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Loyalty and the Law: The Meaning of Trust and the Right of Resistance in Seventeenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Howard Nenner
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Type
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 859 - 870
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2009

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References

1 Sommerville, J. P., Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (London, 1986), 22–27Google Scholar. See, too, Sommerville, J. P., “Absolutism and Royalism,” in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, ed. Burns, J. H. (Cambridge, 1991), 355Google Scholar.

2 Burgess, Glenn, Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution (London, 1966), 19, 22, 42, 52Google Scholar. Burgess believes that “we should never underestimate what promising meant in the seventeenth century” (104). Sommerville, on the other hand, has been consistent in arguing that absolutist is an appropriate label for any variety of political thought that regards the monarch as accountable only to God (Sommerville, “Absolutism and Royalism,” 348, 354).

3 Burgess, Absolute Monarchy, 23, 212.

4 Sheppard, Steve, ed., Reports, vol. 1 of The Selected Writings and Speeches of Sir Edward Coke (Indianapolis, 2003), 195–200Google Scholar.

5 Sommerville, “Absolutism and Royalism,” 366. For a comprehensive discussion of state oaths, see Jones, David Martin, Conscience and Allegiance in Seventeenth Century England: The Political Significance of Oaths and Engagements (Rochester, NY, 1999)Google Scholar. Jones is particularly interested in the way men dealt with “the bonds of conscience and law,” noting that “theologians had long established that oaths could not bind to impossibilities and that change could undermine their bonds” (150).

6 Sheppard, Reports, 192. See also Jones, David Martin, “Sir Edward Coke and the Interpretation of Lawful Allegiance in Seventeenth-Century England,” History of Political Thought 7, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 321–40Google Scholar.

7 Bagshaw, Edward, The Right of the Crown Of England, as it is established by Law (London, 1660), 36Google Scholar.

8 [Cleveland, John], Majestas Intemerata. Or, The Immortality of the King [1649] (London, 1689), 46Google Scholar. For a discussion of the shift in the concept of treason from a crime against the monarch to one against the impersonal state, see Orr, D. Alan, Treason and the State: Law, Politics, and Ideology in the English Civil War (Cambridge, 2002), chap. 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burgess, Glenn, “Regicide: The Execution of Charles I and English Political Thought,” in Murder and Monarchy: Regicide in European History, 1300–1800, ed. von Friedeburg, Robert (Basingstoke, 2004), 221Google Scholar. James Harrington proposed a way around the problem of engagement, asserting in The Commonwealth of Oceana the impossibility of swearing allegiance to a monarchy that had been dead since 1649 (see Blair Worden, “The Royalism of Andrew Marvell,” in Royalists and Royalism during the English Civil Wars, ed. Jason McElligott and David L. Smith [Cambridge, 2007], 237).

9 Lawson, George, Politica Sacra & Civilis, 2nd ed. (London, 1689), 176, 362Google Scholar.

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11 All references to the text are from The Trew Law Of Free Monarchies: Or The Reciprock And Mutuall Duetie Betwixt A Free King, And His Naturall Subjects, in The Political Works Of James I, with an introduction by McIlwain, Charles Howard (1598; repr., New York, 1965), 53–70Google Scholar.

12 ibid., 53.

13 ibid., 54.

14 Bilson, Thomas, The true difference between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion (London, 1585), 520Google Scholar; A Discourse upon Questions for debate between the King and Parliament. With certaine Observations collected out of a Treatise called, The Differences between Christian Subjection and unchristian Rebellion (London, 1643). See, too, Cromartie, Alan, The Constitutionalist Revolution (Cambridge, 2006), 139–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 George Buchanan, De Jure Regni Apud Scotos, trans. Duncan H. MacNeill (London, 1964).

16 Buchanan, De Jure Regni, 70, 69, 82.

17 ibid., 78.

18 ibid., 96. In 1584 De Jure Regni Apud Scotos “was condemned by act of parliament, though it still had considerable influence on political thought in the seventeenth century” (D. M. Abbott, “George Buchanan,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography [Oxford, 2004]).

19 James I, Trew Law, 54.

20 Wormald, Jenny, “James VI and I, Basilikon Doron and the Trew Law of Free Monarchies: The Scottish Context and the English Translation,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Peck, Linda Levy (Cambridge, 1991), 45Google Scholar.

21 James I, Trew Law, 61.

22 In his speech to Parliament in March 1610, James reminded his subjects that “I will not be content that my power be disputed upon,” but, consistent with Burgess's analysis of the limitations on that power, the king conceded that he “bound himself by a double oath to the observation of the fundamental laws of the kingdom: tacitly, as being a king, … and expressly, by his oath at his coronation” (J. P. Kenyon, The Stuart Constitution, 1603–1688 [Cambridge, 1966], 14).

23 James I, Trew Law, 63.

24 ibid.

25 Knachel, Philip A., ed., Eikon Basilike, The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings [1649] (Ithaca, NY, 1966), 163Google Scholar; SirPetrie, Charles, ed., The Letters, Speeches and Proclamations of King Charles I (New York, 1968), 266Google Scholar; T. B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, 21 vols. (London, 1811–26), 4:1092; Lockyer, Roger, ed., The Trial of Charles I: A Contemporary Account Taken from the Memoirs of Sir Thomas Herbert and John Rushworth (London, 1974), 151Google Scholar; Knachel, Eikon Basilike, 190. See, too, Howell, State Trials, 4:1126; Lockyer, Trial of Charles I, 108.

26 “To the Prince of Wales,” in Knachel, Eikon Basilike, 162; Petrie, Letters, Speeches, 265, 269.

27 Nenner, Howard, “Liberty, Law, and Property: The Constitution in Retrospect from 1689,” in Liberty Secured? Britain before and after 1688, ed. Jones, J. R. (Stanford, CA, 1992), 105Google Scholar.

28 Cromartie, Alan, The Constitutionalist Revolution: An Essay on the History of England, 1450–1642 (Cambridge, 2006), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, too, Jason McElligott and David L. Smith, “Introduction: Rethinking Royalists and Royalism,” in their Royalists and Royalism, 12.

29 Nenner, Howard, By Colour of Law: Legal Culture and Constitutional Politics in England, 1660–1689 (Chicago, 1977), chap. 3Google Scholar.

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31 “House of Commons Resolution, 4 January 1648[9],” in Lockyer, Trial of Charles I, 76.

32 Statutes of the Realm, 1 Will. & Mary, c. 6, 1689.

33 Orr, Treason and the State, 176.

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36 Milton, Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 10, 19.

37 Nenner, Howard, “The Trial of Charles I and the Failed Search for a Bounded Monarchy,” in Restoration, Ideology, and Revolution, ed. Schochet, Gordon J. (Washington, DC, 1990), 11–13Google Scholar.

38 Knachel, Eikon Basilike, Appendix 5, 191; Lockyer, Trial of Charles I, 152.

39 Howell, State Trials, 4:1003; Lockyer, Trial of Charles I, 95.

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41 William Cobbett, ed., Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols. (London, 1809–20), 3:1091–92.

42 Cromartie, Constitutionalist Revolution, 268.

43 Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government [1690], ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge, 1960; repr., 1963)Google Scholar, Second Treatise, sec. 242, 477; James Tully, “Locke,” in Burns, Political Thought, 635–37.

44 Howell, State Trials, 11:1195.

45 Howell, State Trials, 4:1070; Muddiman, Trial of King Charles the First, 78–79; Lockyer, Trial of Charles I, 83.

46 Cobbett, Parliamentary History, 5:78.

47 Cleveland, Majestas Intemerata, 38.

48 “The Nottingham Paper,” in Cobbett, Parliamentary History, 5:18.