Consider an incident that occurred over the use of the word “sovereign.” When the Petition of Right was being drafted in 1628, the Lords moved to add a paragraph expressing “due regard to leave entire that sovereign Power, wherewith your Majesty is trusted for the protection, safety, and happiness of your people.” Many in the Commons voiced their dismay. “What is ‘sovereign power’?” John Alford asked. “Bodin says it is that that is free from any condition. ... Let us give that to the King that the law gives him, and no more.” John Pym continued, “I know not what it is. ... I know how to add ‘sovereign’ to his person, but not to his power.” The great jurist, Sir Edward Coke, pleaded that the Lords’ proposal would “overthrow all our petition. ... I know the prerogative is part of the law, but ‘sovereign power’ is no parliament word in my opinion. It weakens Magna Carta and all other statutes, for they are absolute without any saving of sovereign power. ... We must not admit of it; and to qualify it, it is impossible.”44 The Lords capitulated, and the offending language was rejected. The Petition of Right opened with dutiful reference to “our Sovereign Lord the King,” and men continued to refer to “sovereignty in a king,” but Coke and his colleagues had thwarted legal recognition of such sovereign power.
Or take “absolute.” The Speaker of the Commons welcomed James to his first English parliament by proclaiming that they had “exchanged our exquisite Queen for an absolute King.” But when James “desired and commanded, as an absolute King, that there might be a conference between the House and the judges,” members were alarmed by his use of the term “absolute.”45 James may have been misunderstood, perhaps “all he was asserting was his rightful authority as a monarch whose claim to the English throne was beyond challenge,” the customary meaning of “absolute.” But apparently members did not see it that way.46 They were wise to be cautious for James intermittently pressed for absolutist powers, and there were those who argued that Charles I possessed the more potent meanings Europeans were giving these customary terms. It was presumably in response to this threat that Coke had already begun to make exalted claims for the antiquity and supremacy of the law.
THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE KING
The contention that English monarchs were absolute within their realm may have begun as a defense of royal religious supremacy, vis-à-vis the pope, but by the early seventeenth century it had become a flirtation with a more complete absolutism known as the divine right of kings. While there was general agreement that all who ruled did so by divine right, what was novel and controversial in the divine right thesis were the powers attributed to that right, an exclusive, unlimited, irresistible sovereignty.47 J. N. Figgis found its complete form included the following propositions:
1. Monarchy is a divinely ordained institution.
2. Hereditary right is indefeasible. The succession to monarchy is regulated by the law of primogeniture. The right acquired by birth cannot be forfeited through any acts of usurpation, of however long continuance, by any incapacity in the heir, or by any act of deposition.
3. Kings are accountable to God alone. Monarchy is pure, the sovereignty being entirely vested in the king whose power is incapable of legal limitation. All law is a mere concession of his will, and all constitutional forms and assemblies exist entirely at his pleasure. He cannot limit or divide or alienate the sovereignty, so as in any way to prejudice the right of his successor to its complete exercise. A mixed or limited monarchy is a contradiction in terms.
4. Non-resistance and passive obedience are enjoined by God. Under any circumstances resistance to a king is a sin, and ensures damnation. Whenever the king issues a command directly contrary to God’s law, God is to be obeyed rather than man, but the example of the primitive Christians is to be followed and all penalties attached to the breach of the law are to be patiently endured.48
Echoes of these views appear in the published works of clerical, legal, and lay supporters of James I and Charles I and in their own royal pronouncements. All argue from Scripture and the law of nature that absolute monarchy is the divinely ordained form of government, many pointing to instances in Scripture of kings created by God. Adam is transposed into the first king as well as the father of mankind. Monarchy is depicted as the most natural, stable, and perfect form of government, even though the power of kings cannot be limited and subjects might be abused. Because England is a monarchy its king, by definition, is absolute and necessarily above the law and Parliament, answerable only to God. History is employed to demonstrate that England’s kings are more ancient than parliaments. Both the common law and the people’s rights exist by his grace. That is, no right is a right, all are mere gifts of the Crown. Because the king is God’s agent there can be no active resistance to him or to his officials, merely a passive resistance in extreme cases. Clerical authors tended to subscribe to a more extreme form of absolutism, but all royalist writers espoused variations on Figgis’s divine right monarchy.
Examples of such texts abound in the years leading up to the civil war. To take a notorious example, Roger Maynwaring, one of Charles’s chaplains, claimed in a fit of zealous sermonizing reprinted below that kings were above all, “inferiour to none, to no man, to no multitudes of men, to no Angell, to no order of Angels.”49 According to Maynwaring that meant that “all the significations of a Royall pleasure, are, and ought to be, to all Loyall subiects, in the nature and force of a Command.”50 Subjects must either obey the king’s sovereign will—“which gives a binding force to all his Royall Edicts”—even if “flatly against the Law of God,” or suffer patiently.51 Maynwaring’s sermon was published by royal command and so outraged public opinion that when Parliament next met, Maynwaring was charged with an intention to destroy it, sentenced to the Fleet, and fined £1,000. Charles agreed to suppress the offending tract but a month later rewarded Maynwaring with the first of a series of preferments that culminated in the bishopric of St. Davids.
In another notable case John Cowell, in his legal dictionary Interpreter, described the king as “above the Law by his absolute power … and though for the better and equall course in making Lawes, hee doe admit the three Estates, that is, Lords Spirituall, Lords Temporall, and the Commons unto Councell: yet this … is not of constraint, but of his owne benignitie, or by reason of his promise made upon oath, at the time of his coronation.”52 Cowell wrote of Parliament: “And of these two one must needes bee true, that either the King is above the Parliament, that is, the positive lawes of his kingdome, or else that hee is not an absolute King.”53
On the sensitive issue of “subsidie,” or tax, Cowell observed: “Some hold opinion, that this Subsidie is granted by the Subject to the Prince, in recompense or consideration, that whereas the Prince of his absolute power, might make Lawes of himselfe, hee doth of favour admit the consent of his Subjects therein. ...”54
These definitions provoked such furor that James I agreed to condemn the book, but in 1637 Charles allowed it to be reissued. James and Charles apparently shared Cowell’s opinions. In 1621, when in defiance of James’s injunction that they not “meddle henceforth with any thing concerning our government or deep matters of state,” the Commons claimed a right to do so, James retorted: “we cannot allow of the style, calling it your antient and undoubted right and inheritance; but could rather have wished that ye had said, That your privileges were derived from the grace and permission of our ancestors and us, for most of them grow from precedents, which shows rather a toleration than inheritance.”55
Whether James did not “appreciate or even understand” the English constitution, or simply did