Abstract
In his end-of-the-century plea for Protestant legislative autonomy in England’s most proximate — and most problematic — colonial possession, the Irishman William Molyneux cautioned that the rights of parliaments should be nurtured at all costs in every country. ‘This kind of government, once so universal all over Europe, is now almost vanished from amongst the nations thereof. Our king’s dominions are the only supporters of this noble Gothick constitution, save only what little remains may be found thereof in Poland.’1 For Molyneux, and for not a few like him who surveyed the political landscape of Europe at the close of the century, the ideal of the ‘Gothick’ constitution was being rapidly and insidiously eroded by the exaggerated claims of overly ambitious princes. The future of Europe seemed destined to follow the path of augmenting monarchical prerogative at the expense of broader consultation and consent, and inattention to this dangerous trend could only result in the eradication of all institutional and legal bulwarks against tyranny.
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Notes and References
William Molyneux, The Case of Ireland’s being Bound by Acts of Parliament in England Stated (Dublin, 1698), p. 100.
James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 1992), p. 3.
For the French example, see also Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Rise of Absolutist Theory (Cambridge, 1973), ch. 1: ‘The Persistence of Medieval Constitutionalism’.
Hagen Schulze, States, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford, 1996), p. 21.
Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in early modern European Monarchy (New York, 1992), pp. 120–1.
A thorough treatment of this tradition is presented in J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ, 1975), esp. ch. 3. See also Sommerville, Politics and Ideology, pp. 58–9.
John Procope, ‘Greek and Roman political theory’, in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Theory (Cambridge, 1988), p. 23;
Robert Eccleshall, Order and Reason in Politics: Theories of Absolute and Limited Monarchy in early modern England (Oxford, 1978), p. 53.
Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago, 1984), p. 35 (book 1, ch. 1).
Paul E. Sigmond, ‘Law and Politics’, in Norman Kretzmann and Eleanor Stump (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge, 1993), p. 220; Eccleshall, Order and Reason, p. 62.
Downing, Military Revolution, p. 30; Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ, 1970), pp. 65–6; Neithard Bulst, ‘Rulers, Representative Institutions, and their Members’, in Reinhard (ed.), Power Elites and State Building, p. 47.
Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, trans. Alan Gewirth (Toronto, 1986), p. 32.
George H. Sabine, A History of Political Theory, 4th edition revised by T. L. Thorson (Hillsdale, IL, 1973), pp. 271–85, contains a useful discussion of Marsilius.
Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, MD, 1966), pp. 56–8;
Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca, NY, 1984), pp. 76–85; Tierney, Constitutional Thought, pp. 10–11; Downing, Military Revolution, pp. 19–22.
Tierney, Constitutional Thought, p. 17. On the significance of the conciliar movement, see Antony Black, Monarchy and Community: Political Ideas in the Later Conciliar Controversy, 1430–1450 (Cambridge, 1970).
See also Black’s contribution in J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 573–87.
F. Oakley, ‘On the Road from Constance to 1688’, Journal Of British Studies, 1 (1962), 1–32, treats some of the connections between medieval theory and seventeenth-century practice.
Blythe, Ideal Government, pp. 248–9; J. N. Figgis, Studies in Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius, 1414–1625 (New York, 1960), pp. 55–70; Tierney, Constitutional Thought, p. 93.
Blythe, Ideal Government, p. 248; Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought (London, 1996), pp. 177–8; Antony Black, ‘Conciliarism’, in Burns (ed.), Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought, p. 549; Tierney, Constitutional Thought, p. 95.
W. A. Dunning, A History of Political Theories from Luther to Montesquieu (London, 1927), pp. 62–5.
Lloyd, ‘Constitutionalism’, in Burns (ed.), Cambridge History, p. 289. See also Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500–1800, trans. Ernest Barker (Cambridge, 1950), pp. 70–9.
Bonney, European Dynastic States, p. 308; Thompson, Political Thought of Luther, pp. 91–3; John Calvin, On God and Political Duty, ed. J. T. McNeill (New York, 1956), pp. xii–xiv.
Skinner, Foundations, 2:223; Mousnier, Assassination of Henry IV, p. 90. More generally, see M. M. Knappen, Tudor Puritanism: a Chapter in the History of Idealism (Chicago, 1966),
and Edmund Morgan (ed.), Puritan Political Ideas, 1558–1794 (Indianapolis, IN, 1965).
Ponet quoted in Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: the Political Thought of the Elizabethan Catholics (Cambridge, 1982), p. 4.
Kingdon, ‘Calvinism and Resistance Theory’, in Burns (ed.), Cambridge History, p. 216; J. H. Burns, The True Law of Kingship: Concepts of Monarchy in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford, 1996), pp. 185–221, provides the best coverage on Buchanan.
George Buchanan, De jure regni apud Scotus, or A Dialogue, concerning the due Privilege of Government, in the Kingdom of Scotland (Philadelphia, PA, 1766), p. 86.
Donald Kelley, Francis Hotman: A Revolutionary’s Ordeal (Princeton, NJ, 1973), pp. 238–49, provides a useful analysis.
Francis Hotman, Francogallia, in Julian H. Franklin (ed.), Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza and Mornay (New York, 1960), p. 55.
Quoting Herbert Rowen, The King’s State: Proprietary Dynasticism in Early Modern France (New Brunswick, NJ, 1980), p. 37.
Vindiciae contra tyrannos, in Franklin (ed.), Constitutionalism and Resistance, p. 155. Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘The State and Popular Sovereignty in French Political Thought: A Genealogy of Rousseau’s “General Will”’, History of Political Thought, 4, no. 2 (1983), 292–3, emphasizes the corporate nature of Huguenot resistance theory.
On the Catholic League see Mousnier, Assassination of Henry IV, pp. 213–30; Frederic Baumgartner, Radical Reactionaries: The Political Thought of the Seventeenth-Century French Catholic League (Geneva, 1976);
J. W. Allen, English Political Thought, 1603–1644 (London, 1938), p. 344.
Mariana, The King and the Education of the King (1599), quoted in Bonney, European Dynastic States, p. 311.
Suarez, On Laws and God the Lawgiver in Selections from Three Works, trans. G. L. Williams (Oxford, 1944), pp. 374–5, 383.
Guy Howard Dodge, The Political Theory of the Huguenots of the Dispersion (New York, 1947), pp. 6–7;
Paul Hazard, The European Mind, 1680–1715, trans. J. Lewis May (New York, 1952), p. 83.
W. J. Stankiewicz, Politics and Religion in Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley, CA, 1960), pp. 206–7.
Burgess, Politics of the Ancient Constitution, pp. 15–18. J. G. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge, 1959, reissued 1987) is the classic study of the phenomenon in England.
John Fortescue, A Learned Compendium of the Politique Lawes of England (Amsterdam, 1969), p. 26.
Weston, ‘Ancient Constitution’ in Cambridge History, p. 375. On Coke see James Reist Stoner, Common Law and Liberal Theory (Lawrence, KS, 1992), pp. 13–68.
Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, 8.2.11; 8.2.7. Robert K. Faulkner, Richard Hooker and the Politics of a Christian England (Berkeley, CA, 1981), pp. 99–117.
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George Lawson, Politica Sacra, ed. Conal Condren (Cambridge, 1992), pp. ix–xviii.
Peter Laslett (ed.), Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, 1963), p. 72, m #33.
W. M. Spellman, John Locke (London, 1997), pp. 98–121.
Locke’s early political views are expressed in his Two Tracts on Government, never published in his lifetime. Philip Abrams (ed.), Two Tracts on Government (Cambridge, 1969).
Richard Ashcraft, Locke’s Two treatises of Government (London, 1987), p. 21.
On Shaftesbury’s career see K. H. D. Haley, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (Oxford, 1968).
John Marshall, Locke: Resistance, Religion and Responsibility (Cambridge, 1994),
and Ian Harris, The Mind of John Locke (Cambridge, 1994), are now essential studies on Locke’s political ideas during this crucial period.
John Locke, Works (London, 1823), 2:360.
Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. W. von Leyden (Oxford, 1954), p. 109.
Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages (Baltimore, MD, 1966).
Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (London, 1961), pp. 19–26.
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Spellman, W.M. (1998). Constitutions and Consent. In: European Political Thought 1600–1700. European Culture and Society. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27200-6_4
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