Religious Wars, the succession of events sustained the rapid pulse of the crisis. Riots were organized by Shaftesbury’s Green Ribbon Club. The Cavalier Parliament was dissolved, as were its successors in 1679 and 1680. In answer to the trials of many English Catholics, a group of Catholic extremists imitated the

132

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

methods of their persecutors and sought to expose a bogus Presby¬ terian plot (the Meal Tub or Dangerfield hoax). This strengthened Shaftesbury's hand, but the king firmly refused to sanction the Exclusion Bill, and the Whig party disintegrated on the dissolu¬ tion of the Oxford Parliament in 1681. The court now assumed the offensive. Shaftesbury escaped an indictment for treason, but died in exile. The real or pretended association of the Whig leaders with the desperate endeavour of the Rye House plotters to seize or assassinate the king and his brother in 1683 enabled the complete triumph of the court party. As French events became increasingly popular as precedents for contemporary politics, so French political ideas returned to the forefront of English thinking. The tendency of the thought of the early Restoration period to revert to traditional forms ceased abruptly in the new crisis. English controversialists drew upon the extreme opinions advanced in the Civil War. Buchanan’s

De Jure Regni apud Scotos appeared in English in 1680 as A Dialogue concerning the Due Priviledge of Government, beside the first edition of Filmer’s Patriarcha, and a new edition of Filmer’s selections from Bodin’s Republique. All royalist writers did not adopt Filmer’s patriarchal opinions. Many stated an equally extreme view of monarchical sovereignty in the form that continental jurists had derived from Bodin.13 Yet Patriarcha was the chief target of exclusionist writers, who themselves employed French ideas to refute it. French influence, it is true, was little evident in the response of Shaftesbury’s secretary, John Locke, but it was clear in Patriarcha non Monarch a (1681) by Locke’s friend, James Tyrrell, and also in Algernon Sidney’s Discourses on

Government (1698, written c. 1682). TYRRELL, SIDNEY, AND LOCKE

For Tyrrell there could be no one universal basis for kingship. Customs as to the powers and succession of kings varied in 13 e.g. John Brydall, Jura Coronae, 1680. Besides many direct references to Bodin and his continental successors, Brydall also cited English civilians such as Cowell, Arthur Duck, and Richard Zouch.

133

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

different states. In France, for instance, the Ligue had preferred 'Charles X’ to Henri of Navarre. Filmer had based himself on Bodin, who was prejudiced in favour of absolutism. Bodin’s case for parental rights was the fruit of his knowledge of Roman and Jewish Law. It was not expressed in terms of the true Law of Nature, and it had no relevance to monarchical authority. It was true that sovereignty was in a sense indivisible, for this was the opinion of Grotius and Pufendorf. Yet these writers were not opposed to the idea of limited monarchy, and their reasoning implied that the 'real sovereignty’ was that of the people.14 After the Revolution Tyrrell showed an even greater fami¬ liarity with French thought in his Bibliotheca Politica (1692—4). In this work he cited the Franco-Gallia to refute the patriarchal basis of monarchy. He frequently referred to the thought of Barclay and Bodin, and examined the implications of Barclay’s sanctions for revolt. He regarded Bodin in a more favourable light than he had in Patriarcha non Monarcha. It was true that Bodin gave all power to an absolute king, but he permitted resis¬ tance to non-absolute rulers in the Empire, Denmark, Sweden, and Poland, and had he not been misinformed he might also have listed England among these states.15 When Tyrrell was writing this work Algernon Sidney had come to be regarded as the martyr of the Whig cause. Some of the pages from the manuscript of his Discourses featured in his trial for his association with the Rye House conspirators. It seemed appropriate to the supporters of Stuart absolutism that the theory of their opponents should be condemned beside one of its most prominent exponents, the last of the 'Venetians’. Sidney con14 Op. cit., pp. 131, 237. Samuel Pufendorf was another intermediary source of French theories of sovereignty and of contract propounded in the French Religious Wars. His Elementa Jurisprudence Universalis (1660) and his De Jure Naturae et Gentium (1672) assumed that societies were first founded by a social contract and government then established by a contract between the people and the ruler. Pufendorf thus combined elements of the thought of Grotius and Althusius. In both his principal works he also referred frequently to Hobbes. Tyrrell often cited Grotius and Pufendorf in Bibliotheca Politica and he acknowledged his debt to these writers in the preface to his translation of Richard Cumberland's De Legibus Naturae (1693). 13 Op. cit., pp. 692-4.

134

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tinued the links of his ancestors with French resistance theory. His attack on Patriarcha accused Filmer of imitating 'the vile, flattering discourse of Belloy’, who had promoted the personal right of Henri of Navarre to succeed to the French crown, and had held that nothing could debar the legitimate heir 'though furious, mad, a fool, vicious and in all respects abominably wicked’.16 Sidney had no wish to disclaim the debt he owed to the monarchomach doctrine that kings might be disciplined by the sovereign people. 'I am not ashamed in this’, he wrote, 'to concur with Buchanan, Calvin or Bellarmine, and without envy leave to Filmer and his associates the glory of maintaining the con¬ trary.’17 He thought that Hooker would have agreed with him, and declared that it was Filmer who had added the description of the authors of the Vindiciae as 'seedsmen of rebellion’ to the passage quoted in Patriarcha from the eighth book of the Laws

of Ecclesiastical Polity™ For Sidney French history disproved the assertions of Filmer. De Serres, Davila, de Thou, and other historians showed that the French had chosen their kings at will. In his description of the 1560 Estates General, Davila proved that this body possessed the sovereignty. The parlements also possessed more power in the making of law than did the king. The Guises had been unfor¬ tunate in failing to exclude Henri of Navarre, and the means by which Henri of Valois had thwarted their intentions were typical of the tyranny of the French monarchy in recent times.19 The recent acquisition of absolute power by the kings of France had reduced their subjects to slavery: Nothing in the world is more miserable than that people under the 16 Discourses (1771 edition), p. 375. 17 Ibid., p. 5. 18 Ibid., p. 89. See above, Chapter 2, p. 32, and Filmer, Works, p. 83. Some royalists believed that the text of the eighth book of the Laws had been tampered with by parliamentary theorists before its first publication in 1648. Hooker’s express agreement with the Vindiciae over the maxim rex singulis major, universis minor could not be understood, for in the meantime this principle had become the basis of English theories of resistance. Cf. Sir William Dugdale, A Short View of the Late Troubles in England, 1681, p. 39. 19 Discourses, p. 211.

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fatherly care of their triumphant monarch. The best of their condi¬ tion is like asses and mastiff-dogs, to work and fight, to be oppressed and killed by him.20 The very writers upon whose works French absolutism was based had expressed doubts as to its omnipotence. The reservations of Bodin, Barclay, and Grotius betrayed the inconsistency of their theory.21 Sidney’s most admired French author was Hotman, 'famous for his learning, judgement and integrity’.22 Indeed, Sidney’s thought was in many respects similar to that of Hotman. He, too, pretended to rely upon constitutional traditions. For Sidney the Saxons, Danes, and Normans had exercised in their assemblies a power over kings: for Hotman the Franks had done so.23 But in both, the a priori principle was not in accord with belief in the supremacy of custom. Sidney saw this more clearly than did the author of the Franco-Gallia. No human laws were fundamental: 'Magna Charta which comprehends our antient laws and all the subsequent statutes, was not sent from heaven, but made according to the will of man.’ It followed that the sovereign legislature might alter laws which new circumstances rendered inconvenient: As we may without vanity say, that we know a little more than they [our ancestors] did, if we find ourselves prejudiced by any law that they made, we may repeal it.24 The third and most celebrated of exclusionist replies to Patri¬

arch a was that of John Locke. It has been shown convincingly that the Two Treatises of Government was not the product of the Revolution, but a refutation of Filmer’s works written, probably at Shaftesbury’s demand, during the Exclusion Crisis.25 From the lists kept by Locke of his reading it is known that one of the works which he had before him in 1681, when, as it seems likely, 20 Discourses, p. 460. Cf. above, Chapter 5, p. 86, note 15. 21 IbkL.pp. 190,229,374. 22 Ibid., p. 253. 23 Ibid., p.466. 24 Ibid., pp. 501,408. 25 The dating of the Two Treatises and the ensuing information of the works consulted by Locke is based on Mr. Laslett’s 'The English Revolution and Locke’s Two Treatises’, in Cambridge Historical Journal, vol. xii, No. 1.

136

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he was putting the finishing touches to the Second Treatise, was the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. But, unlike Sidney, Locke never referred directly to this or any other French justification of resis¬ tance. Nor did he illustrate the fallacies of Filmer’s theory from French history, as did Tyrrell and Sidney. Yet Locke incorporated French ideas which had permeated English thought through the writings of the intermediaries, especially of Grotius and Pufendorf. Locke had read Edward Gee’s Divine Right and Originall of

the Civill Magistrate, and in 1679 he was instructed by Shaftes¬ bury to consult Lawson’s works. In terms of sovereignty his compromise solution resembled the English variants of the con¬ tinental theory of double sovereignty devised by Gee, Lawson, and Baxter.'0 But if Locke had little direct concern with the French monarchomachs, he was certainly preoccupied with French absolutist theory. Locke’s reading lists contained several mentions of Bodin and Barclay. The concluding paragraphs of the Second Treatise were an exhaustive examination of Barclay’s concessions to the theory of resistance, and twice in the First

Treatise Locke noticed that Blackwood and Barclay, upon whom Filmer pretended to rely, advanced views of monarchical autho¬ rity far more credible than those of Patriarchal Locke called Barclay 'that great assertor of the power and sacredness of kings’, 'that great advocate of monarchical powers’, and 'the great cham¬ pion of absolute monarchy’. One of the passages to which he referred was that cited by Tyrrell and Sidney, and before them by English theorists of resistance in the Civil War, Regicide, and Interregnum. The same passage, either directly from Barclay, or indirectly from Barclay through Grotius, was to be cited in the period of the Revolution. It has been noted also that the conces¬ sions made by Bodin were put to similar use. It would seem, in¬ deed, that the opponents of absolute monarchy regarded French absolutist writers as the only coherent exponents of the theory, or as the models for English royalists. Hence they went to such pains to turn these French arguments to their own advantage. 26 This is discussed in more detail below, Chapter 9, p- 166. 27 Second Treatise, secs. 232-9; First Treatise, secs. 4, 67.

137

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Beside these famous expositions of Whig theory, a host of lesser works in the Exclusion Crisis betrayed the reliance of the opposi¬ tion on the French past. Among the flood of petitions for exclu¬ sion and the recall of parliament was one entitled The Humble Remonstrance and Petition of English Protestants against English and Irish Papists.2* It called upon the king to 'remember the massacre of Paris in which so many thousands fell, and with them that brave Admiral Coligni’. It recalled how Henri III and Henri IV had been slain by Catholic fanatics for tolerating Pro¬ testantism, and suggested that the Duke of York should therefore be excluded in his own interests as well as in those of the nation. Another petition asked its readers to consider what would occur 'if papists or fanaticks should get a King in their hand as the Duke of Guise once dealt with the French King’.29 William Cavendish addressed a pamphlet to the king at the time of the Oxford Parlia¬ ment in which he described the similar circumstances of the Blois Estates General of 15 88.30 At the same time there were some of Shaftesbury’s pamphleteers who perceived that the use of Ligueur precedent was little credit to their cause. Thomas Hunt, in his Great and Weighty Considerations relating to the Duke of York (1680), denied that the attempted exclusion of Henri of Navarre was relevant to the Whig case. The Ligueurs were Papists, and as such they were the enemies of all true religion and all sound politics. THE ROYALIST REPLY

In answer to the exclusionist use of the theory and events of the French Religious Wars, the writers of the court party refashioned the old royalist convention of associating their enemies with the French Calvinist and Jesuit-Ligueur doctrine of the sovereignty 28 Somers’ Tracts, vol. viii, pp. 238-43. 29 The Nations Address, ibid., pp. 381—5. The author of this tract also made use of the concessions of Barclay, Grotius, and Arnisaeus. 30 Reasons for His Majesty’s passing the Bill of Exclusion (1681), ibid., pp. 211—16. Cavendish, later Duke of Devonshire, was the associate of the leading Whig lords. He was more fortunate than Russell and Essex, who lost their lives after the discovery of the Rye House Plot, and survived to sign the invitation sent to William III at the Revolution.

138

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

of the community over the king. As in earlier periods of crisis they criticized the concept and the manner of its execution through the eyes of the Politiques. Thus Roger L’Estrange, the most pro¬ lific writer among court apologists, republished in 1682 his Holy Cheat, which had been directed, twenty years before, at Presby¬ terian politics in the Civil War and Interregnum. In a new pre¬ face he suggested that the events of 1641 were being re-enacted. These events were based on Huguenot and Ligueur practice in the Religious Wars. The legislative power was not in the Estates but in the king alone. If the Whigs sought to use Grotius to main¬ tain that king and Estates were co-ordinate, then they should read Bodin for a true account of England as an absolute monarchy.31 Perhaps the most convincing royalist criticism came from the pen of Robert Brady. Three of his attacks on exclusionist theory were re-issued together in 1684 as An Introduction to the Old English History. In the preface he distinguished 'two sorts of turbulent men’. One group claimed on logical grounds the deriva¬ tion of government from the sovereign people: the other used historical methods 'to hold forth to the people ancient rights and privileges ... to prescribe against the Government for many things they miscal fundamental rights’. Brady’s first tract attacked the second method, manifested in William Petit’s Rights of the Commons Asserted (1680). He brought to bear the clear histori¬ cal thinking of Sir Henry Spelman against the belief that a set constitution had descended unchanged from Saxon and even from pre-Saxon times. His second pamphlet refuted the anti-Norman thesis, first developed by the Levellers, that the rulers of England were foreign tyrants descended from the Norman conquerors. In this Brady used French historical writers, such as Andre Du Chesne, the interpreter of Norman antiquity. Brady’s third and most powerful piece, A True and Exact History of the Succession, was levelled at Hunt’s Brief History of the Succession (1681) and Samuel Johnson’s Julian the Apostate (1682). Brady asserted that the doctrine of popular sovereignty was implicit in medieval theory, and developed into the basis of active rebellion in the 31 Op. cit., p. 31.

139

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

Vindiciae and the Du Droit. From these works 'Julian the Apos¬ tate had most of his hints and much of the materials with which he built up his doctrine of resistance’.32 Brady examined the opi¬ nions of the Jesuits and observed that Parsons, who had borrowed the ideas of the Vindiciae, was now plagiarized by Hunt.33 Brady was anticipated in much of his analysis by his fellow antiquarian, Sir William Dugdale. Dugdale’s Short View of the LateTroubles in England (1681) related the English civil wars to their French predecessors. Like Foulis, he devoted much space to a comparison of the policies and actions of the Long Parliament with those of the Ligue. Dugdale relied upon Davila, and also upon de Thou, Matthieu, and d’Aubigne. So intricate were his parallels that he found it necessary to set the text of Guisard manifestoes beside their English counterparts. In this period John Dryden was quick to see the advantage of associating the promoters of the Exclusion Bill with the rebel¬ lions of the French Religious Wars. The preface to his The Medall or a Satyre against Sedition (1682) recommended the Whigs to read Davila to discover the enormity of their own conspiracies. There they would find 'the same pretences for reformation and loyalty and the same grounds of a rebellion’. Calvin, Buchanan, and their Catholic counterparts were the Whig models. 'Milton’s Defence of the English People is from Buchanan, de Jure Regni apud Scotos ... your first covenant and new association from the Holy League of the French Guisards.’ The prologue to Dryden’s play, The Duke of Guise (1683), began: Our play’s a parallel: the Holy League Begot our cov’nant: Guisards got the Whigg: What e’er our hot-brain’d sheriffs did advance. Was, like our fashions, first produced in France. This did not go unanswered by Whig pamphleteers. 'See now’, replied Flunt, 'the impudent knavery as well as folly of this syco32 Op. cit., p. 346. 33 Edward Pelling’s The Apostate Protestant (1682) expressed the same opinions. It proved Hunt’s plagiarism of the 1681 edition of Parsons’s Conference and observed that the Whigs were equally indebted to the ideas of the Vindiciae and the Du Droit.

140

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

phant, to falsify a history so common that it is read by all gentle¬ men that pretend to reading.’34 While endeavouring to maintain his previous contention that no valid parallel existed, Hunt so far forgot himself as to defend the legality of the Ligueur Estates General. Dryden had misread Davila, who said that not merely the Third Estate, but all three estates jointly had voted the exclu¬ sion of Henri of Navarre. Moreover, was Dryden forgetting his courtier’s art when he suggested comparison between the King of England and the contemptible Henri of Valois? No one could conceal the true character of Henri III and his part in French history. 'The histories of this Henry III are so common that scarce any one escapes the reading of them.’35 Dryden issued his Vindication of the Parallel in the same year. His play, he said, had first been undertaken in 1660, when its aim was 'the exploding of the villainies of the late rebellion’. He had perceived that English attempts to exclude the lawful king or heir, factious endeavours to gain command of the militia, and the use of city riots for seditious ends, were elements common to both French and English simations. He now saw a new situation which bore an equally close resemblance to the Ligue. He had compared events and the doctrines of sedition which inspired them. He had never implied any parallel between the king and Henri III, though it might well be that the Duke of Guise had his counter¬ part in Monmouth or the late Earl of Shaftesbury. To leave the matter in no doubt, Dryden published in 1684 a translation of Maimbourg’s History of the League, adding a lengthy Postscript, in which he inserted French precedents for the Rye House Plot, and elaborated such striking similarities as the Guisard organiza¬ tion of the Paris riots of May 1588 and Shaftesbury’s control of the London mobs during the Popish Plot. Though separated in time and space, the two societies had a common political history because they had both experienced the application of the same seditious doctrines. There was nothing but the age that makes the difference, otherwise the old man 34 Some Reflections upon the Pretended Parallel in the Play called the Duke of Guise, 1683, p. 7. 35Ibid.,p. 10.

141

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

of an hundred and the babe in swaddling-clouts, that is to say 1584 and 1684, have but a century and a sea betwixt them to be the same.36 Another example of the English belief in the resurrection of the French past was the publication in 1684 of a letter written by Pierre Charron renouncing his allegiance to the Ligue, under the title The Right of Kings and Duty of Subjects. Few French works had so lasting a vogue in seventeenth-century England as Charron’s De la Sagesse.31 Like Bodin, many of whose political opi¬ nions he reproduced, Charron had joined the Ligue in the period of its ascendancy. As he said in the letter in which he made his apology, it had been the murder of Guise and the dissolution of the Blois Estates General which had persuaded him temporarily to desert the cause of the legitimate monarchy. His penitence could not have been more abject: Although all what the League says were true, which it is not, and yet worse than all that, notwithstanding it is never lawful for any cause whatsoever to use force and violence against ones sovereign. It is rather a wicked, cursed and pernicious thing.38 The anonymous translator was careful to explain the relevance of these sentiments to English politics. Henri III had refused to persecute the Protestants, as Charles II had been unwilling to sanction the unjust persecution of English Catholics. The Guises, 'under the fair pretence of religion screw’d themselves into the favour of the common people (who are usually deceived by such pretences), and raised a strong party against the King by the name of the Holy League’. All this, said the translator, 'agrees so well with the late troubles in this Kingdom of England, I have taken the boldness to present it to the publick view’. To drive home the lesson he added a long extract from the very chapter on sove¬ reignty in De la Sagesse (L. 1, c. xlix) which had been based on Bodin’s Republique. The Tory use of French history and criticism of French resis36 In Dryden’s dedication of his translation to Charles II. 37 See above, Chapter 2, p. 23 .

142

38 Op. cit., p. 16.

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

tance theory contributed little of positive value to royalist ideas. It was left for Sir George MacKenzie to fuse together the two segments of absolutist thought which in Filmer appeared at times to be disparate and unrelated. His Jus Regium (1684) associated the theory of hereditary monarchy by Divine Right with Roman Law principles of sovereignty, and did so by a re-examination of the doctrines of the Politiques and of Arnisaeus. As Charles II’s Advocate General in Scotland, 'Bluidy MacKenzie’ earned the hatred of the Covenanters. He was an expert civilian, and mar¬ shalled Roman Law texts and French authors with the same remorseless precision with which he prosecuted the king’s ene¬ mies. He admitted in the dedication of Jus Regium to the Univer¬ sity of Oxford that in many points he had been anticipated by Barclay and Blackwood in their refutation of the monarchomachs. The arguments which Blackwood had launched against Bucha¬ nan’s interpretation of Natural Law were applied by MacKenzie to both Buchanan and Sidney, who had assumed that kings 'usurpt over us a power inconsistent with our natural liberty’.39 From Barclay MacKenzie derived the view that the social instinct was the natural bond of the family, and that in parental authority the family displayed the natural prototype of political power. Monarchy originated from the right of patriarchal power, and Bodin, wrote MacKenzie, had proved that the devolution of this power by primogeniture was a universal principle of nature. This was what was meant by jurists who said that the sovereign, though above positive law, was limited by Natural Law.40 MacKenzie claimed that Bodin’s opinions were not new, but in the main stream of Roman Law tradition. Moreover, MacKenzie did not, like Filmer, leave himself open to misinterpretation by implying that the patriarchal theory was empirically verifiable. Like the contractarian ideas of the opponents of absolutism, MacKenzie’s 39 Op. cit., p. 49. Blackwood had accused Buchanan of confusing Jus Naturale with Jus Gentium. The former prompted an anarchist liberty, an aversion to law and authority. It applied to all living creatures. The latter applied exclusively to man, and explained the growth of political authority and the introduction of positive laws. Pro Re gibus Apologia, p. 21. 40 Jus Regium, pp. 23, 24, 149-51.

143

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

view of the natural basis of monarchy was primarily a logical argument as to the grounds of political obligation. MacKenzie referred to Arnisaeus in his opinion that the patri¬ archal theory was perfectly consistent with the idea of sovereignty. I lay it down as an uncontroverted principle [he wrote], that every thing must be constructed to be perfect in its own nature, and no mix¬ ture is presumed to be in any thing.41 Sovereignty was in essence indivisible. Monarchy was the only natural and perfect form of state, for there one man alone pos¬ sessed the sovereignty. Mixed monarchy was a confusion in terms, a logical impossibility. The king held a supreme power through his birthright by the same rational principles which defined that power as indivisible and inalienable. MacKenzie was anxious to explain that Grotius had been misunderstood in this context, although he was forced to admit that Grotius had been incon¬ sistent when he declared the king’s power supreme, and yet allowed resistance.42 Since England and Scotland were mon¬ archies, the 'architectonick’ (legislative) power lay in the king, and the Estates merely gave a formal consent to his commands.43 Jus Regium was the most powerfully argued of all seventeenthcentury expositions of the theory of hereditary absolute mon¬ archy. Its debt to French absolutism and to the intermediaries was clear and unequivocal. Its author was equally aware of the politi¬ cal background of the thought of the Religious Wars, and its relevance to his own age.44 Jus Regium appeared as a royalist tailpiece to the Rye House Plot. The same conspiracy provoked the University to which Mac¬ Kenzie dedicated his work to strike another blow in the cause of Stuart absolutism. On the day that Russell was executed the 41 Jus Regium, pp. 37, 38. Cf. Arnisaeus, De Jure Majestatis, 1. i, c. i, p. 11: 'Proprie enim et per se majestas est summa in republica potestas, quae omnes reliquos legibus suis comprehendit, ipsa nullius nisi Dei et naturae lege tenetur.’ 42 Ibid., pp. 109-12. 43 Ibid., p. 67. 44 Cf. ibid., pp. 118, 140, discussing the origin of the Ligue and asserting that the Religious Wars were not fought to decide religious issues so much as personal rivalries between political factions.

144

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

University of Oxford issued a condemnation of 'certain pernicious books and damnable doctrines destructive to the sacred person of Princes, their state and government and all human society’. It was an indication of the persistent influence of monarchomach theory that the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos and the De Jure Regni apud Scotos should be listed beside the many English and Scottish works which in the preceding forty years had reproduced French doctrines of resistance. Even if the dicta of MacKenzie and the fiat of Oxford Univer¬ sity had been able to banish the anti-monarchical ideas of the French Religious Wars from English minds, they would have re¬ turned from a new source. In France the beginning of Louis XIV’s persecution of the Huguenots had revived long-forgotten political heresies. The Jansenist Antoine Arnauld and the Huguenot Pierre Jurieu engaged in controversy over the merits of the Popish Plot, and, with an eye to the unhappy position of their own religious followings, had interpreted English events in the light of the French Religious Wars. Jurieu’s Politique du clerge de France was translated and published for presentation to Charles II at the Oxford Parliament. Jurieu declared it a fundamental law that the King of England be a Protestant, and upheld the wildest claims advanced by the managers of the Plot. Arnauld responded with his Apologie pour les Catholiques (also 1681), using the opinions of Barclay to condemn both the political theories and actions of the Huguenots in the Religious Wars and those of Jurieu and the Whigs in present circumstances. Arnauld asserted that the Vindi¬ ciae had inspired all English and Scottish conspiracies and rebel¬ lions, including the Whig invention of the Popish Plot. In a series of further replies Jurieu vindicated Huguenot loyalty in the Religious Wars, denied that all the tenets of the Vindiciae were sanctioned by his church, and described the Popish Plot as a Catholic conspiracy to re-enact the massacre of St. Bartholomew on English soil.45 45 views were expressed by Jurieu in Suite de la Politique du clerge de France (1682); The Last Efforts of Afflicted Innocence, being an Account of the Persecution of the Protestants of France (1682. Dedicated by the translator, Walter Vaughan, to Lord Russell); Histoire du Calvinisme et celle du Papisme mises en

6109

145

L

RESTORATION AND EXCLUSION CRISIS

In this way the Exclusion Crisis anticipated that later associa¬ tion between persecuted Huguenots and exiled Whigs which ensured the further application of the thought of the French Religious Wars to English politics in the era of the Revolution. parallele (1683, against an anti-Calvinist work by Maimbourg, the author used against the Whigs by Dryden); L’Esprit de Monsieur Arnaud (1684). Arnauld was the son of the anti-Jesuit writer whose works were translated into English in late Elizabethan times.

146

CHAPTER 8

‘Revolution and oAftermath In many ways the Glorious Revolution—supposedly the most English of all English political crises—represented the culmina¬ tion of the influence of the French Religious Wars in English politics. The revival of Huguenot resistance theory after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes injected into the veins of English thought a fresh draught of ideas distilled from the era of the Wars of Religion. But the very success of the Revolution, to which French thought contributed so effectively, severed the Eng¬ lish link with the French past. Though the memories of the theory and events of the age of Catherine de’ Medici lingered on in later English thought, they became too remote in time, and too obscured by the aggressive reality of the new France, to sharpen the edge of English controversy as they had done in the preceding half-century. The absolutism of the Politiques seemed to be realized in the person of Louis XIV. Yet, for all its auspicious beginnings, the reign of his English cousin ended in a crisis which denied the theory of absolute monarchy any future English field of application. James II is reproached by the more generous Whig historians for taking his politics too seriously. The truth is that the last Stuart king believed in the claims asserted on behalf of the prerogative by the English adaptors of Barclay and Bodin. The exercise of the suspending and dispensing powers, the erection of a new Court of High Commission, the attempts to dragoon the universities and the bishops, these were the deeds of a king resolved to make the theory of absolute monarchy something more than a theory. The prevailing tone of royalist writing, especially Nathaniel Johnston’s Excellency of Monarchical Government (1686), 147

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

reflected the trend of Stuart policy. Like MacKenzie, and like Barclay and Le Roy a century before, Johnston reinterpreted the Aristotelian view of the family as the microcosm of the state, and saw parental and kingly authority in identical terms. As Bodin had shown, where there was no certain repository for sovereignty, there was mere anarchy. Johnston described a commonwealth as Bodin had described it—an association of families united in one body politic by a sovereign power. The only perfect form of government was that where the king held the indivisible sove¬ reignty in his person. The theory of the Politiques vindicated the royal exercise of the dispensing power: This prerogative of Kings Bodin avouches among the rights of sovereignty, to pardon the persons, the forfeiture of their goods and to restore the attainted honours of those condemned by righteous or unrighteous judgement.1 Legislative sovereignty belonged to the king alone, but the king might not alter the laws of succession, for these were established by the Law of Nature. Johnston quoted the opinion of Hotman, in his monarchist character, to support this.2 There was no truth in the view that the people had voluntarily endowed kings with power. Johnston was prepared to pervert the texts of the civilians which seemed to controvert this view: The Emperors Julius and Augustus, having as Conquerors rather than by any other right, got possession of the sovereign power, after a quieter settlement obtained the Lex Regia to be established, of which Justinian saith that which pleaseth the prince has the vigour of law.3 THE RE-ENTRY OF FRENCH THEORY

Murmurs of the approaching crisis were already to be heard in the controversies aroused by the persecution of the Huguenots. It has already been noticed that this occasioned French debate on the merits of the Exclusion Bill, and that this debate recalled 1 Excellency of Monarchical Government, p. 139. 3 Ibid., pp. 147,148.

148

2 Ibid., p. 447.

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

memories of the Religious Wars. Jansenist writers such as Arnauld and Nicole had asserted that both Jesuit and Calvinist politics were contrary to Christian teaching.4 Various historical works by Jesuit and monarchist Catholic writers, such as Maimbourg, Soulier, Le Grand, and Varillas, attacked Huguenot poli¬ tics and illustrated from the Religious Wars that the doctrines of resistance were implicit in Calvinism, whatever disclaimers its members offered. The great Bossuet himself entered the lists with his Histoire des variations des £glises protestantes. A work which made many Englishmen familiar with the details of French persecution, and indignantly denied the imputations of these writers, was Jean Claude’s Les Plaintes des Protestans cruel-

lement opprimez dans le royaume de France (1686). True to his policy of toleration, James II welcomed the flood of refugees who entered England, but his motives were questioned when he acceded to French requests to order the burning of Claude’s book. John Evelyn recorded in his diary that it was this act that finally set him against the Stuarts. There were many who felt as he did, and many who had personal ties with the refugees. Evelyn was the friend of Claude, of the Marquis de Ruvigny, and of Pierre Allix, the adversary of Bossuet and the last moderator of the Huguenot synod. He also knew Justel, whose Paris salon Locke had attended. After his flight to England in 1681, Justel became the royal librarian to the last two Stuarts, and an important Huguenot contact at the court.5 It was not within Huguenot circles in England, but rather within similar groups in Holland, that an active opposition to the Stuart monarchy developed which influenced the course of the Revolution. There exiled Whigs co-operated with Jurieu and his associates in the criticism of both Smart and Bourbon absolutism. Hence the concepts and events of the Religious Wars became the 4 In addition to the Jansenist anti-Calvinist works mentioned in the preceding chapter an earlier anti-Jesuit book by Arnauld and Nicole was much read in England in the translation of John Evelyn —The Pernicious Consequences of the New Heresie of the Jesuites against the King and the State (1666). 5 Cf. C.-E. Engel, 'John Evelyn et le Protestantisme frangais’, in Bulletin de la Societe de I’Histoire du Protestantisme frangais, vol. lxxxiii (1934), pp. 29-48.

149

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

focus of English as well as French controversy. The most energetic of Whig propagandists in the United Provinces was Gilbert Burnet, who recorded in his History of his Own Times the dis¬ cussions he conducted with James’s daughter, the Princess of Orange, about the theories of Jurieu. Burnet’s particular opponent was Antoine Varillas, the royalist historian of the Religious Wars with whom he exchanged a series of polemical works.6 It was not easy for the Huguenots to forget a century of adula¬ tion for French absolutism, and to revert to the ideas of the

Vindiciae and the Franco-Gallia. Many of them continued to denounce all doctrines of resistance, although this did not prevent them from advocating liberty of conscience. Others moved gradu¬ ally from an attitude of suspicion towards their anti-monarchical ancestors to an acceptance of their most violent tirades against absolutism. It was often their interest in English politics which effected this transformation. Thus the theory upon which the Whigs based the overthrow of the Stuarts was the product of both English and Huguenot writers. The best known of Huguenot contributions were Michel Le Vassor’s Les Soupirs de la France

esclave qui aspire apres la Liberte (1689), Antoine Coulan’s La Defense des Refugiez (1691), La Defense du Parlement d’An gleterre dans la cause de Jacques II (1692) by La Combe de Vrigny (the grandson of Du Plessis-Mornay), Jacques Abbadie’s La De¬ fense de la nation britannique (1693), and several tracts by Jurieu, notably his Lettres pastorales (1688—9)-7 All these writers discussed and expounded the early Huguenot polemics against the Valois monarchy, and applied their theory, in its original or a modified form, to English politics. They de¬ clared the right of the English people to depose their king under the maxim rex singulis major, universis minor. They held that James II had broken his covenant with his people as Charles IX 6 Own Times, 1756, vol. ii, p. 390. Among the more important works in the controversy with Varillas were Reflections on Mr. Varillas’s History of the Revolu¬ tions that have happened in Europe in Matters of Religion, 1686, and A Continua¬ tion of Reflections . . . , 1687. 7 An account of Huguenot thought in this period is given by G. H. Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion, 1947. Les Soupirs is some¬ times attributed to Jurieu.

150

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

had done in 1572. They supported the actions of the Convention Parliament with the theory of the inferior magistrates. Some adopted the pseudo-historical methods of the Franco-Gallia. Les

Soupirs was based directly on Hotman’s work and plagiarized several passages from it. Others followed the logical method of the Vindiciae. In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth of his

Pastoral Letters Jurieu applied to the Revolution texts from the Vindiciae which he had earlier disavowed. Jurieu became a central figure in the Whig theory of the Revolution. His use of Grotius and of the concessions of Barclay, and his view of the contract of government with the fundamental laws it incorporated, were typical of Whig political thought. In addition to the English version of his Pastoral Letters, his Apolo-

gie pour leurs serenissimes majestes britanniques was republished in English with other Revolution pamphlets in State Tracts (1705). If Jurieu became typical of that section of Whig thought which was modelled directly on the Vindiciae, the ideas of Abbadie were a French example of Locke’s modification of monarchomach theory. Like Locke, Abbadie said little of the unity of the sovereign community, which enabled it to covenant with the ruler and to act against him should the contract of government be voided. Instead of the juristic fictions of Languet he developed a theory of natural rights. He listed these rights as property, liberty, parental authority, life, honour, and conscience.8 He criticized the patriarchal theory, and viewed the origin of political society as a voluntary act of association by its members. Political autho¬ rity was a necessary evil, but its basis was that of the consent of the governed. The members of a commonwealth could never cede the individual rights for the preservation of which government existed. Abbadie and Locke expressed similar views. So did Jurieu and Burnet. These were but four of the most celebrated names of the Huguenots and Whigs who were in the United Provinces before the Revolution. Their common labours produced the 8 Defense, p. 114. Abbadie fled to Berlin in the Dispersion but was often in Holland to arrange for the publication of his works. In 1688 he accompanied Schomberg to Holland and thence to England at the Revolution.

151

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

theories upon which future generations believed the Revolution¬ ary settlement to have been grounded. While French opponents of absolutism provided their English counterparts with a fresh interpretation of the resistance theory of the French Religious Wars, French monarchical writers em¬ ployed Politique theory to defend the Stuart monarchy. Denis de Sainte-Marthe dedicated his Entretiens touchant I’entreprise du

Prince d’Orange sur VAngleterre (1689) to James II. He referred to Barclay’s denunciation of the Huguenot monarchomachs and identified contemporary English sedition with their doctrines. He associated the makers of the Revolution with every possible Huguenot precedent for conspiracy and rebellion, and defended Varillas’s interpretation of the Religious Wars against Burnet and Jurieu. Another French Catholic writer, Paulian, made the same points in his Critique des Lettres pastorales de Mr. Jurieu (1689). He also drew upon earlier English royalist theory, citing James I, Heylyn, and Hammond. Support for the Stuart monarchy was also afforded by those Huguenot exiles who remained loyal to the traditions of French absolutism. Their acceptance of the principles of monarchical sovereignty was fully in accord with their Politique opinions as to freedom of religious conscience. Their arguments for toleration, particularly those of Aubert de Verse,9 were similar to those of Locke, whose politics they viewed with abhorrence. Their scepti¬ cism of the dogmas of revealed religion sometimes led them to incur the stigma of Deism. Pierre Bayle exceeded them all in this respect. His questioning mind and his hatred of superstition led many of the later philosophes to regard him as the father of the Enlightenment. Bayle advanced the most powerful of all the pleas that supported the rights of the Stuarts. His Avis important

aux Refugiez (1690) condemned Whig theory and excited many responses from Jurieu, Abbadie, and their fellows. He perceived that certain English royalist authors had borrowed the theory of the Politiques upon which he himself depended. He made parti9 Traite de la Liberte de Conscience, ou de I’autorite des souverains sur la reli¬ gion des peuples, 1687.

152

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

cular use of the writings of David Owen against the monarchomachs. The deposition of James II gave Bayle the opportunity to renew the parallel between the Whigs and the Ligue. Both Abbadie and Jurieu indignantly denied that the Ligue offered any precedent for the activities of their English friends. Bayle could see no distinction between the ideas of Jurieu and Burnet and those of the Vindiciae. The claim that the whole people were superior to the king was no more than a fiction. The only real alternatives were monarchical sovereignty or anarchy. The doc¬ trine of the inferior magistrates was no better based. Bayle quietly annihilated this monarchomach fundamental with the question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodesP10 Jurieu had resuscitated from the tomb of Buchanan 'cette pretendue souverainete du peuple . . . cette chimere favorite, le plus monstrueux et en meme temps le plus pernicieux dogme dont on puisse infatuer le monde’.11 WHIG THEORISTS OF THE REVOLUTION

The English supporters of the Revolution, no less than their French associates in Holland, deserved many of Bayle’s gibes at their dependence upon the theory and practice of rebellion in the Religious Wars. The 1648 English edition of the Vindiciae was republished in 1689- Shaftesbury’s former pamphleteer, Thomas Hunt, made use of it in his attack on the principles of indefeasible Divine Right still maintained by the non-jurors: 'We ought (saith the learned Junius Brutus) to consider that all Princes are born men.’12 He proceeded to examine the role of the Estates General in French history and to expound the voluntary and contractual basis of government set forth by Languet and Mornay. A Memorial from the English Protestants (1689) compared the relation of Henri IV to the Ligue with that of William and Mary to the Jacobites. The author of Pour Questions Debated (1689) applied Brutus’s description of a tyrant to the actions of James II. 10 Avis, p.93. 11 Ibid., p. 97. 12 Political Aphorisms, in State Tracts, 1705, vol. i, p. 395. This was directed against The Case of Resistance of Supreme Powers by William Sherlock, soon to become a powerful critic of the principles he there advocated.

153

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

The elder Thomas Long of Exeter, once a staunch supporter of the Stuarts in the Civil War, recalled the massacre of St. Bartho¬ lomew, and argued that the support which England had afforded the Huguenots was evidence of a traditional English belief in their political principles. In various tracts he referred to Bilson’s sym¬ pathy for the Huguenot cause, and he made a close examination of the reasons for which Bodin, Barclay, Grotius, and Pufendorf allowed resistance in certain circumstances.13 These admissions, together with Bilson’s vindication of the Huguenots in his True Difference, became once more the stock arguments of those who opposed the Stuarts.14 One of the most active Whig propagandists in the period of the Revolution was Evelyn’s friend, Pierre Allix. He was more fully represented in the State Tracts republished in collected form to support the new regime than was any other single author.15 In all his pamphlets Allix recalled the opinions of the monarchomachs that in France the sovereignty had reposed in the body of the commonwealth. All western kingdoms, he observed, possessed a similar constitution, except where the monarchy had usurped an absolute power. Davila had defined the power of the Estates General, and traced their brief resurrection in the Religious Wars. Bodin, who had championed absolute monarchy, had written 13 The Historian Unmask’d, 1689, pp. 34, 35, 51, 52; A Resolution of Certain Queries, 1689, pp. 22—26, 49, 50; A Full Answer to All the Popular Objections, 1689, pp. 9—17 (quoting in full Pufendorf’s comments on resistance, themselves a gloss on the celebrated passage in which Grotius had elaborated Barclay’s admis¬ sions). The younger Thomas Long was a non-juror. 14 e.g. That Resistance may be used in Case our Religion and Rights should be invaded, 1689, pp. 6, 7, referring to Bilson and Abbot’s view of Bodin (see above, Chapter 2, p. 34); Daniel Whitby, Considerations humbly offered for Taking the Oath of Allegiance, 1689, pp. 20, 43 (Grotius and Bodin); Samuel Masters, The Case of Allegiance in our Present Circumstances considered, in State Tracts, 1705, vol. i, pp. 332-3 (Bilson); Defoe, Vox Populi. Vox Dei, 1689, pp. 18, 34 (Bilson, Grotius); Allix, An Examination of the Scruples . . . (1689), in State Tracts, 1705, vol. i, p. 310 (Bilson). Locke also referred to Bilson, Second Treatise, sec. 239. Many of the above writers viewed Grotius’s general political views as fully in accord with the Whig theory of government. 15 An Examination of the Scruples of those who refuse to take the Oath of Allegiance: A Letter from a French Lawyer to an English Gentleman upon the Present Revolution: Reflections upon the Opinions of some Moderate Divines concerning the Nature of Government in General and that of England in Par¬ ticular.

154

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

either in ignorance or in flattery. France, like England, was pro¬ perly a limited monarchy. The ultimate sovereignty, as Grotius had shown, lay in the whole community. The king and Estates shared the legislative power. In this sense De Seyssel and Du Haillan had described the government of France as part mon¬ archy, part aristocracy, and part democracy. Since the Estates General wielded the underlying sovereignty of the people, they might depose kings for misgovernment. The Jesuits and Ligueurs had rightly maintained the deposition of Henri III on these grounds, although they had erred in their belief that the Pope also possessed the power to depose. Despite the decay of the Estates General in France, 'there are still in being a great number of honest men who adhere to the antient maxims’. One such, Allix continued, was Claude Joly, who: confirms these maxims by the testimony of the Kings themselves, chancellors, ministers of state, lawyers and historians of France, that were always of opinion in that kingdom that the King holds his authority from the people, that the power of the King is limited, that the French monarchy is a monarchy allay’d and temper’d with Aristo¬ cracy and Democracy, that the Kings can do nothing without the States General, which are the very same things with our Parliaments.16 In the eyes of Allix that theory of resistance first developed in the Religious Wars, and revived by Joly during the Fronde, applied to the actions of the Convention Parliament in the Glorious Revolution. THE LAST APOLOGISTS FOR STUART ABSOLUTISM

English absolutist theory, and loyalty to Anglican doctrines of non-resistance, continued to present opposition to the revolutionary settlement. Abednego Seller in his History of Passive Obedience (1689) and his Continuation of the History (1690) directed the same Politique arguments against the government of William and Mary which Bayle employed. He, too, examined the tenets of the French monarchomachs and new English revolutionaries 16 State Tracts, 1705, vol. i, p. 505.

155

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

through the eyes of Barclay and Owen. He condemned both Huguenot and Ligueur rebellion as the model of English sedition. He passed severest censure on the Vindiciae, discussing Languet’s participation in its authorship, and recalling the controversy which it had provoked at both Oxford and Cambridge at the time when Owen composed his Anti-Paraeus. Bilson’s support of the Huguenots was regarded by Seller as a betrayal of true Anglican principles. Yet it was not as gross as that of the clergy who had sworn allegiance to the new monarchy. Among them Seller re¬ proached Stillingfleet for his apostasy, and declared his astonish¬ ment that one who had condemned Boucher and the Ligue should now support a regime which relied upon the same doctrine of the sovereignty of the people. Seller referred to the writings of Digges, Bramhall, Hammond, Heylyn, and Edward Symmons, authors who in the Civil War had drawn attention to the simi¬ larity of French and English rebellion. Bishop Morton, he ob¬ served, had understood the true extent of kingly power through his reading of Gregoire. The jurists had correctly stated the nature of monarchical sovereignty when they had declared the king to be legibus solutus. In all, Seller’s treatises represented the epitome of French influences in English thought. They built upon the French ideas manifest in earlier royalist works; they laid bare the reliance of opposing English theorists upon the monarchomachs; and they displayed an awareness of the similarity between the history of the French Religious Wars and that of English seven¬ teenth-century crises. It is an indication of the unchanging appearance of absolutist thought that the year 1703 should witness the first publication of The Right of Succession to the Kingdom of England, written in Latin just a century before by the Scottish feudist, Sir Thomas Craig. Then, as in 1703, it was intended to refute the opinions of Robert Parsons, whose Jesuit’s Memorial was published in 1690. Like Sir John Hayward, whose Answer to the First Part of a

Certain Conference concerning the Succession (1603)17 rendered the publication of The Right of Succession unnecessary, Craig 17 See above, Chapter 3, p. 36.

156

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

used Bodin and Belloy among his primary sources of reference. Craig’s translator summarized the use of Parsons’s works in all the dissensions of the previous century, and associated his ideas with their original application in the Religious Wars. He also referred in his preface to the works of Blackwood, Barclay, and Arnisaeus, and of their modern interpreter, Sir George MacKenzie. In the years that followed, the same opinions were expressed by Charles Leslie in his controversy with Bishop Hoadley, and in the upsurge of the old Anglican principles that accompanied the trial of Henry Sacheverell for preaching a sermon on the high church cause in 1709- Leslie set patriarchalism and Bodinian sovereignty against the Whig theory of resistance which sought to dispel the fictions with which moderate opinion had disguised the deposition of James II. The sovereign, he claimed, could not be limited by fundamental laws supposedly established in some original contract of government. Laws were the result of govern¬ ment, not government the consequence of laws. Bilson, Barclay, and Grotius had not really sanctioned any kind of resistance. Their meaning had been wilfully perverted by Whig theorists. It was absurd for Locke to distinguish between the absolute and arbitrary exercise of sovereignty. Since the sovereign’s will was the law, the distinction was meaningless. Barclay had written that the sovereign’s will was supra jus, extra jus et contra jus. Now Leslie paraphrased his observation with: The legislative power, wherever it be placed, in any sort of govern¬ ment, is and must be absolute and arbitrary, and it is impossible to be otherwise. The legislative is not bound by its own laws, but may repeal them at pleasure: and before repeal may dispense with them and leap over them, and act contrary to them.18 18 A View of the Times, No. 38, 1705, in Rehearsals, vol. i, 1708. On Bilson, Barclay, and Grotius see The Right of Monarchy Asserted, 1713, pp. 17, 31-33. On the reproduction of Filmer’s patriarchal views see The Best Answer [to Hoad¬ ley}, 1708.

157

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

SOME LATER ECHOES FROM THE RELIGIOUS WARS

The Revolution may have been the last significant occasion on which Englishmen read the politics of the French Religious Wars into their own circumstances, but just as Politique influence re¬ appeared in later absolutist thought, so also did the theory and example of French resistance haunt the political writing of the new regime. In 1693 a new translation of Henri Estienne’s Dis¬

cours Merveilleux was published. The first English version had been printed in 1575. Now it was entitled The History of the Life of Katherine de Medicis ... or the Exact Pattern of the present French King’s Policy. The supposed perfidy of Catherine’s treat¬ ment of Conde and Coligny was now held to be repeated in Louis XIV’s actions against William III and the Huguenots. Again, in 1698, a tract was issued discussing the merits of Huguenot resistance in the Religious Wars, Lex Talionis, or an

Enquiry into the Most Proper Ways to prevent the Persecution of the Protestants in France. It was the author’s purpose to protest against the English and Dutch neglect of Huguenot interests in the Treaty of Ryswick, which ended ten years of warfare against France. English political events continued to evoke memories of the Religious Wars. In 1700 the Chancellor, Lord Somers, was threatened with impeachment in the Commons for his failure to disclose details of the secret partition treaties preceding the war of the Spanish Succession. The Whig freeholders of Kent wTere moved to present a petition demanding that the Commons desist from the pursuit of factious interests and follow the popular desire for a firm opposition to French aggression. A supporting pamphlet, said to have been composed by Somers himself, curiously adapted former French constitutional practice to Eng¬ lish circumstances. The Commons, it was said, were obliged to obey the instructions of those who elected them, just as the depu¬ ties at the Estates General had been restricted to the matter in their cahiers. The opinions of Bodin delivered at the 1576 Estates

158

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

General were used to support this point.19 The dicta of Bodin were still, it seems, weighty enough to influence the course of English politics. Bodin was quoted in this same constitutional character in 1707 in the Scotch Echo of the English Legion.20 The Com¬ mons were said to be exceeding their mandate in the bill to effect the full union of England and Scotland. Bodin had shown that elected representatives must respect the people’s liberties and give effect to their will. The same pamphlet made reference to Sir James Stewart’s Jus Populi Vindicatum, and, like Stewart, cited the opinions of Althusius. Members of Parliament were but inferior magistrates holding their commission from the people. Althusius had declared that 'the parliament is but a servant to the people’. Bodin and Althusius were strange allies in a cause remote from that which had inspired the Republique and the

Politica Methodice Digesta. The eighteenth-century controversies between Whig church¬ men and the non-jurors, in which the opinions of Charles Leslie have already been noticed, involved reference to the history of the Religious Wars as well as to the political thought which accom¬ panied them. John Withers, a Whig clergyman, maintained that the English support of the Huguenots in the sixteenth century was proof that the Church of England sanctioned doctrines of resistance.21 A contrary view was expressed in An Account of the

Conduct of the Roman Catholic Clergy and Zealots of France (1710). The author asserted in his preface that reference to French history was a surer guide than the 'speculative reasoning’ of the Whigs. It was not for the clergy to meddle in purely political doctrines of resistance. When the Whig faction in the church did so, it set the church above the state, as Boucher and the Ligueurs had done with such disastrous consequences in France. The writer gave a long and detailed account of the Religious Wars to illus¬ trate this theme, citing the opinions of Bodin, and quoting at length from the Satyre Menippee. 19 Jura Populi Anglicani, 1701, pp. 51, 52. 20 In Somers’ Tracts, vol. xii, pp. 596—606. 21 The History of Resistance as Practised by the Church of England (1710), in Somers’ Tracts, vol. xii, pp. 249-67.

159

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH THE GOTHIC CONSTITUTION

These were but isolated instances of the reappearance of the French Religious Wars in the aftermath of the Revolution. No longer did they seem so vitally relevant to English politics. The French doctrines of resistance employed during the Revolution gradually became political orthodoxies, and their origin was no longer a central topic of debate. There was one respect, however, in which English political thought in the eighteenth century was still conscious of a debt to the monarchomachs. This was the legend of the Gothic constitution. Algernon Sidney was one of the first of Englishmen to express it: 'All the northern nations which upon the dissolution of the Roman Empire possessed the best provinces that had composed it, were under that form which is usually called the Gothic polity.’22 This theory of the 'Gothic polity’ was a distillation of monarchomach theory. It suggested that the community as a whole retained the 'real’ or ultimate sovereignty, that government (the exercise of personal’ sove¬ reignty) was prevented from abusing the purpose for which it was instituted by the balance of the constitution between king and Estates. The monarchomachs had found principles in common within the constitutions of France, Aragon, Poland, Scotland, and England. The king was subordinate to the interests of the people. He confirmed this in his coronation oath, and was liable to be deposed should he betray his trust. At the end of the seventeenth century it was possible to trace the overthrow of the constitutions supposedly based on these principles in many European states. In France the old constitution had gone down in the Religious Wars, in Bohemia during the Thirty Years War, in Denmark in 1661, in Sweden in 1682, while in England a similar monarchical revolution had been narrowly averted. When Sidney asserted that the Saxon institutions, upon which the English constitution was allegedly based, were similar to the Frankish institutions described by Hotman, he did not regard this as a coincidence. The French 22 Discourses, p. 139. A general survey of the legend is given by S. Kliger, The Goths in England, 1952.

160

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

constitution, the English constitution, and many others besides, were not the product of national tradition but of a common Gothic stock. Hotman was seen as the originator of this theory, and what he had termed Frankish was now called Gothic. Thus in his Jus Regium (1701) Somers described the spread of the Gothic races over Europe, and referred to Hotman’s views of the similarity of feudal institutions. Harley in his Faults on Both Sides (1710) remarked how this form of government with small alteration was introduced into most of the Kingdoms of Europe by the Gothic people: in some the king was elective, in others hereditary, but not always confined to the immediate succession by birth right.23 The foremost exponent of Gothicism was Viscount Moles worth, the friend of Locke and admirer of Sidney. Molesworth was abruptly withdrawn from his ambassador’s post in Denmark because of his expressed dislike of Danish absolutism. His

Account of Denmark (1694) closely resembled La Combe de Vrigny’s Voyage fait en Danemarc a la suite de Monsieur I’Envoye d’Angleterre (1706).24 He drew attention to the reactions of Sidney during his embassy to Denmark shortly before the mon¬ archical coup d’etat. It was Molesworth who in 1711 published the first English version of the Franco-Gallia. He remarked in the preface that the purpose of his translation was to make English¬ men aware of the nature of liberty. He defended Hotman against the criticism of Bayle, who, he said, had shown his liking for tyranny in his controversies with Jurieu. The 1711 edition con¬ tained only a portion of the full preface which Molesworth had designed for the work. This was published separately in 1713, and again in 1721 with the second edition of his English Franco-

Gallia. Few writers, wrote Molesworth, surpassed Hotman in his description of the subject’s rights and liberties and of the solid foundation of our constitution, which in truth is not ours 23 In Somers’ Tracts, vol. xii, p. 714. 24 The Gothic theory was suggested by other Huguenots of the Dispersion, e.g. Le Vassor, Traite de la maniere d’examiner les differens de religion, 1697, p. 500. 6109

161

M

REVOLUTION AND AFTERMATH

only, but that of almost all Europe besides; so wisely restor’d and establish’d (if not introduced) by the Goths and Franks, whose descendants we are. A little later he remarked: My notion of a Whig, I mean a real Whig (for the nominal are worse than any sort of man) is that he is one who is exactly for keep¬ ing up the strictures of the true old Gothick constitution, under the three estates of King (or Queen), Lords and Commons, the legislature being seated in all three together, the executive entrusted with the first, but accountable to the whole body of the people in case of maleadministration. The preface setting these words before the text of the Franco-

Gallia was again to appear in 1775 as The Principles of a Real Whig. The flavour of the Franco-Gallia was still to be tasted in the Whig theory of politics which dominated English thinking for at least a century after the Revolution. The manner in which English thought repaid its debt to France during the French Revolution cannot be examined here. But it would be wrong to assert that French revolutionary ideas were borrowed from Eng¬ lish sources without any awareness of their original derivation. Montesquieu may have thought that he was concerned with a peculiarly English tradition when he analysed Whig principles. Yet the men of 1789 had more respect for French originality. The first years of the French Revolution saw the republication of Du Haillan’s Histoire generale, Le Vassor’s Soupirs, and £tienne de la Boetie’s De la servitude volontaire:2 The first two of these works were influenced by the Franco-Gallia. The last manifested a love of liberty as great as that of Hotman himself. 25 Extracts from Du Haillan’s Histoire generale were published as Conditions sous lesquelles les Frangois se sont donne un roi\ Les Soupirs as Les V ceux d’un patriote. La Boetie’s De la servitude volontaire (or Contr’un) was first published as part of the Reveille-matin (1573) and then in Goulart’s Memoires de I’estat de France sous Charles IX (1577).

162

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion For a century and more the ideas born in the French Wars of Religion fertilized the ground of English politics. In the sixteenth century they entered English thinking through English participa¬ tion in a struggle which appeared contemporarily to have France for its battleground and the forces of Reformation and CounterReformation as its contending parties. French ideas remained dormant in English thought for the first four decades of the seven¬ teenth century, though their memory was preserved by the Oath of Allegiance controversy. Then, in the Civil War, their implica¬ tions were revealed to Englishmen, who at the same time began to discern a repetition of French events within their own imme¬ diate experience. This combination of factual precedents with revolutionary theories proving readily adaptable to English cir¬ cumstances did much to provoke English writers to formulate logical doctrines of general application. The finality of the Regi¬ cide shut off the constitutional myths of the past from the adora¬ tion of their worshippers. The Interregnum remained a period of perplexing doubt when past traditions seemed to stand accused at the bar of the present. The theorists of the age continued to search beyond the confines of English experience, and became aware of new continental interpreters of those French ideas which had helped to shape the thought of the Puritan Revolution. The Exclusion Crisis and the Revolution of 1688 saw fresh manifesta¬ tions of the tendency of political writers to use the idiom of the Religious Wars to elucidate their own predicament. The Whig Revolution marked the rout of those concepts of French absolut¬ ism which had influenced royalist thought, but it did not issue in the clear triumph of the ideas of the French monarchomachs. The new liberalism looked back to those theorists who, in the last

163

CONCLUSION

years of the Interregnum, had devised solutions of compromise between the logic of sovereignty and a respect for the liberties of the governed. In their writings it became familiar with the ideas of Grotius and the other thinkers who mediated between French and English thought. It is easy to exaggerate the differences between political ideas in France in 1579 and those in England in 1689- There were Englishmen who read the Whig edition of the Vindiciae contra

Tyrannos and believed in its principles as literally as had those Frenchmen who had accepted its ideas in the aftermath of the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Similarly, there were Englishmen in the eighteenth century who read the English version of the

Franco-Gallia as if it were a manifesto of Whig principles. In historical perspective the gulf between the theorists of the Reli¬ gious Wars and those of the Glorious Revolution is not so great as the passage of time might suggest. It is far less than that, say, between the nineteenth-century ideal of progress and the disillu¬ sionment of the twentieth century. But differences there were, and in them it is possible to see the new directions assumed by French ideas in the hands of their English interpreters. Take, for instance, the points of departure of Locke’s Two

Treatises of Government from the Vindiciae. The most striking contrast is that between the religious grounds for disobedience and resistance, advanced in the first two sections of the Vindiciae, and the scepticism of Locke towards the use of force in the main¬ tenance of religious truth. Yet the Protestant exhortation to obey God before man in the Vindiciae was not a fanatical appeal. It was expressed in the rational terms of contract theory. This rationality was even more apparent in the secular arguments of its second two sections. These owed little to the theology of the Reformation, for they were developed from medieval concepts of communal sovereignty stated by canonists and civilians. Another apparent contrast is that between Locke’s stress upon individual natural rights and Languet’s view of communal right. The Vindiciae denied individual man the right of political action. Society must act through its leaders, and resistance must always be

164

CONCLUSION

collective, never personal. The individualist mechanics of Locke’s social contract were alien to an organic view of society which accepted the corporate unity of the people as the natural result of human instinct, not the artificial product of human reason. The authors of the Vindiciae had no need to explain how the people acquired that unity which enabled them to enter into covenants with the ruler. In addition to their Aristotelian premisses, the juristic fictions of the universitas lay ready to hand. Even in this the relation of the Vindiciae to the Two Treatises is one of transi¬ tion, not of antithesis. Mid-way between the theory of Languet and of Locke lay the ideas of Althusius, Grotius, and Pufendorf. Their endeavour to retain the principles of Aristotle, and yet to complete the logic of the contract of government with that of the social contract, led to a curious dichotomy in their thought. There was even a remnant of this dualism in Locke, who would not describe the state of nature as an anti-social state. Locke was still sufficiently tied to the idea of the natural sociability of man to add perfunctory references to the Aristotelian Hooker to his Second Treatise. Althusius had rendered the popular sovereignty of the Vindi¬ ciae explicit by his adaptation of the definitions of Bodin and Gregoire. Locke was suspicious of the term sovereignty, just as Hooker had been. Yet the absolute sovereignty of the community over the ruler, or that of the king over his subjects, had become concepts which were as familiar in English politics as they had been in French. Locke could not ignore this. It has been shown that the clearest testimony to the influence of Politique theory in English absolutism was the unfailing regularity with which its critics took advantage of the admissions of Barclay, of Bodin, and of Grotius. Locke, it has been seen, followed this convention in his observations on Barclay’s concessions in the concluding para¬ graphs of the Second Treatise. He quoted Barclay that 'the body of the people may with respect resist intolerable tyranny’. A king who betrayed his trust was no king. This sounded very like the doctrines of the Vindiciae, but Locke, who built the structure of his argument upon the layers of interpretation which his English

165

CONCLUSION

and continental predecessors had added to French resistance theory, restated the idea of popular sovereignty with a subtlety which disguised its origins. If there was an ultimate sovereignty it was not an actual standing power which the people possessed in some corporate capacity. The monistic society was a myth. Grotius had shown that at best the community might act through the decision of the majority, and only by a convenient fiction could this be described as the decision of all. Furthermore, sovereignty was an inappropriate term with which to express the responsi¬ bility of the ruler to the ruled. The German theory of double sovereignty had used the word in two different senses—the supreme legislative power and the sanction with which the con¬ sent of the community endowed that power. Lawson had realized this from his reading of Besold and Arnisaeus. Baxter and Gee had seen a similar distinction in Grotius, and Hunton had reached the same conclusion without any acknowledged debt to the inter¬ mediaries. Locke was familiar with these English writers, and he knew the work of Grotius directly. Locke appreciated the various meanings attributed to sovereignty. Fie accepted the distinction between its legislative and executive aspects, but saw the law¬ making power as fundamental. He declared that the community could not exist as such without some supreme and acknowledged authority. The legislative sovereign was empowered with this authority by the agreement of the individual members of the society. Should their trust be abused, then, wrote Locke in the concluding words of the Second Treatise, 'the people have a right to act as supreme, and continue the legislative in themselves, or erect a new form, or under the old form place it in new hands, as they think good’. These were the Lockian modifications of the theory of the Vindiciae. The rationality with which ideas of sovereignty had been expressed had resulted in the constant re-examination of the axioms upon which they had originally been based. These axioms had finally been replaced by new self-evident truths. No longer was a political society a natural phenomenon in which the recog¬ nition of social obligations supplied the bond of its organic unity.

166

CONCLUSION

Now society was atomistic in composition. The state was an arti¬ ficial device to serve the needs of the individual. The individual was fortified against society at large and the government in par¬ ticular by the possession of inalienable rights carried over from the state of nature. What remained in common to Locke and the authors of the Vindiciae was their reliance upon logical principle at the expense of that reverence for the traditions of the past which had characterized much earlier thinking. The transition from the principles of the monarchomachs to those of the Whigs was the record of a long line of French, Dutch, German, and English writers. On the one hand they rejected the mystique of custom: on the other they secularized the theory of Natural Law, and freed political thought from the sphere of theology. Was society and its government natural or artificial? Who was the immediate master of nature, man or God? These were the questions suggested by the age of Locke and Pierre Bayle. Two contrasting views of human nature underlay sixteenth- and seven¬ teenth-century speculation on the nature of political obligation. One stemmed from the Augustinian tradition which regarded the sinfulness of man as redeemable only through Grace, and the state as the artificial means of avoiding the consequences of the Fall. The other was the influence of Aristotle, accepting the state as the natural product of the social instinct and as the only means of living the good life. To those who accepted the Thomist syn¬ thesis, the reason of man was an imperfect copy of that of his Creator, and faith was necessary to complement the deficiencies of human reason. Hence it might be said that man could con¬ sciously co-operate with his instinct and might enter political association, and subsequently regulate it, by reasoned acts of will. But the new rationalism went further than this and suggested explanations of society to which faith became increasingly irre¬ levant. In his commentary upon Aristotle’s Politics Aquinas had sug¬ gested the formula ars imitatur natwram. In the commentary which Le Roy placed beside that text of the Politics which served English seventeenth-century controversialists, there was an evi-

167

CONCLUSION

dent shift towards a secular view of Natural Law, a view which interpreted it in terms of human rather than divine reason. Some three thousand years ago, wrote Le Roy in his preface, the world was inhabited by savages as rude and as primitive as those recently discovered by the Spanish in the West. They had lived in amity without avarice or ambition, but when they became aware of these things they found it convenient to devise means of govern¬ ment, to make laws, and to appoint magistrates to enforce them. This was the sort of opinion which made itself felt beside the rival dogmas of the theologians in the time of the Religious Wars. It was as much the product of a Politique theorist like Le Roy as of the secular theorists of resistance. It seemed to provide the starting place for such ideas as those expressed by Locke a century later. Even Locke’s single lapse into empiricism referred to the same primitive societies of the New World as visible testimony of the soundness of his logic. The problem of reconciling instinct and reason as the dual impulsions to society preoccupied the theorists to whom seventeenth-century English thought was so indebted. Buchanan was never more suggestive than when he observed that nature might be treated as a mother or as a maid¬ servant. The force of nature might be regarded as a divine light infused in human minds,1 to be reverenced as the origin of human society. It might also be judged by the canons of utility, and society might be founded and regulated by self-interest. Like Bodin, he tended to regard the latter view as essentially destruc¬ tive to society. He asked whether it was possible to believe that man had once lived a solitary and savage existence before reason had persuaded him to co-operate with his fellows in the establish¬ ment of an organized society. He seemed on the point of perceiv¬ ing that it was absurd to describe the human attribute of sociability apart from the existence of man in society. Yet Buchanan was tempted to postulate a pre-social man. Gregoire condemned him for it, and Barclay remarked that he resembled Aristotle himself 1 'Lux animis nostris divinitus infusa’ or 'lex ilia divina ab initio rerum insita’. This summary of Buchanan’s treatment of the problem is taken from De Jure Regni apud Scotos in Opera Omnia, 1725, pp. 5—7.

168

CONCLUSION

in paying lip-service to the social instinct while applying the force of nature nullibi minus quam in politicise Bacon’s epigram—homo naturae non nisi parendo imperat— summed up the conclusions of the age as to the place of man in nature. Political thinking returned to the Stoic ideal of the selfsufficient man in tune with the rationality of the universe. It was this attitude which did much to foster the growth of the new individualism. It can be too easily assumed that the Reformation stressed the personal relation of man to God and so directly pro¬ moted individualism in politics. This may be true in general terms, and it can be demonstrated in the thought of certain Pro¬ testant theorists.3 It is not, however, the whole explanation of the advent of the liberal era. In the preceding age no variety of religious dogmatism was conducive to the view that respect for the worth of individual personality was more important than an enforced conformity to creed and ceremony. The reappearance of Stoic ideals was made possible by the mutual conflict of the churches. Protestant theology was, if anything, more distrustful of the power of human reason than was Catholicism. Without the secularization of Natural Law, the Protestant individualist ethic could not have been translated to the field of political thought. The concept of toleration was itself the product of the rational¬ ism of French Politiques and English Latitudinarians. It com¬ pleted the theory of liberalism, for liberty of conscience became a natural right almost as fundamental as the sanctity of property. For some, this allowed the supremacy of reason to invade the sphere of religion itself. Saint-£vremond regarded the history of religious thought as the swinging of a pendulum between faith and reason: 'There is a continual turn and return from nature to religion, and from religion to nature.’4 The new age showed all the signs of a return to nature, but to a measurable and nonmysterious nature. Once again it is in the Religious Wars that the 2 De Republica, 1. i, c. ii, sec. 6, p. 14; De Regno, 1. ii, p. 34. 3 As with Althusius, see above, Chapter 3, p. 46. The most penetrating examina¬ tion of this theme is that of Lagarde, Recherches sur I’esprit politique de la Re¬ forme, 1926, pp. 377—465. 4 Reflections on Religion, in Miscellaneous Essays, translated by Dryden, 1692, p. 344.

169

CONCLUSION

origins of what Pierre Viret called Deism are to be found.5 Bodin’s Heptaplomeres attempted a comparative study of many faiths, but his own sympathies seemed to lie with Toralba, his spokesman for 'natural religion’. It has been seen that Pierre Charron repre¬ sented the ideas of the libertins to Englishmen throughout the seventeenth century. Religion, no less than politics, it seemed, must conform to reason. No one, neither Locke nor even Pierrre Bayle himself, expressed this with quite the lucidity of Michel Le Vassor: Nous sommes en un siecle aussi eclaire qu’il en fut jamais. Tout le monde se pique de raison et de force d’esprit.6 The same doubting spirit of inquiry which was applied to the sciences should be brought to bear upon the dogmas of politics and religion. Sovereignty in church or state meant domination, and Tesprit de domination a forge la chimere de l’infaillibilite’. To every doctrine should be applied the one liberal criterion, 'le premier principe du sens commun’. All these are strands of thought which were woven into the pattern of liberalism. They have been regarded as the specifically English products of the seventeenth century, but at every stage of their English formulation it has been possible to trace the debt of English politics to the examples and ideas of the French Religious Wars. Yet the traditions of political thought which were adapted to produce the liberal ideals of the modern world were not really the exclusive heritage of any one nation. They were not English, nor even were they French. They were, in truth, European, the legacy of a single civilization. It happened that these medieval traditions were first to be bent to serve the needs of modern poli¬ tics in the anarchy of the French Religious Wars. It happened also that in England a later series of dissensions created similar needs, and that English theorists were sufficiently aware of French prece¬ dents to build upon French achievements and so to complete this transformation of European political thought. 5 Cf. P. Villey, 'L’Influence de Montaigne sur Charles Blount et sur les deistes anglais’, in Revue du XVIe siecle, vol. i, 1913. 6 Traite de la maniere d’examiner les differ ens de religion, 1697, Preface.

170

APPENDIX A

A. List of French Works Published in England ij6o-p8 This list is designed to illustrate contemporary English interest in the politics of the Wars of Religion, and omits many works of literary and theological interest. A number of works published in English translation abroad are included. In some instances there are entries which are not listed in the

Short Title Catalogue. These are marked *.

1560

Protestatio Christianissimi Regis Gallorum. Responsum ad Protestationem Regis Gallorum.

1561

Ane Oration (delivered by Beza at the Colloquy of Poissy, 9 Sep¬ tember 1561; another edition 1562). The Institution of Christian Religion (Calvin; some other edi¬ tions 1562,1574,1578 (2), 1580,1582,1587,1599).

1562

A Declaration made by the Prynce of Conde. A seconde declaration of the Prince of Conde and his assocyates to the Quene. The treaty of thassociation made by the Princes of Conde. A complaint of the Churche against the tiranny executed in France upon her poor members. An history briefly contayninge that which hath happened sens the departure of the house of Guise. A discourse upon the libertie or captivitie of the Kyng. The destruction and sacke cruelly committed by the Duke of Guyse in the toune of Vassy. The requests presented (4 May 1562) unto the French King by the three rulers. With an answer. The second oration (delivered by Beza at the Colloquy of Poissy 26 September 1561).

1563

An Answer (12 March 1563) to the examination (21 February 1563) of John de Poltrot upon the death of the late Duke of Guyse (issued with the approval of Coligny, Rochefoucauld, and Beza). #Ho Guyse the chefe of that gredy garyson (ballad by Owen Rogers entered in the Stationers’ Register). *A warnynge to Englande herein to advance by the cruell tyranny of the Guyse late of Fraunce (ballad entered in the Stationers’ Register).

171

APPENDIX A

1564

A discourse contayning the life and death of John Calvin (by Beza; another edition 1578).

1565

"^Concerning composing discords in religion (Paris).

1566

*A confyssion and Consente of all the Reformed Churches with an exhortation of Master Beza to the nobelitie of Ffrance. The Copie of the French Kings Privie Councells sentence.

1567

Certain tragicall discourses (translated by Sir Geoffrey Fenton; another edition 1579).

1568

An edict or ordonnance containing a prohibition of al preaching. The Kinges edict or decree upon the pacification of the troubles (23 March 1568). A short discourse of the meanes that the Cardinal of Loraine useth to hinder the stablishing of peace.

1569

A discourse of such things as are happened in the armie of the princes of Navarre and Condy. A politike discourse for appeasing of troubles in Fraunce. The copy of a letter sent by one of the camp of the Prince of Conde to a friend of his.

1570

An edict set forth by the French King for appeasing of troubles (16 August 1570). The edict or proclamation set forthe by the Frenche Kinge. A discourse of the civile warres in France drawn into English by G. Fenton. #Oration pronounced before the Frynshe Kynge (by Hubert Languet?). Instructions given by the princes of Navarre and Conde upon the conferences for the peace.

1571

Actes of conference in religion, holden at Paris.

1573

The fyrst part of the commentaries of the civill warres of France (by Jean de Serres). A Christian instruction (by Pierre Viret). A true and plaine report of the furious outrages of Fraunce (by Francois Hotman—'Striveling’; three Latin editions of De Furoribus Gallicis were issued, two at Edinburgh and one at London). *A table gathered out of a treatise of treasons lately compiled by a stranger and sent out of France. The edict of the French King for the appeasing of the troubles (11 August 1573).

172

APPENDIX A

1574

The three partes of the commentaries of the civili warres of France (by Jean de Serres). A forme of Christian pollicie. Le Reveille-matin des Francois et de leurs voisins (four editions, one in Latin, allegedly published at Edinburgh; by Eusebius Philadelphus, i.e. Beza or N. Barnaud?).

1375

Practices touching the state of France, discovered by an Italian, a gentleman of Florence. A mervaylous discourse upon the lyfe, deedes and behavior of Katherine de Medicis (by Henri Estienne. Heydelberge [Lon¬ don?]; second edition, Cracow, 1576). A declaration concerning the needfulnesse of peace in France. Practises touching the state of France. The protestation of the Duke of Allenson.

1576

The lyfe of the most godly capteine Jasper Colignie Shatilion (by Jean de Serres). The fourthe parte of the commentaries of the civili warres of France (by Jean de Serres). The edict or proclamation upon the pacifying of the troubles in France (14 May 1576). A treatise of the excellencie of a Christian man (by Pierre de la Piace; another edition 1577).

1577

The Defence of Death (by Du Plessis-Mornay). A legendarie, containing an ample discourse of the life and behaviour of Charles Cardinal of Lorraine (by Frangois de l’lsle, i.e. Regnier de la Planche).

1578

The wonderfull woorkmanship of the world (by Lambert Daneau). Politique discourses, treating of the differences and inequalities of vocations. A Christian discourse upon certaine poynts of religion presented unto . . . the Prince of Conde.

1579

An apology or defence of the Christians of Fraunce (by Innocent Gentillet). A summe of the Guisian Ambassage to the Bishop of Rome founde lately amongst the writings of one David an advocate of Paris. Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (by Hubert Languet and Du PlessisMornay, Edinburgh?). A Treatise of the Church (by Du Plessis-Mornay; other editions 1580,1581,1606).

173

APPENDIX A

1581

The stage of popish toyes (by Henri Estienne). The apologie or defence of the most noble Prince William (by Hubert Languet; another edition 1582). A treatise against the proclamation by the King of Spayne (by Hubert Languet). Ane Catholik and facile traictise, to confirm the real praesance of Chrystis bodie and blude in the sacrament (by John Hamilton, the Ligueur, Paris).

1582

The joyful and royal entertainement of the right high and mightie Frauncis the Frenche Kings only brother (entry of Alengon into Antwerp). A stable decree of the Parliament of Paris against W. Butrique.

1584

Judith (by Du Bartas).

1585

Declaration of the French King shewing his pleasure concerning the new troubles in his realmes (April 1585). An answer to the excommunication by Sixtus V against Henry King of Navarre and Henry Prince of Conde made by the said princes. Declaration of the King of Navarre touching slanders. The Kinges edict for the reunityng of his subiectes in the Catholique Church. A letter written by the King of Navarre unto the French King. A declaration and protestation published by the King of Navarre the Lord Prince of Conde and the Lord Duke of Montmorency concerning the peace concluded with the house of Lorrayn (10 August 1585). De sacris ecclesiae ministeriis ac beneficiis pro libertate ecclesiae Gallicanae (by Francois Duaren). An advertisement from a French gentleman: answere to a declaration published in the name of the Card, of Bourbon (two editions). An advertisement from a French gentleman touching the inten¬ tion which those of the house of Guise have in their late levying of forces in France. A true report of the taking of Marseilles by the favourers of the League togither with the releve thereof by the Kings faithfull subiects.

1586

A declaration published by the King of Navarre. Three letters to the cleargie, nobilitie and third estate. A necessary discourse concerning the right which the house of Guyze pretendeth to the crowne of France. 174

APPENDIX A An answere to the League written by a French gentleman. The French Academie (by Pierre de la Primaudaye; other edi¬ tions 1589, 1594, 1601, 1602, 1605, 1611, 1618). A Declaration and Catholick exhortation to all Christian Princes to succour the church of God and Realme of France (by Pierre Erondelle). An advertisement to the King of Navarre. The Brutish Thunderbolt or rather feeble fier-flash of Pope Sixtus the hft against Henrie the most excellent King of Navarre and the most noble Henrie Borbon, Prince of Condie (by Fran¬ cois Hotman).

1587

A brief discourse of the merveylous victorie gotten by the King of Navarre against those of the Holy League (20 October 1587). A Christian and wholsom admonition to Frenchmen revolted from the true religion. A worke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian religion (by Du Plessis-Mornay; other editions 1592, 1604, 1617). The Politicke and Militarie Discourses of the Lord de la Noue. *A letter written by a French gentleman to a friend of his at Rome. *The Ffrench Kinges edict touching the pacificacion of the troubles of his realme. *An oration latelie pronounced by the ambassadours of the Pro¬ testant prynces of Germanye unto the French Kynge. A declaration exhibited to the French King concerning the Holy League.

1588

A declaration of the Kings pleasure published after his departure from Paris translated according to the originall. A caveat for France upon the present evils that it now suffereth. Discours politique tres excellent pour le temps present compose par un gentilhomme frangois contre ceulx de la Ligue. A letter written by a French Catholike gentleman to the Maisters of the Sorbonne (by Du Plessis-Mornay). *Auscuns articles proposez par les chefs de la Ligue en l’assemblee de Nancye en Janvier 1588 pour estre arrestez en la generalle de Mars prochain (listed for translation in the Stationers’ Register). *De l’authorite du Roy, et crimes de Lez Maieste (listed for trans¬ lation in the Stationers’ Register). A discourse upon the present state of France (by Michel Hurault). A short apologie for Christian souldiours (fourth question of the

Vindiciae contra Tyrannos).

175

APPENDIX A

1589

A declaration of the King concerning the observing of his edicts. The declarations as well of the French King as of the King of Navarre concerning the truce. A letter written by the King of Navarr to the three Estates of Fraunce. Directions from the King to the governors of the provinces con¬ cerning the death of the Duke of Guise. #Discours brief mais tressolide monstrant clairement qu’il est . . . necessaire au Roy de s’allier au Roy de Navarre (in French and English). The French Kinges declaration upon the riot felonie and rebel¬ lion of the Duke of Mayenne. A letter from the King to his court of parliament of Burdaux touching the death of the Duke of Guyse. De caede Gallorum regis (Oxford). *A Frenche mans songe made upon the deathe of the French Kinge. A politike discourse composed by a French gentleman against those of the League who went about to perswade the King to breake the allyance with England. A comparison of the English and Spanish nation composed by a French gentleman against those of the League (another transla¬ tion of the preceding work). The whole and true discourse of the enterprises against Henry de Valois. The Contre Guyse, wherin is deciphered the pretended title of the Guyses. Advise given by a Catholike gentleman to the nobilitie and commons of France to ioyne together and take armes . . . against theeves and robbers. A true discourse of the most happy victories obtayned by the French King against the rebels. The Contre-League and answere to certaine letters sent to the maisters of Renes. A true discourse of the discomfiture of the Duke of Aumale. A letter written by a french Catholike gentleman conteyning a brief answere to the slaunders of a certain pretended English¬ man (by Du Plessis-Mornay). A treatise touching Anti-Christ (by Lambert Daneau). The Restorer of the French Estate (by Michel Hurault). An admonition given by one of the Duke of Savoyes councel to his Highnesse tending to disswade him from enteprising against France.

176

APPENDIX A

#The second collection conteyning the history of the most notable thinges happened under the League. #A letter sent to the good townes that are in obedience to the Kinge. #Examen pacifique de la doctrine des Huguenots, prouvant contre les Catholiques rigoureux (in French and English). Instructions for the warres (by Guillaume du Bellay). The declaration of the Lord de la Noue upon his taking armes for the just defence of the townes of Sedan and Iametz. A discourse upon the declaration published by the Lord de la Noue. The reformed Politicke (by Jean de Fregeville).

1590

The letters patterns of the Kings declaration for referring the generall assemblie unto the 15 day of March. Antisixtus (by Michel Hurault; three editions). The oration and declaration of Henrie IV (8 August 1590). A discourse of all such fights which have happened in France. The discoverer of France to the Parisians. The judgement of L. Danaeus touching certaine points now in controversie. A canticle of the victorie obteined by Henrie the Fourth at Ivry (by Du Bartas; two editions). The true discourse of the victorie obtained the fourteenth day of March 1590 (in French and English; three editions). A Catholike apologie against the Libels made by the League (by Pierre de Belloy). The copie of a lettre sent into England by a gentleman from St Denis wherein is set forthe the good success of the Kinges maiesties forces against the liguers and the Prince of Parmas power. The miserable estate of Paris. A treatise concerning the famine of Paris. Sommaire discours au vray de ce qui est advenu en l’armee du Roy depuis que le due de Parmes s’est ioint a celle des ennemis. A recitall of that which hath happened in the Kings armie since the taking of the suburbes of Paris (in French and English). Credible reports from France and Flanders. True news concerning the winning of the town of Corbeyll by the French king. Brief declaration of the yielding up of St Dennis to the French King.

6109

177

N

APPENDIX A

An abstract of the proceedings of the French King . . . written by a French gentleman. Ce qui est advenu en la retraicte du Due de Parme depuis le 20 Novembre jusques au 27 dudict mois 1590 (in #French and English). *Les Lauriers du Roy, contre les foudres practiques par l’Espagnol (in French and English). *The decree of the courte of parliament of Normandie for the seasinge of ye rebelles goodes, and two canticles touching the said Vyctorye. *The Frenche Kinges lettre to Monsieur de Vernue touchinge the vyctorye againste the rebelles and leagers. #Deploration de la mort du Roy, Henry Troisiesme, et du scandale qu’en a l’Eglise (listed for translation in the Stationers’ Register).

1591

The Kings declaration importing a revocation of all such letters for ennoblishment as have not been verified in the chambre of accounts of Normandy. Ordinances set foorth by the King for the rule and government of his Maiesties men of warre. Newes from France. Newes lately come from France. A true discourse of an overthrow given to the army of the Leaguers in Provence. Les rodomontades du Capitaine Vigues, and a letter of a French gentleman to my Lady Jacquet Clement. Description veritable des batailles victoires et trophees du Due de Parme (in ^French and English). A discourse uppon a question of the estate of this time. *A true declaration of the honorable victorie obtained by the French King in winning Noyan. A journall or briefe report of the late service in Britaigne by the Prince de Dombes. An answer to the Supplication, against him who seeming to give the King counsel to become a Catholic endeavoreth to stir up his good subiectes unto rebellion. A Discourse of Life and Death (by Plessis-Mornay; other edi¬ tions 1592, 1600, 1606, 1607).

1592

The continual following of the French King upon the Duke of Parma. A discourse of that which is past since the Kings departure from Gouy to pursue the Prince of Parma.

178

APPENDIX A

The chief occurrences of both the armies from 8th April till 17th. Newes out of France. A discourse of the great overthrow given by the French King unto the Leaguers in Poictiers. An excellent discourse upon the now present estate of France (by Michel Hurault). #Good newes from Fraunce, a true discourse of the winning of sundry cheefe townes. *The mask of the League and the Spaniard discovered. A true relation of the French Kinge his good successe.

1593

Articles accorded for the truce-generall in France. Remonstrance to the Duke de Mayne. A proposition of the princes, prelates and others of his maiesties councell propounded to the Duke of Mayenne (in French and English). *A lettre de Monsieur de Thevines and a parlement held at Chaalons. An answere to the last tempest and villanie of the League.

1594

The profit of imprisonment (by Odet de la Noue). The French Kings edict upon the reducing of Paris. The arrainement of the whole societie of the Jesuites in France (by Antoine Arnauld). The Jesuit displayed (by Etienne Pasquier). The copie of a letter sent to M. de Beauvoir wherein is shewed the late attempt of a Iesuite to kill the King (in French and English). Of the interchangeable course or varietie of things in the whole world (by Louis Le Roy). The order of ceremonies observed in the anointing and corona¬ tion of the most Christian King of France and Navarre.

1595

The copie of a letter sent by the French King to the people of Artoys and Henault. The decree of the court of parliament against John Chastel. A pleasant satyre or poesie: wherein is discovered the Catholicon of Spayne and the chiefe leaders of the League {Satyre Menippee, by Pierre Le Roy, Pierre Pithou and others). *The cakephacisme doctrinall and confession of the Liguers faith. *A state discourse upon the late hurt of the French King. The Historie of France: the foure first bookes. Politicke, Moral and Martial Discourses (by Jacques Hurault).

179

APPENDIX A

1597

The Historye of the late troubles of Fraunce (Histoire des der¬ nier s troubles, 1594, by Pierre Matthieu). The mutable and wavering estate of France from 1460 untill 1595.

1398

The Colonies of Bartas. The Mirrour of Policie (Le Miroir politique, 1555, by Guillaume de la Perriere; another edition 1599). The moral philosophy of the Stoics (by Guillaume du Vair). Aristoteles Politiques (a translation of the 1576 French edition of Louis Le Roy). An historical collection of the most memorable accidents and tragicall massacres of France under the raignes of Henry 2, Frangois 2, Charles 9, Henry 3 and Henry 4 (Recueil des choses memorables avenues en France, 1595, by Jean de Serres). #The articles and conditions of peace between the high and mightye prynces Phillip Kinge of Spayne and Henry the IV the French King.

180

APPENDIX B

Some Personal Pinks between English Statesmen and French Theorists It may be something more than a coincidence that the authors of those French works which influenced English seventeenth-century thought should have been personally known to those who conducted Elizabethan policy. Bodin, Languet, Mornay, and the Hotmans were not, of course, merely political writers or academic lawyers. They were all involved in diplomatic negotiations at one time or another in the course of the Religious Wars, and even had some share in form¬ ing the political decisions which changed the direction of the conflict. It was largely in their diplomatic capacity that they were familiar to English statesmen. At the meeting of the Estates General of 1576-7 Bodin, according to his own account,1 opposed the renewal of the war against the Huguenots, maintained the traditional rights of the Third Estate against the nobility and clergy, and criticized the practice of alienating the royal domain. He thus appeared as the supporter of traditional constitutional practice. At this time a diplomatic agent, William Wade,2 had accompanied the ambassador, Sir Amyas Paulet, to Blois, where the Estates General were meeting. Wade wrote to Burghley claiming a familiar acquaintance with Bodin.3 He praised Bodin’s ability and reputation as a civilian, and mentioned his activities as the deputy for Vermondois in the Third Estate. He added that Bodin had retired from public life because of his Huguenot religious opinions.4 1 Recueil de tout ce qui s’est negotie en la compagnie du tiers estat de France en I’assemblee generalle des trois estats assignez par le Roy en la ville de Bloys, 1577. 2 Sir William Wade, or Waad, later became Clerk of the Council and Lieu¬ tenant of the Tower. In 1585 he negotiated the alliance with the Netherlands Estates General preceding Leicester’s expedition. It was he who was sent to France to explain the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and to demand the recall of De l’Aubespine. 3 C.S.P. (Foreign) 1515—1, No. 1244. 4 This conflicts with the accepted view that Bodin had discarded his Calvinist

181

APPENDIX B

He promised to send Burghley a revised copy of the Republique, containing much information on diplomatic procedure. Bodin had in fact been in touch with the English embassy for some time. He remarked in the Republique that his information on the English constitution, which he described as an absolute monarchy, was gained in conversation with Paulet’s predecessor, Dr. Valentine Dale.5 Dale is known to have obtained a doctorate of Civil Law from a French law school before 1552, and it is possible that he knew of Bodin when the latter was gaining his academic reputation at Toulouse. Bodin widened his circle of English acquaintances during his visit to England with Alengon in 1581. He next appeared in the corre¬ spondence of English diplomatic agents when in March 1582 he was in the Netherlands with his patron. One of Leicester’s spies wrote: 'Bodin affirmeth openly within these three days here, that before six months were come we should be invaded with foreign and civil wars for our religion in England.’6 Two days later Bodin wrote to Walsingham himself, warning the Secretary of a grand Catholic conspiracy against England. He added, rather bitterly, that despite the festivities marking Alencon’s presence in Antwerp his master had come with the real intention of fighting the Spanish. 'That is why’, he went on, 'I told him in England that no conquering Prince, elected and called in by the subjects of another, had ever gone save with a good and powerful army.’7 Bodin never saw himself out of character as the informed diplomat, the learned adviser on constitutional usage and diplomatic practice. Nearly a year later, another English agent at Antwerp, Audley Danett, reported to Walsingham that in Bodin’s opinion the contem¬ porary rebellion of Lennox in Scotland had no chance of success. Within two weeks Danett followed this up in great indignation with a letter announcing that the author of an intercepted missive to the agents of Mary Queen of Scots was none other than this same 'Jhon Bodin’. What was more, Bodin had expressed the hope that he might be her 'Chancellor in France’.8 Soon afterwards Bodin wrote again to beliefs at an earlier date. Cf. Pierre Mesnard, 'La Pensee religieuse de Bodin’, in Revue du XVle siecle, vol. xvi (1929), pp. 77—121. 3 Republique, 1. i, c. viii, p. 96. 6 C.S.P. (Foreign) 1581-2, No. 574. 7 Ibid., No. 584. Cf. Republique, 1. ii, c. v, p. 220, on the legality of the summon¬ ing of a foreign prince by the subjects of a tyrant. Bodin’s doctrine was identical with that propounded in the fourth question of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. 8 C.S.P. (Foreign) 1583, Nos. 12,47.

182

APPENDIX B Walsingham deprecating Alengon’s political rashness, and enclosing a letter for Queen Elizabeth, who, he feared, had some cause to be offended with him.9 His duplicity was not forgotten by Walsingham. At the time of Babington’s Plot the Secretary demanded the source of the inspiration which had enabled Bodin to foretell the death of the Queen on 27 August 1586, the date said to have been chosen by the conspirators.10 Bodin’s explanation, no doubt, was given in terms of the conjunctions of the planets. Like Bodin, the authors of the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, Hubert Languet and Du Plessis-Mornay, gave their active personal service as well as their ideas to the contest with Spain in the Netherlands. As the confidant of William the Silent, Languet was constantly in touch with Walsingham, and it was he who conducted the negotiations with Alencon which resulted in the latter’s disastrous intervention. Wal¬ singham lamented Languet’s death in October 1581 as nothing less than a tragedy for the Protestant cause.11 Languet had attended the University of Padua, where he subsequently obtained a Chair of Civil Law, at the same time as Sir Thomas Smith. After vacating his chair he had become the pupil of Melanchthon before becoming the diplo¬ matic agent of several German Protestant princes. Languet’s friend, Mornay, acted as Henri of Navarre’s agent in the Netherlands. It was testimony of his diplomatic ability that he gained the confidence both of Alencon and the Netherlands Estates General, who requested him to represent them at the Imperial Diet of 1582. Mornay, who undertook missions for Navarre in England in 1577 and 1580, kept closely in touch with Walsingham and informed him of the calamitous course of Alengon’s rule. At Alengon’s death it was Mornay who directed the new trends in Navarre’s propaganda, and who himself wrote many of the Huguenot and Politique polemics against the Ligue. At this time, when Leicester’s venture in the Netherlands was following in the wake of Alengon’s, Jean Hotman, Leicester’s secre¬ tary, wrote frequently to Mornay, while the latter advised Frangois Hotman on the need to modify the arguments of the Franco-Gallia 9 Ibid., No. 72. 10 Ibid., 1586-88, part i, p. 94. Bodin’s implication in Babington’s Plot is dis¬ cussed by S. Baldwin, 'Jean Bodin and the League’, in Catholic Historical Review, vol. xxiii (1937), pp. 160-84, where information is also given of his interview with Queen Elizabeth in 1581. 11 C.S.P. (Foreign) 1581-2, No. 365.

183

APPENDIX B

to suit Navarre’s legitimate claim to be recognized as heir to the Valois.12 Frangois Hotman had corresponded with Burghley, and it seems that at one time he was invited by Elizabeth to occupy a post at Oxford.13 Frangois Hotman was known to Sir Amyas Paulet, who was an overt sympathizer with the Huguenot cause. Paulet had shel¬ tered many Huguenots on his estates in Jersey, and was the intimate friend of that Huguenot paladin, Frangois de la Noue.14 Paulet’s stern Puritanism made him a suitable custodian for Mary Queen of Scots. When he was ambassador in Paris he appointed Jean Hotman as tutor to his sons. The younger Hotman spent much of his time in Oxford, where he was a doctor of civil law by incorporation, and an adviser to the Government on diplomatic problems. The fruits of his ex¬ perience were contained in his The Ambassador (1603), in which he found occasion to attack Bodin’s haphazard remarks on the English constitution, and also to recount a malicious story of his 1581 visit to England.15 It may be suspected that Jean Hotman found favour with James I, for it was he who translated the king’s Basilikon Down into French. The most obvious name in all this network of relationships is that of Sir Philip Sidney. His family had long been associated with Euro¬ pean Calvinism. When the Huguenots had sought English aid in 1574, it was through his father, Sir Henry Sidney, that they advanced their pleas. It was Sir Henry who had made the military arrangements for English intervention in the first of the Religious Wars. As a youth Sir Philip Sidney was introduced to the leaders of the Calvinist move¬ ment in Europe by Hubert Languet, with whom he corresponded for 12 Correspondance inedite de Robert Dudley, Comte de Leycester, et de Franfois et Jean Hotman, edited by P. J. Blok, 1911, p. 208. 13 Cf. Maitland, English Law and the Renaissance, 1901, p. 13. 14 It was La Noue, according to one of Paulet’s reports, who did much to per¬ suade Alenfon to try his sword in the Netherlands. C.S.P. (Foreign) 1577—8, No. 848. 15 It is probable that Jean Hotman recognized and resented the fact that much of Bodin’s Republique was directed against his father’s Franco-Gallia. He told the story of Bodin’s attendance at a certain dinner, when he had asked his English host if there was any proof of the custom that an heir to the English throne must be born on English soil. His question referred to Mary Stuart, and, as Hotman put it, 'It was sodainely replied unto him by this Lord: You shall finde it on the backe side of the Salicque Law, a iudicious and biting rebound which instantly stopt the curiositie of this man, which indeede was in all respects out of season: for at that time there was a treaty of marriage betweene his Master and the Queene of England’ (op. cit., p. 62r).

184

APPENDIX B

the last eight years of Languet’s life. It was through Languet that he came to know Mornay, and he must have known Jean Hotman when he served in the Netherlands with his uncle, Leicester. Sidney, Lan¬ guet, and Mornay had all been in Paris on that portentous St. Bartho¬ lomew’s eve in 1572. If the response of Languet and Mornay was the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos and the diplomacy which applied its prin¬ ciples in France and the Netherlands, Sidney’s contribution to the cause was his heroic death on the field of Zutphen.

185

BIBLIOGRAPHY SOURCES

This list does not include those works given in Appendix A

Abbadie, J. La Defense de la nation britannique, La Haye, 1693Abbot, R. Anti-Christi Demonstratio, Londini, 1603. (An) Account of the Conduct of the Roman Catholic Clergy and Zealots of France, London, 1710. Allix, P. An Examination of the Scruples of those who Refuse to take the Oath of Allegiance (1689), in State Tracts, 1705, vol. i. -A Letter from a French Lawyer to an English Gentleman upon the Present Revolution (1689), ibid. -Reflections upon the Opinions of some Moderate Divines (1689), ibid. Althusius, J. Politica methodice digesta (1603), edited by C. J. Fried¬ rich, Harvard Political Classics, 1932 (the 1614 edition). Amyraut, M. Discours sur la Souverainete des Roys, Paris, 1650. Arnauld, Antoine (the elder). A Discourse . . . in Aunswer of Sundry Requests in France, London, 1602. -(the younger). The Pernicious Consequences of the New Heresie of the Jesuites against the King and the State, translated by John Evelyn, London, 1666. -Apologie pour les Catholiques, Liege, 1681. Arnisaeus, H. De Jure Majestatis, Argentorati, 1635. d’Aubigne, T. A. Les Tragiques (1616), Paris, 1932.

Bacon (Lord Verulam). The Elements of the Common Lawes of Eng¬ land (first published as The Use of the Law, 1629), London, 1636.

BAGSHAW, Edward (the elder). De Monarchia Absoluta, Oxon., 1659. Baltimore, (first) Lord. The Answer to Tom-tell-Troth, n.p., 1643. BANCROFT, R. Dangerous Positions and Proceedings, London, 1593. -A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline, London, 1593. BARCLAY, W. De Regno et Regali Potestate, Paris, 1600. -Of the Authoritie of the Pope, London, 1611. Baxter, R. A Holy Commonwealth, London, 1659. Bayle, P. Avis important aux Refugiez, Amsterdam, 1690. Bede, J. The Right and Prerogative of Kings, London, 1612.

186

BIBLIOGRAPHY BESOLD, C. Dissertatio politico-juridica de majestate in genere, Argen-

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198

Index Abbadie, J., 150,151,153. Abbot, R., 33-34, 154 n.

46 n., 72, 81, 84, 85, 94, 95, 126, 140. Bilson, T., 31, 82, 85, 154, 156, 157. Blackwood, A., 18, 111, 137, 143, 157. Bodin, J., 3 n., 11, 12, 17, 21-24, 26, 31, 33, 34, 36, 39, 40, 41, 42, 47-50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 60, 61, 62, 66, 68, 83, 85, 88, 92, 94, 95, 99, 100, 102, 103, 104, 106, 110, 111, 112, 114, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121, 124, 125, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 148, 154, 157, 158, 159, 165, 170, 181-3, 184. Bossuet, J. B. de, 149. Boucher, J., 10, 20, 34, 35, 36, 51, 70, 71, 72, 73, 91, 128, 130, 156, 159. Brady, R., 139-40. Bramhall, J., 93, 109 n., 113, 156. Brisson, B., 65. Brydall, J., 133 n. Buchanan, G., 17, 18, 27, 34, 35, 45, 46 n„ 47 n„ 51, 72, 77, 78, 81, 84, 92, 93, 94, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 119, 125, 130, 133, 135, 140, 143, 145, 168-9. Bude, G., 20, 65. Burhill, R., 76-77. Burnet, G., 126,132,150,152. Butler, S., 86 n.

(An) Account of the Conduct of the Roman Catholic Clergy, 159.

Alciatus, 65. Alford, J., 62. Allix, P., 149,154-5. Almain, J., 76, 78, 91. Althusius, J., 12, 40-50, 53, 54, 55, 88, 95, 103, 116, 121, 130, 159, 165, 169 n. Amyot, ]., 24, 25, 26 n. Amyraut, M., 105. Andrewes, L., 76 n. Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 24, 167. Archon et Politie, 19, 44 n. Aristotle, 21, 24, 48, 51, 102,113,167, 168. Arnauld, A. (the elder), 36. Arnauld, A. (the younger), 145, 149. Arnisaeus, H., 12, 50—52, 54, 62, 83, 87, 106, 119, 130, 138 n., 143, 144, 157, 166. Ascham, A., 102 n. Aubigne, T. A. d\ 26, 27, 140. Augustine, Saint, 21, 167. Bacon (Lord Verulam), 64, 169. Bagshaw, E. (the elder), 116-17. Bald us, 104. Baltimore, (first) Lord, 80. Bancroft, R., 31, 32, 70. Barclay, J., 74. Barclay, W„ 34-35, 39, 52, 55, 70, 71, 72, 74-75, 76, 77, 78, 83, 85, 87, 91, 94, 95, 96, 102, 104, 109, 111, 125, 130, 134,136, 137,138 n„ 143,145, 154, 156, 157, 165, 168. Barnaud, N., 19 n. Bartolus, 103. Baxter, R., 120, 137, 166. Bayle, P., 152-3, 161. Bede, J., 75,91. Bellarmine, R., 69, 70, 71, 74, 76 n., 135. Belleforest, F. de, 18 n., 25, 26 n., 35, 99. Belloy, P. de, 19, 34, 35, 36, 48, 74, 135,157. Besold, G, 12, 53, 106, 119, 166. Beze, T. de, 7, 9 n„ 19, 29, 31, 39, 45,

Calvin, J., 9, 29, 30, 31, 35, 39, 81, 84, 95, 102, 104, 107, 130, 135. Camden, W., 20. Canne, J., 103. Cartwright, T., 29—30, 31, 35. Casaubon, I., 25, 71. Cavendish, W. (Duke of Devonshire), 138. Chapman, G., 28. Charron, P., 23, 142, 170. Chasseneuz, B. de, 68. Cicero, 21, 115. Clarendon, Earl of, 113. Claude, J., 149. Coeffeteau, N., 71, 74 n. Coke, Sir Edward, 59-60, 62, 64. Coke, R., 124. Commines, P. de, 25, 26, 60, 61, 99 Contarini, V., 112. Contre Guyse, 19Contre League, 19-

199

INDEX Gee, E., 112, 120-2, 137, 166. Gentilis, A., 63, 65. Gentillet, I., 17 n., 19. Gerson, J., 78, 91. Gifford, W., 75 n. Gilby, A., 31. Goodman, C., 31. Goodwin, J., 97. Goulding, A., 29. Gregoire, P. ('Tolosanus’), 3 n., 39, 41, 45, 49, 50, 52, 76, 77, 102, 111, 121, 156, 168. Grevin, J., 27. Grimeston, E., 73. Grotius, H., 12, 13, 54—56, 66, 83, 84, 85, 87, 102, 104, 106, 113 n., 119, 120, 121, 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138 n., 139, 144,154, 157,165,166.

Cook, J., 103. Coulan, A., 150. Cowell, J., 63, 64, 133 n. Cragge, J., 125. Craig, Sir Thomas, 63, 156. Crawley, Sir Edward, 60. Cromwell, O., 106-8. Cujas, J., 26, 65, 67. Cumberland, R., 134 n. Dallington, R., 26. Daneau, L., 21, 29, 41, 42, 43, 45, 49, 53, 72, 83 n., 95, 101,102,103, 125. Dannett, T., 25. Davila, H. G, 100, 124, 127, 132, 135, 140, 154. Defoe, D., 154 n.

Dialogue d’entre le Maheustre et le Manant, 26, 97.

Digges, Sir Dudley (the elder), 62. Digges, Sir Dudley (the younger), 8990,91,156. Discours par dialogue sur I’edict de la revocation de la paix, 6 n.

Dorleans, L., 20, 36, 70. Dryden, J., 140—2. Du Bartas, G. de S., 26—27. Du Chesne, A., 139. Duck, A., 133 n. Dugdale, Sir William, 135 n., 140. Du Haillan, B. de G., 25, 26, 35, 37, 66, 99, 155, 162. Du Moulin, C., 63. Du Moulin, L., 107—8. Du Moulin, P. (the elder), 71, 73 n. Du Moulin, P. (the younger), 80, 104, 109-10, 126. Du Perron, Cardinal, 74 n., 77—78. Du Plessis-Mornay, P. (see also Vindiciae contra Tyrannos), 9 n., 17, 26, 29, 150, 183, 185. Du Tillet, M. J., 25, 26, 35, 52. Du Vair, G., 24, 56 n. Eliot, J., 26 n. Eliot, Sir John, 62-63. Estienne, H., 19, 158. Estienne, R., 24, 26. Eudaemon-Johannes, 74, 76 n. Evelyn, J., 149. Feme, H., 99. Filmer, Sir Robert, 3 n., 75, 91, 99, 100, 110-13, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 157 n. Foulis, H., 128-9. Four Questions Debated, 153. Fulbecke, W., 64.

Hakewil, W., 60. Hammond, H., 92, 102 n., 152, 156. Hampden, J., 100. Harley, R. (Earl of Oxford), 161. Harrington, J., Ill n., 117—18. Harvey, G., 24. Hayward, Sir John, 36, 111, 156. Heylyn, P., 94-95, 110, 152, 156. Hoadley, B., 157. Hobbes, T., 56, 101, 110, 111 n., 113-17. Hooker, R., 32-33, 121, 135, 165. Hotman, F., 7, 9 n., 16 n., 17, 19, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 47 n., 49, 51, 58, 64, 65, 66, 72, 86, 89, 91, 94, 103, 104, 119, 134, 136, 148, 151, 160, 161. 162, 183—4. Hotman, J., 17, 183—5. Howell, J., 85-86. Hudson, M., 93. (The) Humble Remonstrance and Peti¬ tion of English Protestants, 137.

Hunt, T., 138, 139, 140, 153. Hunton, P., 98-99, 166. Hurault, J., 19. Hurault, M., 19-20.

James I, 6, 64, 69, 71, 73, 78, 152, 184. John of Paris, 72, 76, 78, 91. John of Salisbury, 90 n. Johnson, S., 139Johnston, N., 148. Joly, C. de, 105 n„ 155. Jones, R. ('Laophilus Misotyrannus’), 129. Jonson, B., 23. Jurieu, P., 108 n., 145-6, 150, 151, 152, 153, 161. Justel, H., 149.

200

INDEX Kirchner, H., 52. Knox, J., 30, 95.

Nicole, P., 149. North, Sir Thomas, 24.

La Boetie, £. de, 19 n., 162. La Combe de Vrigny, 150, 161. Languet, H. (see also Vindiciae contra Tyrannos), 17, 39, 156, 164, 183, 185. La Noue, F. de, 26, 184. La Primaudaye, P. de, 21—22, 86 n. Lawson, G., 118—20, 137, 166. Le Grand, J., 149Le Roy, L. ('Regius'), 21, 24, 26, 167-8. Leslie, C., 157. L’Estrange, R., 139. Le Vassor, M., 150, 161 n., 162, 170. Lex Talionis, 158. Lilburne, J., 105 n. Limnaeus, J., 52. Lloyd, W., 126-7. Locke, J., 2, 56, 111 n., 121, 133, 136-7, 151,152,154 n., 157, 164-7, 168. Long, T. (the elder), 154. Loyseau, C., 66, 67.

Owen, D., 71-72, 153, 156. Paget, C., 75 n., 76 n. Palmer, R. (Earl of Castlemaine), 126-7. Paraeus, P., 72 n., 104. Parker, H., 82-83, 86 n., 91, 92, 93. Parsons, R., 34, 35, 36-37, 70, 82, 84, 128, 140 n., 156. Pasquier, £., 25, 52, 65, 67. Pattenson, M., 125. Paulian, P., 152. Pelletier, P., 74. Pelling, E., 140 n.

(The) Peoples Right briefly Asserted,

103. Petit, W., 139. 'Philodemius, Euctatus’, 102. 'Philodemus, Eleutherius’, 101. Pithou, P., 66. Plaix, C. de, 73 n. Polybius, 21, 112. Ponet, J., 82. Preston, T. ('Roger Widdrington’), 76. Prynne, W., 83-85, 91. Pufendorf, S., 134, 137, 154, 165. Pym, J., 62, 81.

Machiavelli, N., 23, 51, 66 n., 102, 106 n., 112. Mackenzie, Sir George, 143-4, 157. Maimbourg, L., 145 n., 149. Major, John, 8, 76, 78. Mariana, J. de, 72, 73, 84, 93, 101, 103. Marlowe, C., 28. Marsilius of Padua, 72, 91. Martin Marsixtus, 20. Masters, S., 154. Matthieu, P., 73, 140. Maxwell, J., 87, 91-92, 111. Melville, A., 30. Memoires de la Ligue, 52.

Rabelais, F., 65. Rebuffi, P., 68 n.

Reveille-matin des Francois, 19, 80,

Memoires des occasions de la guerre appelee le bien public, 6 n. (A) Memorial from the English Pro¬ testants, 153.

Milton, J., 81,104, 140. Molesworth, Viscount, 161-2. Montaigne, M. de, 26, 170 n. Montesquieu, C. L. de S. de, 162. More, Sir Thomas, 20. Morton, T., 70,156.

(The) Mutable and Wavering Estate of France, 38.

Nalson, J., 129.

(The) Nation’s Address, 138 n.

Nedham, M., 105-6.

(The) Next Way to France, 105.

162 n. Reynolds, W. ('Rossaeus’), 10, 20, 35, 41, 45, 51, 70, 71, 75 n., 84, 85 n., 91, 127, 128, 130. Rossant, A. de, 85 n. Rousseau, J.-J., 50. Rutherford, S., 87—88, 112. Sainte-Marthe, D. de, 152. Saint-Dvremond, 169. Salamonius, 45, 46 n., 88. Sancroft, W., 109. Satyre Menippee, 20, 159. Saumaise, C. de ('Salmasius’), 109 n. Scaliger, J.-C., 24, 26. (The) Scotch Echo Legion, 159-

of

the

104,

English

Selden, J., 65—67. Seller, A., 155-6. Seneca, 6l. Serres, J. de, 19, 26, 73 n., 85, 99, 135.

Severall Politique and Militarie Obser¬ vations, 99-100.

201

INDEX Seyssel, C. de, 6, 155. Shakespeare, W., 28. Sheldon, R., 75. Sherlock, W., 153 n. Sidney, A., 133, 134-6, 143, 160, 161. Sidney, Sir Philip, 26, 29, 184—5. Smith, Sir Thomas, 16. Somers, Lord, 158, l6l. Spelman, Sir Henry, 65, 67, 139Spelman, Sir John, 92. Stewart, Sir James, 130, 159. Stillingfleet, E., 127, 156. Stirling, J., 129Stubbes, J., 18. Sutcliffe, M., 36, 76 n. Symmons, E., 88, 156. That Resistance may be Used, 154 n.

Thou, J. A. de, 20, 127, 135, 140. Travers, W., 29-30. Twysden, Sir Roger, 68. Tyrrell, J., 133-4. Ulpian, 90, 104, 111, 112. 'Ursinus, Gulielmus’, 104 n. Usher, J., 90-91.

Varillas, A., 149,150,152. Verse, A. de, 152.

Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (see also Du Plessis-Mornay and Languet), 7, 12,

17, 19, 32, 34, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46 n„ 47, 49, 51, 58, 72, 77, 78, 84, 85, 87, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 103, 109, 119, 125, 126, 129, 130, 140, 145, 151, 153, 156, 164-7. Viret, P., 29, 170. Voltaire, F. M. A. de, 1, 13. Warmington, W., 75. Warwick, Sir Philip, 100, 130—1. Watson, W., 35. Wentworth, T. (Earl of Strafford), 62. Whitby, D., 154 n. White, T., 116. Whitgift, J., 30, 32. William of Occam, 91. Williams, G., 95-96. Williams, R., 97. Withers, J., 159. Zouch, R., 133 n.

202

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