VINDICIAE CONTRA
TYRANNOS
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
HAROLD J. LASKI
I
All political systems are the natural reflection of their historic
environment, and there has been no influential political work that is not, in
essence, the autobiography of its time. That does not mean the absence from it
of a flavour of universality. Ideas beget a progeny which soon outstrip the
narrow concepts of their creator. It means only that the attempt to penetrate
the nature of political phenomena has always been coloured by the special
experience of the writer. Rousseau is what he is because Geneva retained to the
end his ultimate spiritual allegiance; and the federalism of Proudhon bears the
marks of one to whom the village of his birth is passionately dear. It is in
the competition of the market place that systems receive that correction of the
event which gives them their applicability.
This is, in a special degree, true of the Reformation. It was the real
starting point of democratic ideas; but, therein, it builded better, or, at
least, differently than it knew. In the name of a theory of religious truth,
existing ecclesiastical institutions were overthrown; and in the attempt at
their reconstruction men were driven to enquire into the nature of obedience.
The scale of things underwent a decisive change. European Christianity had
previously encountered the notion of reform; it had hardly until the advent of
Luther, been compelled to confront the portent of a revolution. The
significance of Luther lies in the fact that, all unconsciously, he made the
Reformation one of the great turning points in the history of political ideas.
From the fall of the Roman empire until his emergence, political thought was
always dominated by the notion of a single Christian Commonwealth. Its ultimate
sovereignty was the possession of God. Its direction belonged to Pope and
Emperor as his viceregents ; and the degree of power allotted to each varied
with the affiliations of the given writer. The notion of a Europe divided into
self-sufficient and independent states was not completely absent ; but the
universality characteristic of the Church, and the closeness of its connection
with political life, prevented that notion from attaining its natural results.
The prospect, however, of any genuine imperial suzerainty perished with the
failure of Lewis of Bavaria ; and when the defeat of the Council of Basle made
it clear that any genuine internal purification of Rome was impossible, the
way, as Cardinal Cesarini then pointed out, lay open for new political
dogmas.
For Luther's protest against the degradation of Rome had synchronised
with two other great movements which lent him the aid of their influence. The
growth of nationalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had prepared the
ground for the decentralisation of religious power ; and the new intellectual
atmosphere fostered by the Renaissance made possible the search for, and
acceptance of, new religious foundations. But religion was then, and, indeed,
until the nineteenth century, too deeply imbedded in the structure of the state
for the discussion of religious dogma to be possible without, at the same time,
involving enquiry into the validity of political systems. The new religions
sought a place within a state that had been previously part of a unified system
; and they were prepared to hew their way to acceptance. Once, therefore,
research into their rights had been undertaken, the unity of the middle ages
was immediately obsolete. Every centre of discontent became also a centre of
novelty. The Christian Commonwealth which had been one and indivisible was
dissolved into a variety of separate and sovereign states. Men ceased to think
in European terms. The interest of Europe as a whole, which had, however
vaguely, been preserved above the conflict of nations, was lost before the
separate ends of states which viewed their individual well-being as itself the
highest objective. The loss by the papacy of any accepted claim to moral
leadership was, of course, the main institutional source of change. The idea of
the state as the end to be preserved found its justification in part from the
renewed contact with Greek political philosophy and in part from the new and
pungent sense of immediate fact which is the contribution of the Renaissance to
the atmosphere of political discussion. The realism of Aristotle and the
pragmatic analysis of Machiavelli combined to defeat the incoherent
cosmopolitanism of medieval Christianity. The effort was sharpened by religious
warfare; and the new states demanded a new political philosophy for their
explanation and safeguard. If they were to be sovereign, they must know the
meaning of their sovereignty. Their independence of Rome, on the one hand, and
the presence within themselves of dissent, upon the other, made the problem of
their internal relationships the main theme of political enquiry.
The sixteenth century is, therefore, nothing so much as one long
research into the terms of political obedience. Luther might seek to protect
the prince against the anarchy at least in theory implicit in the structure of
Protestantism by insisting on the duty of submission to rulers whose power was
of God. But that did not bind those to whom his creed was anathema, and, where
it brought peace, it was the peace of men who accepted despotism as a relief
from war. Yet even then it did not bind those who, coming to full political
maturity after the Peace of Augsburg, found themselves outside the narrow
boundaries therein laid down for toleration. Had that peace contained some
effective measure of protection for the adherents of Calvin, the history of
European democracy might have been very different. Dogmas apart, however,
temperamental differences between the leaders of Reform made impossible the
establishment of a united Protestant front against Rome. The new creed was
driven to repeat the belligerent experience of its predecessor.
The result was to throw all political systems once more into the melting
pot. Every minority, whether in England or upon the Continent, which struggled
against odds for survival, was compelled, by the logic of its situation, to
enunciate a theory of the state. It sought to explain its will to live in terms
of political right. It challenged the nature of such authority as denied to it
a place within the categories of citizenship. Religions which began by
protesting that they were entirely innocuous to the existing civil order,
continued by insisting that it was the duty of the state to suit its character
to the new spiritual dispensation, and they ended by denying the legitimacy of
any government which did not admit the merit of toleration. The transformation
is well seen in English Protestantism in the movement from Tyndale's
Obedience of a Christian Man, with its vigorous defence of passive
obedience, to Ponet's insistence,1 a generation later, upon the
right to overthrow a régime which refuses accommodation. The
Scottish Reformation was not less prolific of novelty; and it is possible that
Buchanan's famous Dialogue 2 was the most influential political
essay of the century. So soon, also, as Holland raised the standard of revolt,
its thinkers stated a theory of politics in which not merely did the right to
religious freedom become a natural part of the philosophy of the state, but the
denial of it became the definition of tyranny. Even the magistral effort of
Althusius is, at bottom, simply an attempt to generalise from a special
situation.
Detail excepted, the method is a similar one throughout Europe. The
attempt is always, on the one hand, to limit the power of government, and, on
the other, to destroy the papal right of interference by showing the sovereign
and, therefore, independent character of the state. This destruction of papal
power was not, after 1570, the work of religious reformers alone. There came a
time when the civil wars produced by religious dissension had wrought a havoc
so extensive that even moderate Catholics were willing to deny that the state
must perish for conscience sake. Men were then led to see that state and church
can be regarded as species of a larger genus, and that neither is dependent
upon the other. That vision, indeed, was partial, and had it not lain at the
root of Calvinism in its Scottish form, it is possible that the conversion of
Henry IV would have prevented it from bearing its natural fruit. For whether
men insist on the definitely separate spheres of church and state, as did
Melville and the Presbyterians, or admit that toleration, though a pis
aller, is at a certain point inevitable, as did the Politiques, the way lay
open for the emergence of a definitely secular state. But that day still lay in
a remote future.
The independent character of the state was reached, immediately, in a
somewhat different way. It was accomplished by making the use of power a trust,
and giving to the people as a corporate whole the right to judge the character
of its exercise. The result, inevitably though not deliberately, is a
philosophy of the state that has in it the seeds of democratic institutions.
For once it is clear that the prince holds his power upon conditions, it
becomes necessary to discover the means through which those conditions may be
enforced. The merit of popular sovereignty at once becomes apparent; and to an
age still permeated by feudal notions, princely power becomes, at least in
part, the result of, and dependent upon, a contract with the people. The
purpose is not a democratic one; it is the enforcement of some special desire
that the contract has always in view. Nor is any loophole left through which
the democracy may catch the vision of its power. For, until the reckless days
of the League, and then with some vagueness, the corporate people does not mean
the mass of individual citizens. It is taken to mean the representative men of
the nation, nobles, magistrates, officials, just as, three centuries later, a
French Minister could identify the state with the Chamber of
Deputies.3 The notion of equality had not moved from the religious
to the political sphere.
This is, of course, unduly to simplify a complex situation; and it omits
the influence of such special views as those of Bodin and his school. Above
all, it does not sufficiently emphasise what becomes apparent only from the
mass of detail, namely, that the favour accorded to popular sovereignty has
always a specifically religious penumbra. All successful political
generalisations have been intended to serve a particular end; they give to the
"stereotype"4 of the age a satisfying mythology. So soon as the
theory of popular sovereignty had secured for the minority a toleration which,
however grudging, was still toleration, the main root of contemporary political
disturbance was removed. The partial toleration so won did not, of course,
imply that men had learned to accept the secular nature of the state; it
implied only, as the Thirty Years' War was, in its origins, to demonstrate,
that the cost of religious warfare necessitated a breathing-space in which they
learned the political value of indifference. Nor, in general, did they seek to
probe further into the meaning of popular sovereignty. It was not until the
French Revolution that Europe as a whole grasped the fact that the theory, with
all its possibilities, applied not less to political than to religious
needs.
In England, indeed, the transition to the secular state had, at least in
part, been made much earlier. The Rebellion and the Revolution transferred the
results of the discussion upon the place of religion in the state to the
political field a century before Rousseau so depicted them that no man might
mistake their meaning. But, even in England, until the emergence of Burke and
Bentham, it is the consistently religious background of political speculation
that is most striking. Locke could not write a treatise on civil government
until, in the Letter on Toleration, he had vindicated the
self-sufficiency of the state, and its consequent freedom from religious
trammels. The implication of the Bangorian controversy was simply, at bottom,
that the predominant section of Convocation thought it the duty of the state to
persecute in the name of religious truth. Men like Price and Priestley seek so
to define the state that they may demonstrate the right of Nonconformists,
despite religious difference, to a full citizenship.5 They and their
opponents alike represent the last vestiges of a struggle which goes back to
the refusal of Puritan England to accept the system of "Thorough" thrust on it
by Laud. But that refusal was not made in the name of toleration, and, in its
turn, it takes its form from the long effort to define the nature of a
Reformation settlement which refashioned the relationship between state and
church. The thought of Tyndale and Ponet, the effort of those, Anglican and
Catholic alike, who attempted, under Elizabeth and James I, to discover the
nature of political allegiance,6 these are present, at least by
implication, not less in the speeches of Eliot and Pym than in the writings of
Hobbes and Filmer. The Reformation, in brief, set the perspective of modern
political traditions. It was the chief business of later ages, certainly until
the Industrial Revolution, to find institutions best fitted to embody its
discoveries.
II
The religious wars of France bring out with especial clarity the real
nature of the struggle. Not only did they provoke a crisis in which the very
notion of royalty was in danger; they were also a struggle in which political
doctrines played a great part in defining and determining the issue. The danger
did not come from Calvinism alone. The prospect of a heretic King persuaded the
partisans of Rome to the enunciation of dogmas far more extreme than any to
which the Hugenots gave adherence. In the shock of conflict, practically every
theory of importance in political science until the outbreak of the French
Revolution found, in some sort, its expression, with the important and constant
exception of egalitarianism. The crisis was, on the whole, unexpected. The
firmness of Louis XI, on the one hand, and the easy rule of Louis XII, on the
other, seemed to have given the French monarchy a foundation secure beyond all
dispute. Yet not only was the succession called into question. The idea of
popular election to the throne was mooted. The notion of an inherent, if
indirect, right of papal control made itself heard. There were times when the
conception of France as a quasi-federation of aristocratic republics did not
seem impossible. Once, at least, it seemed within prospect that the estates
might seek to transform ancient, if dubious, memories into something akin to
the form and substance of an English Parliament. The confusion, of course, did
not spring merely from the existence of a Protestant party. It was due, in
part, to the economic and social importance of that party's members; in France,
as elsewhere, the connection between Protestant doctrine and commercial
development is immediate and significant. In part, also, it was caused by the
fact that the nobles seized the opportunity of conflict to reassert claims
which the previous half-century had seemed to extinguish; the age is hardly
less a Fronde than a religious struggle. In part, also, the special
circumstances of the struggle, the feebleness of the Kings themselves, and the
labyrinthine dishonesties of Catharine de' Medici, exasperated men's feelings,
and sharpened especially the ambitions of those who, like the Guises, stood
within palpable reach of the throne. The hopes of Spain, and the reawakened and
reorganised power of Rome undoubtedly contributed to the fashioning of men's
thoughts. Yet the existence in France of a powerful body of religious dissent,
claiming rights, and with the will to attempt their enforcement in the name of
justice, undoubtedly gave to the political ideas of the time a breadth and
sharpness of definition they did not have, the work of Buchanan apart,
elsewhere. Not indeed that either Catholic or Protestant stood for an
unchanging body of coherent doctrine. Each party changed its views with a
rapidity that was equalled only by the kaleidoscopic swiftness of events.
Protestants who had, under Henry III, embraced the theory of popular
sovereignty, had no difficulty, under Henry IV, in proving the virtues of royal
absolutism. But ideas have a history more enduring than that of their sponsors.
Born of some particular occasion, they live on to become the parent of events
far different from what the age of their origin could either have foreseen or
desired. The Hugenot who probably sighed With satisfaction when it became
unnecessary to test the adequacy of Hotman's history, the Ligueur who, after
the Peace of Vervins, looked back upon the feverish democracy of Boucher and
Rose as a bad dream, did not realise that they had released forces more
powerful by far than the inert quietude they were so thankful to accept.
To Calvin himself only a very limited degree of political novelty can be
traced. Rigidly authoritarian in temper, and without an atom of faith in
religious tolerance, it was by indirect means only that he opened the way for
the developments that ensued. What he preached was obedience to God, and
submission, though at one remove, to the magistrate; and his sense of the
importance of authority was clearly shown in his repudiation of Knox to
Elizabeth. But he did not clearly recommend any solution when the commands of
God and the magistrate were in conflict. The duty of prayer and the acceptance
of exile were obvious counsels; but they hardly suited the energy of a vigorous
age, and they had the capital defect of involving ruin for those who accepted
them. In part, of course, they originate in Calvin's deep, if gloomy, sense of
the natural badness of men, and his consequently natural insistence on the
virtue of a strong government which should be fortified against the results of
their wickedness. Princes, for him, ruled by the will of God and the right of
the people was simply the duty of submission. But there was, alongside the
power of the prince, the constituted authority of the magistrates; and Calvin
came to see that when tyranny is in question, they have the right to invoke
resistance. It is clear from the general tenor of his writings that by tyranny
Calvin meant a régime which endangered the existence of the new
faith. In that event, resistance was simply obedience to the will of God. He
seems to have envisaged a situation in which the general rule is submission,
and the call to revolt the result of a confidence on the part of those in
authority, without co-operation from the mass, that the safety of religious
conviction has reached the extreme point of compromise.
So far, indeed, Calvin might well have claimed that his views were
simply traditional to his time. Melancthon had previously emphasised the
importance of resisting tyranny; and until the massacre of Saint Bartholomew
not even the growing severity of the Crown tempted any Hugenot theorist to go
seriously beyond that point. What Calvin has to say is little different, for
example, from Commines' remark, in the previous age, that God sometimes
authorises a revolt against a tyrant.7 The general background of
Calvin's politics is, indeed, hardly incompatible with the theory of the state
presented in 1519 by so ardent a royalist as Seyssel.8 But after the
death of Louis XII, the despotism depicted by the latter loses its moderation
and benevolence, even while the thinkers of the time, and especially the
lawyers of the south, continued to insist upon the unlimited nature of royal
power. Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem becomes in fact and
theory the motto of the French monarchy; and attractive jeux d'esprit
like the Contr' Un of La Boétie would not, before 1572, have
provoked any widespread sympathy. A sense of popular right such as the friend
of Montaigne depicts is, indeed, as remote from the spirit of the time as the
anarchy of Herbert Spencer in an age committed to government interference. The
note of all the literature is the unlimited extent of royal power. "The King,"
said the jurist Vincent de la Loupe in 1551,9 "can make wars,
treaties, and peace when they seem good to him. He can impose taxes, make laws,
statutes, and ordinances. He can create such magistrates as he pleases.
Whatever he says is accepted as law, and as though it were the oracle of a new
Apollo." Nor did the Gallican complexion of French Catholicism do other than
emphasise the overwhelming dignity of the King. Du Moulin, for example, did not
hesitate, whether as Catholic or Protestant, to admit the royal supremacy over
religious matters. When Francis II ascended the French throne, the monarchy
seemed securely established in popular acceptance as the pivot of the whole
political system. The jurists had given to it the support of legal science. The
adherents of either religion had found no discrepancy of importance between
dogma and despotism. The change of temper which supervened is as remarkable as
it is unexpected.
From the mere existence of religious dissent conflict would not
necessarily have developed. Calvinism simply gave rein to a wider controversy
which is traceable to diverse causes. There was the memory of Statutes which
could be interpreted, as Coke and Prynne interpreted the feudalism of Magna
Charta, to narrow the boundaries of royal power. The ancient weakness of the
Crown could be contrasted with its recent strength to awaken memories of a time
when some degree of popular consultation was the avenue to law. The nobility
saw itself deprived of power with deep discontent. Under Louis XI it had been
almost annihilated. Under his successors it became a court rather than a
magistracy. The people were discontented as a result of foreign war; to them
princely ambition meant only the growth of taxes. Nor did the municipalities
see the invasion of their prerogatives without the sense that the monarchy had
used them for its own exaltation without payment for their aid. The Hugenots,
therefore, merely precipitated a controversy of which the possibilities were
already latent. Once a party was prepared to make protest against oppression,
it was inevitable that every cause of discontent should proclaim its presence;
for it is impossible to set bounds to a revolution. The consequence was that
while the Hugenots were striving to prove that the well-being of the state
demanded their toleration, and the Catholics to insist that their religion must
not be subordinated to purely temporal considerations, each was in fact
compelled to envisage the broader political situation in the hypothesis they
presented. The massacre of Saint Bartholomew in one generation, and the
accession of a Hugenot King in the next, came to give additional point to the
dispute. The central dogma involved was not, at first, the sovereignty of the
people, but merely the duties of the Crown to its subjects. But once it was
discovered that the real problem was not the duties of the Crown, but their
enforcement, the theory of popular sovereignty became the real centre of
doctrinal discussion; so much so, that even an abstract essay like that of
Bodin is, above all, an attempt at its refutation. Not, of course, that it was
a new doctrine. Gregory VII had already appealed to it against the
encroachments of the Ghibellines. Thomas Aquinas and Marsiglio of Padua had
both estimated its validity. But in the French wars, it became not merely a
dogma, but a dogma supported by battalions; and its analysis was, as a result,
something more than academic exercise.
When Francis II ascended the throne, the movement towards popular
sovereignty received no direct impetus. Exactly as the early English reformers
were almost passionate in their protestations of allegiance, so the Hugenots
made a merit of unconditional support to the throne; and they insisted, at a
general synod, on the illegitimacy of rebellion. But events were greater than
themselves. They had not yet, in any wholesale fashion, been tried by
persecution; and their demand for toleration was more the desire to forestall
difficulties that were approaching than a protest against the concerted
oppression of the government. They were, moreover, gaining ground; Francis
Hotman was only the most considerable convert of those won over by the burning
of Anne de Bourg. The regency of the Guises united against that disastrous
family not merely the nobility, whose pride was affronted by the spectacle of
novi homines exercising the sovereignty of the state, but also the
Hugenots themselves, who were incensed by the increased persecution for which
the Guises made themselves responsible. The result was the conspiracy of
Amboise; and thenceforth there was an extending series of outrages until the
culmination of all in the massacre of Saint Bartholomew.
But the development of political thought does not take the direct line
to its obvious goal. None of the earlier rebels admitted that he was attacking
the state. He claimed simply to be protecting the King, during his minority,
against the advice of evil counsellors. There is, indeed, some evidence that
more radical doctrine was slowly gaining ground, but there was no official
avowal of a new outlook. Nor did the Catholics think differently. They simply
condemned rebellion out of hand. Whether it derived from motives of religion or
politics, it was, in their view, always wrong. To this attack the Hugenots
replied not, be it noted, by palliating the rebels, but by insisting that the
regency of the Guises was unconstitutional. It destroyed, they urged, the
foundations of French government. The estates ought to be convoked, and a
council provided for the King. They affirmed with emphasis that they were not
defending their religion, but simply protecting the Crown. "That only," says
one of their pamphleteers,10 "that only has armed us — it is
false to say that our petition to the King masks a religious purpose." Francis
Hotman's famous attack on the Cardinal of Lorraine has no other substance than
this. Let the people be consulted, as in ancient days, and the throne will be
secure against mischance. The sudden death of Francis II followed the official
convocation of the estates; but not before Coligny had presented a memorial to
the council in which, granted a policy of moderation on the part of the Crown,
he offered to pay higher taxes than ever before to prove the measure of Hugenot
loyalty to the King.
The reign of Francis II showed no marked change in doctrine, but it
demonstrated the existence of two formidable possibilities. It had, in the
first place, armed Protestants and Catholics alike. If the motives of rebellion
were highly confused, that was less significant than the fact of their
presence. It had, in the second place, produced from those whom the Guises had
excluded from a share in power, the demand that the Crown be put into
Commission during a minority. From that position it would be but a short step
to demand some system of perpetual limitation upon monarchical power. The
Hugenots, moreover, were building upon the assumption that an unfettered King
would necessarily desire toleration. That assumption was bound to prove vain.
No King in an era such as this could possibly have remained unfettered, nor was
toleration as yet a natural standpoint. What, in brief, had been made clear was
that persecution would drive the Hugenots to revolt, and that toleration would
involve, at least from those Catholics wedded to the Guises, a grave measure of
armed disloyalty. The next years rendered this development inevitable.
For Charles IX was only a child; and the regent was Catharine de'
Medici. She was moved by no purpose save the appetite for power, and she had no
policy save that which seemed most likely to maintain her hold upon affairs.
For the experiment she embarked upon with Michel de l'Hôpital as
chancellor, and toleration as the basis of his government never had any chance
of succeeding. Catharine and her minister were swayed by very different
motives. She saw in his policy no more than a means of balancing the power of
the Guises by the support of the Hugenots, and when the balance broke down, she
had no difficulty in moving to a régime of persecution.
L'Hôpital, indeed, took broader views. As he himself said, he was shocked
that Frenchmen of opposing religious views should have less in common than
foreigners of the same religion; and it was to the rebuilding of the national
unity of France that he bent his energies. But the ideas of the author of the
Discours de la Réformation de la Justice could not have been
applied until a generation of civil war convinced men of their substance.
Frenchmen of all parties were still convinced that force was a solution of
their problems; they had to pay for their ultimate belief in reasonable
compromise by years of social misery. What l'Hôpital preached was
moderation in terms of royal despotism. With a theory of monarchy hardly
different from that of Seyssel, he sought by administrative skill to conciliate
alike Hugenots and Catholics. He realised, as Burke realised two centuries
later, that the inevitable outcome of repression is revolution. He saw in Spain
what the extreme methods of the Counter-Reformation would produce; and he
sought to cut the Gordian knot of metaphysical difference by evading it. He saw
that the state could not afford civil war, and his policy was therefore based
on the theory that no cause alien from the substance of temporal affairs was
sufficient to persuade it to indulgence in such an evil. But the theory of
royal power for which he stood was too absolute for a nobility which sought a
larger share in government, and a third estate which was prepared to defend the
retention of urban franchises which acted as a protection for religious
freedom. Nor were the Hugenots, who counted upon the moderation of his temper,
at all wise in the use of their opportunity. For Catharine was the base upon
which the pillar of l'Hôpital's conciliation was founded; and the woman
who schooled her children in the precepts of Machiavelli was a foundation which
needed the most cautious scrutiny. The true Hugenot policy was silence. But
some invited the Queen-Mother to undertake religious reform in time of peace,
lest she be driven to attempt it in a time of storm.11 Others
suggested, with more than a hint of threat, that the throne was not hereditary.
If these views were exceptional they were important straws in the wind. Nor was
this all. The mass of Hugenots were doubtless loyal to the new
régime; but some, like Condé, had a conscience whose
workings were intimately affiliated to political ambition, and Catharine had
learned from her Italian master the proper method with rivals. L'Hôpital
could have succeeded only if the results of his policy were not too obvious in
the manifest satisfaction of its beneficiaries. The latter were not so wise,
and the more extreme Catholics were naturally quick to point out that their own
loyalty was affronted by the toleration of heretics. The Chevalier de
Villegagnon, for example, was representative of a fairly general temper among
his co-religionists when he insisted, in an appeal to Catharine, that the King
had sworn to preserve inviolate his religious inheritance, and that to tolerate
heresy was to deny his oath.12 It was hinted abroad that the
tolerance of l'Hôpital prepared the way for the conversion of the King;
and the Sorbonne accepted the thesis of a young doctor of theology who
maintained the view that the Pope could depose a heretic sovereign. Appeal was
even made to Philip of Spain to protect the true faith. The temper of all
parties was clearly becoming exacerbated. "They begin," wrote the Venetian
ambassador to his government, "by showing contempt for the law. Thence they
pass to contempt for the magistrate. They end by proving their contempt for the
King himself."13
L'Hôpital did not improve matters by attempting, in the Colloquy
of Passy, to bring together the two religious parties. Théodore Beza,
indeed, who represented the Hugenots, spoke with an unwonted conservatism, and
explained that his religion made the prince the representative of God on earth.
But the Cardinal of Lorraine, who spoke for the Catholics, significantly
demanded persecution when, with much arrogance, he demanded the defence of the
established religion. Nor was it from the Church only that hostility developed.
The Parliament of Paris asked why, in the face of law, the heresy of the
Hugenots went unpunished, and inquired by what right the King gave them a legal
status. The reply made by l'Hôpital that the Parliament should not meddle
in affairs beyond its competence only increased the number of his enemies. It
was obvious that his ideas of pacification went beyond the convictions of his
age; and the growing number of conversions to the reformed faith, a number
above all significant in the ranks of the nobility, embittered the Catholics
against toleration.
L'Hôpital, indeed, had his defenders; but the voice of fanaticism
was too loud to be resisted. The Catholics began to publish attacks, to this
point without justification, upon Hugenot loyalty. Calvin was shown to favour
usurpation; Beza had defended the Conspiracy of Amboise; Calvinism involved
— it was an accusation truer than its proponents could then have
understood — a federal system destructive of the French monarchy. When the
Duc de Guise was assassinated, though the Hugenots in general sought to clear
themselves of complicity some of their leaders, and, most notably,
Théodore Beza, spoke in favour of tyrannicide. Catholic indignation grew
apace. Exactly as the Hugenots had protested against the persecution of the
Guises, so the Catholics protested against the moderation of Catharine and her
advisers. They spoke of changing the dynasty, of giving the nobility a larger
place in the national councils, of freeing the towns from l'Hôpital's
encroachments. The clergy used their sermons to a similar end; and it must not
be forgotten that the sixteenth-century sermon fulfilled the functions of the
modern press.14 Once the parties had organised civil war was
certain, and with the coming of war there is rarely strength of character
enough in any people to permit the expression of moderate views. The position
was, moreover, complicated by the fact that the strength of Hugenot
organisation, both politically and ecclesiastically, was such as to make them
regard the prospects of civil war with some confidence. When Condé took
charge of the forces of French Calvinism, he ensured the drift of Catharine
towards persecution for two reasons. He was, in the first place, controlled by
those who elected him to that office; no happy augury for one who believed in
despotism. And Catharine saw in the struggle for religious freedom an avenue
through which Condé might seek political power. Her methods, therefore,
changed that she might safeguard her position and influence.
The war did not break out without protest; and some voices were even
raised to demand toleration. It was pointed out by one pamphleteer that God
had, over Europe as a whole, protected as well Protestants as Catholics and had
thereby manifested his will that both should survive.15 Castellion,
as always urgent in the defence of freedom, insisted that the constraining of
conscience never secures more than an empty victory.16 The curiosity
of the time is the insistence of each party on the wickedness of sedition and
its desire that the position of the Crown should be kept sacred and inviolate.
In fact, the struggle was, in its beginnings, less a direct conflict of
religions than a fight between opposing factions of the aristocracy for the
possession of the government. The problem of reform happened to be there, and,
as the war endured, it became more and more the predominant issue. But, at the
outset, religious difference simply permitted a classification of the
contestants; it did not define the objects they had in view.
How true this is becomes clear from Hugenot pamphlets light down to the
fatal night of Saint Bartholomew. They are not, they protest, fighting against
the King. They merely desire to protect him against the advice of evil
Counsellors. They wish to protect the ancient laws of France. They are fearful
lest liberty be suppressed. They fight, so they affirm, for the corporate
people without distinction of religious belief. In the struggle in which they
are engaged, says one writer,17 they are concerned to protect the
integrity of the French throne against the usurpations of the Papacy. The Pope
has always been the enemy of the House of Capet, and the counsellors of the
King must take thought against the danger he represents. The monarch, it is
asserted, is losing the affection of the people, and even if he reigns by
divine right, he cannot afford to incur that loss. Another
pamphlet18 draws an analogy between the Hugenots and the famous
League of Public Safety. Like the latter, it insists, the Hugenots, as in the
great days before the crushing despotism of Louis XI, seek to temper the
authority of the Crown by the advice of the nobles, and the corporate will of
the provinces and towns. It is, in fact, a species of feudal struggle; and the
significance of this enthusiasm for the past is that it emphasises those
categories of power in which the Hugenots were most strong. Of their religious
demands they say almost nothing. Sometimes there escapes a phrase about the
patience they have displayed. Sometimes a note of reality appears as in an
attack on the influence of the Sorbonne in promoting civil disturbance. A cry
like that of the citizens of La Rochelle that a King hostile to God becomes
immediately a mere private person was quite exceptional.
The weakness of this attitude is evident enough. It was the protest of a
minority not upon the solid ground of right, but upon the shifty basis of
administrative error. It did not frankly avow the substance of its claims,
while it sought to conceal the real nature of its efforts in an impossible
distinction between the King and his advisers. For, in theory at least, there
was little in this statement of the Hugenot position that an antiquarian-minded
Catholic might not have been tempted to accept; and, confronted by the facts as
so presented, the Catholic party remained faithful to the Crown. That, indeed,
is the substance of its position. Since it was likely to possess the ear of
royal authority, its writers devoted themselves to the proof that all rebellion
was wrong, and that royal power was absolute by definition. Even a heretic
King, said one writer,19 ought to be obeyed; a significant claim
that had, when Henry of Navarre became King, so obvious an application that the
Guises procured from its author an explicit repudiation of the idea.
Resignation, it is urged, is the only attitude to be adopted in the face of
grievance. What the King wills is of God, and to resist him is, as Charles IX
said in a proclamation, to forget all fear of him to whom the royal power is
due. Nor should the nobility forget how directly its power is dependent upon
that of the King. Let the nobles ally themselves with the third estate against
the monarchy, said one pamphleteer,20 and no property will be safe.
A single noble with a handful of servants cannot fight a mob of hundreds; and
the peasants have already begun to attack the estates of the nobility. Let them
be once encouraged, as rebellion encourages them, and no one can see the end.
Up to the Edict of Longjumeau, the Catholic note is thus moderate, and not
unreasonable. If the religious difficulty is largely evaded, that is true also
of the Hugenot writers. Astonishment at popular insolence, as with
Monluc,21 insistence that a liberal regime would be
disastrous because it would give power to that headless monster an ochlocracy
are, after all, no more than the staple arguments of conservatism in the face
of popular tumult.
But after the Edict of Longjumeau, the atmosphere changes decisively.
From the standpoint of Catholic pride, it represented a serious defeat.
Catharine saw in it an encroachment by the Hugenots upon her power; and there
now developed rapidly that desire to be done with reform which culminated in
the plans for the massacre. L'Hôpital, still true to the ideal of
moderation, was driven from office. His dismissal, indeed, was marked by the
publication of a plea for peace which is not the least noble of his
writings.22 To give way to Condé, he urged, is not to
capitulate shamefully to rebellion; it is to act as any prince would act who
recognises that his subjects are free men. If religious toleration is conceded,
the cause of war will disappear. And there cannot, in his view, be political
freedom without religious toleration. For liberty cannot be enclosed within
boundaries so narrow as to exclude therefrom religion and the conscience it
controls. "The liberty of serfdom," he said, "is not liberty at all." But
l'Hôpital was too late; Catharine had already made her decision. An edict
of September, 1568, announced war in the royal name upon the reformed religion.
They seek, said the King, to establish an empire within the empire given to him
by God. The pamphleteers took on a new tone. It now became a duty to destroy
heresy. The contrast between the conciliatory tone adopted by Beza at Passy,
and the fact of rebellion was pointed out. The Hugenots did not change. They
still protested their humble obedience to the King. Could religious toleration
be accorded to them, they were ready to take an oath of loyalty. But, in
reality, their humility was less real than appeared. In worshipping the King,
they had not lost sight of the state of which he was the representative. They
equated royalty with freedom, and they meant by freedom not merely the
assurance of their safety, but also the preservation of ancient franchises into
which the experience of the last generation had driven them to pour a new
meaning. What they were in reality seeking was the path to a limited monarchy.
Already, there were amongst them men who had blessed tyrannicide. Already, they
were discussing whether a prince who did not accept the word of God was a
prince at all. Nor was the notion of a contract between monarch and people
entirely absent.
They had, in fact, evolved the foundations of a system incompatible with
the ambitions of the court. There lay ready to the hand of Catharine de' Medici
a party to which royal absolutism was a dogma unqualified by any limitation.
That persecution was right, they did not doubt; that it should be undertaken,
they were ready to prove from the implications, as they deemed them, of heresy.
France, they urged, was a Catholic Kingdom, and the King ruled it as an
absolute monarch. To say that he did not control the consciences of his
subjects was to destroy the roots of his power. Were he to be moderate, the
experience of Germany would show him the results of such weakness. Such a
policy was bound to commend itself to Catharine so soon as it was clear that
the aims of l'Hôpital were incapable of success. To that end Spain and
the Papacy were alike endeavouring to persuade her. The Hugenot policy in the
Netherlands had failed; and she herself suspected both the ambition of the
Bourbons, and the ascendancy established by Coligny over the mind of her son.
She made her determination; and there was no difficulty in persuading the
weak-willed King to sanction the most extreme plans that Rome could have
desired. The die was cast; and on the morrow of Saint Bartholomew, Europe awoke
to a new epoch in the history of its political doctrines.
III
The change wrought by the news of the massacre is evident immediately.
The court had made the holocaust; Charles IX himself had gloried in its
success. It was no longer possible to make any distinction between the King and
his advisers. It was the person and position of the crown that was now in
question. If Kingship existed for the protection of subjects, what were their
rights when the very basis of its meaning was taken away? Saint Bartholomew, as
Duplessis-Mornay said,23 destroyed the mutual faith of prince and
subjects, and so uprooted the foundations of the state. It made necessary the
abandonment of the fiction that the powers of the King were not a fit subject
for discussion. It became essential to survey the rights of citizenship, to
discover whether a royal power so obviously capable of abuse, could be
permitted to exist without definite and guaranteed limitations. Men did not
dream of overthrowing the notion of monarchy; but they had no longer any faith
either in the theory of absolutism, on the one hand, or its corollary of
passive obedience upon the other. Since Protestantism had been derived from the
study of the Old Testament, it became possible to remember the names of Joel
and Judith and Jehu. The Catholics might urge that David had refused to be
responsible for the death of Saul as the anointed of the Lord; but the Hugenots
could retort that at least he had, and with divine sanction, taken up arms
against his royal master. The New Testament was ransacked for texts which might
seem to justify rebellion; and all evidence in favour of submission was
explained away. Nor did these researches cease with the Bible. France could not
fail to remember that Poland had an elective monarchy. The recent revolutions
of Denmark and Scotland were used to point their obvious moral. Harmodius and
Brutus became popular deities in the Hugenot Valhalla. The revolt against the
tyranny of Tarquin became a model and an example to a horror-struck generation.
The issue, for the Hugenots, had become a simple choice between their religious
faith and their political loyalty. It was fortunate for European liberty that
they did not hesitate in their decision.
Most of the writings which owe their origin to Saint Bartholomew are, on
the Protestant side, of two kinds. Some are simple narratives of the day's
event. The mere horror of what occurred was rightly regarded as likely to carry
conviction of its wickedness to all decent-minded men. Others became, as was
natural, a definite enquiry into the nature of government, for it had clearly
become essential to restate the Hugenot position. The Court had presented two
incompatible defences of its action.24 On the one hand it had
depicted the massacre as the untoward result of a factional conflict within the
aristocracy; on the other it had justified, and even boasted of its commission
as the necessary consequence of rebellion and a sacrifice offered to the
Church. Some Hugenots remained faithful enough to earlier dogma to accept the
first explanation. They had then to justify the fact of being in arms; and this
they did by insisting that while they had no grievance against Kingship itself,
they could not bow their necks beneath the yoke of intolerable edicts. Such a
position was, of course, an impossible one. It accepted absolutism, on the one
hand, while it sought to justify occasional revolution on the other. It was, in
fact, the coronation of contingent anarchy; and it did nothing to meet the
profounder circumstances of the new situation. It had no philosophy save what
had already been condemned by the massacre; and its justification of rebellion
would have had to be made afresh on each occasion, and then not in terms of
general right.
One book then existed of which the substance and temper might have
satisfied the most extreme of the Hugenots. The Contr' Un of La
Boétie had probably been written twenty-five years before;25
but the problem it envisaged was exactly the tyranny the Hugenots now
confronted. But attractive as was the spirit of La Boétie's essay,
avowed and academic republicanism was meat too strong for the digestion of the
time. Not that La Boétie was entirely without influence; but he was used
as cautiously as an Anglican bishop might, in the sixties, have announced an
interest in Darwinism. The pseudo-classicism of the French Renaissance never
went so far as a disbelief in monarchy. Much more typical was the treatise, now
known to have been written by Theodore Beza,26 on the Rights of
Magistrates over their Subjects. The theory of Calvinist politics is here
set forth with perfect clarity. To God alone, it urges, does absolute power
belong. Magistrates, indeed, have wide authority, and they cannot be held to
account by the people. Nevertheless, when they command something that is
incompatible with true religion, disobedience becomes a duty. And by
disobedience, Beza argues, rebellion may, ultimately, be implied. The value of
patience and prayer must not be forgotten; but when the tyranny becomes
intolerable, just remedies must be used against it. Not, however, by every
member of the state. The ordinary citizen is bound, by the conditions of his
citizenship, to submit. The officers of the state, whose business it is to
maintain the laws, must secure their authority; but they must not depose the
prince. There are, however, in each state a body of citizens whose function it
is to see that the sovereign does his duty; in France the States-General is a
body of such men. They can, if they will, depose the prince. They safeguard the
original rights of the people. They may, if they so desire, restore the French
monarchy from its present absolutism to a form more consistent with its
original and elective foundation. Royalty is, even though divine in nature,
essentially dependent upon popular institution. The people has given power to
the prince for its own benefit, and, therefore, upon conditions. If the
conditions are not fulfilled, it is obvious that the power conferred reverts to
the source of its origin. The only thing to be remembered is that the decision
of abuse depends upon authorities of a special nature, and cannot be settled by
the ordinary citizen.
Though, obviously enough, Beza had French conditions in his mind when he
wrote, his book is a purely general treatise. Like most Calvinist pamphlets, it
is aristocratic in final texture, and it is wanting in a clear discussion of
the exact means whereby the objects Beza had in view could be attained. But it
is the first pamphlet published during the civil wars of which the main keynote
is the idea of popular sovereignty, and Beza may well claim to be the first in
that significant procession of those whom Barclay in the De Regno called
Monarchomachs. With the Catholic phase of that school we are not, at the
moment, concerned, but of the Protestant branch certain general hypotheses may
be laid down. In fighting the absolutism of the Reformation State they were
concerned to secure religious freedom. None of them valued it as an end in
itself. None of them would, had the occasion offered, have conceded freedom to
an opponent. But alike in Scotland as with Buchanan, and in France as with Beza
and his successors, they were concerned to show the impossibility of an
absolute state. They sought to secure certain rights against the possibility of
princely encroachment. They had, therefore, to argue, first, that princes are
not free to settle as they will the religion of the state, and secondly, that
the reason of this limitation lies in the general nature of the state itself.
The latter is, for them, practically invariably the result of a contract which,
however varied in form, always confers certain rights upon the people. Law is,
therefore, never the simple command of an Austinian system, as, for example,
that of Bodin, but the attempt to fulfil the purpose of the social contract. If
it does not fulfil that purpose, it is not law. Laws, therefore, are the
reflection of the law of nature which at once brought into being the social
contract and is the purpose and end of political authority.
From the Protestant point of view, the results of this theory are
perfectly clear. A law which violates the purpose of the social contract is not
a law at all, and may therefore be resisted. Edicts of religious persecution
are contrary to that purpose, and the Hugenots, when properly warranted by
persons of authority, may take up arms against them. The Monarchomachs had an
importance which went far beyond the very limited aim their effort had in view.
It was in itself valuable in an age of despotic centralisation so intense as
the sixteenth century to have an effective protest against unlimited power. In
Scotland, France and Holland the Reformers represented, broadly speaking, a
popular movement to which the Crown was hostile; it consequently became the
necessary condition of religious success that the aristocracy of the Crown
should be secured or some other form of toleration granted. Even in England it
is true to say that the condition upon which Parliament was successful against
Charles I was the fact that the Puritans were prepared to give battle against
the finality of the Elizabethan settlement. The development is, of course, most
dear in Holland, where rebellion is not merely successful, but leads to the
formation of a republic of which the prosperity was based on toleration. But
the Dutch struggle is only the most striking of several; and the whole
Monarchomachic movement points the moral that the political liberty of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the outcome of the protest against
religious intolerance. Had there not been that protest, the general condition
of Europe would have been similar to that of France under Louis XIV — an
inert people crushed into uniform subjection by a centralised and unprogressive
despotism.
Nor must another aspect of this effort be neglected. The sixteenth
century is pre-eminently a century of raison d'état. The poison
of Machiavelli was in its blood, and, as the reign of Henry VIII makes evident,
a cynical utilitarianism is its predominant temper. Expediency is a basis of
rights; it can never become an effective basis of right. It is to the credit of
the Monarchomachs that they moved the question to higher ground. They were
anxious to make it not merely wise, but also legal, to rebel. In order to do
so, they were compelled to show, as in the work of Gentillet,27 the
inadequacy of any basis other than ethical for political institutions. And it
is permissible to argue that no motive save that of religious conviction would
have been strong enough to inspire their effort against the inertia which made
men anxious for any peace, whatever its character. They saw clearly that only
by meeting the claims of the secular state upon the ground of absolute right
could the validity of their plea be accepted. There is no other way in which
the rights of associations can be maintained. Once utility is admitted as the
sole ground of right, the state can enforce its supremacy as against all other
bodies. It is, of course, true that most of the Monarchomachs were aiming at a
dominance for their own creed not less complete than that which they denied to
the state itself. Undoubtedly the victory of the state was, on the whole, a
necessary victory, but its minimisation by religious bodies was the main
guarantee against its abuse.
Beza's book is the beginning of a long tradition which expresses itself
in many forms. It was at once applied to purely French conditions in a treatise
of 1577. The author of Whether it is Lawful for the People and the Nobility
to take up Arms is unknown;28 but it is obvious that he had read
Beza's pamphlet to good advantage. Unless, he says, the state of France is
remedied, those who love her may well be accused of parricide. They must not
confuse the state with the government. The object of the first is the public
good; the second may simply seek the welfare of particular persons. With
Kingship in particular, it is important to distinguish between the permanent
dignity of the office, and the fallible character of some given occupant. If
the latter be a tyrant, no one can be so mad as to think resistance to him a
crime. Rebellion against tyranny, indeed, is a defence of the real interests of
monarchy against those who would destroy it. And the institutions of France
have been aptly constructed to this end. The parliaments exercise surveillance
over the workings of justice. The chamber of accounts preserves the royal
demesne against the danger of excessive alienation. The task of the nobility is
to prevent the ruin of the state by enforcing upon the monarch the observance
of his coronation oath. Clearly, then, the Hugenots have a right to resist, and
when God has made sufficient proof of their endurance, he will not fail to
bless their aims.
As a serious defence of the Reformer's position, the pamphlet is at once
clear and consistent. Like Beza's essay, it contains within itself the germs of
all that was later to be developed into a full and mature theory of the state.
Here is set out the notion of a contract between monarch and people, the sense
that interference with monarchical power is an ultimate act, for which,
however, provision must be made, the conception that power is a trust. The
writer is essentially moderate in his outlook. Moved as he obviously was by the
spectacle of the massacre, he yet did not seek to erect the circumstances of a
very special act of royal perfidy into a philosophy which viewed it as an
ordinary event. Like all the Hugenots, rebellion is for him a detestable thing,
and authority is always exalted above the reach of the common people. Other
writers, intelligibly enough, were less restrained. Some exhausted themselves
in vituperation of the government and sought to show, from the analysis of its
members' lives, their complete unfitness to rule. The author of La
France-Turquie, for example, charges the Crown with seeking to establish a
crushing despotism, and in what appears to be the sequel of this
pamphlet,29 he suggests the banishment of Catharine to a convent,
the fall of the Chancellor, the exile of the King's counsellors and their
replacement by advisers nominated by the provinces, and the dismissal of all
foreigners. Until the States-General can be summoned he urges that the towns
and provinces of both religions shall form an armed league against tyranny, and
refuse to pay taxes. Other writers were deeply anxious for revenge, and
demanded any assistance, from within or from without, that might accomplish
this end. The author of the Tocsin, for example, was not satisfied to
call on Condé and Navarre for help against the tyrant; he summons
Elizabeth, William of Orange, and the Swiss, to help in the work of liberation.
The author of the Reveille-Matin des Français went even further,
and actually appealed to the Guises, the assassins of Coligny, to expel the
House of Valois from the throne, and occupy it themselves.
The Reveille-Matin went too far for the vast majority of
Hugenots; to embrace the cause of the Guises was only less evil than to see the
continuance of the Valois in power. But it is more than a mere cri de
coeur. Its two dialogues seek to show that Calvinists had been in the
history of the previous thirty years devoted to the cause of the Crown, that
they had no other object than to assure the well-being of the Kingdom, and the
Convocation of the States-General. It speaks with ardent hope of the
assassination of the tyrant. It depicts a federal organisation of communes
which may by rebellion win their freedom. It insists that the estates may limit
the power of the prince. It sees in the maintenance of communal immunities the
sole effective guarantee against the crushing effects of monarchical despotism.
The book is, to some extent, a compilation; its account of Saint Bartholomew is
taken from a widely-read narrative of Hotman's,30 its theories are
often an almost textual reproduction of Beza's essay, and its eloquent picture
of the disastrous results of tyranny is taken, in great part, from La
Boétie. The compiler is uncertain, though it is possibly that Nicholas
Barnaud, the physician, whose violence even Beza condemned.31 But it
had a wide influence. It was many times reprinted, and it was translated both
into Dutch and German. Its appeal to the Guises apart, it differs only in its
emphatic tone from the bulk of the writings produced after the massacre by the
Hugenots.
They have thus a coherent body of doctrine to enunciate. An insistence
upon the validity of tyrannicide, a confidence in the results of a guarantee of
local liberties, an appeal to the power of the estates, these are the main part
of the common stock of ideas upon which the Protestants drew. With their
well-organised municipalities, such as La Rochelle and Montauban, with their
closely-knit ecclesiastical structure, with their solid power among the
nobility and the rich bourgeoisie, they had every reason to hope that the
translation of such ideas into the structure of the French state would be the
surest guarantee of their safety. These pamphlets, in fact, were not simply
published in the void. They attempted the provision of definite institutional
channels for the sources of Protestant strength. What was needed was a
convincing proof to their generation that they were seeking not daring
innovation but genuine reform. If, like Coke and Selden and Prynne in the next
century, they could convince their countrymen that the picture they had in
their heads was the original institutional pattern of France before the
usurpations of Louis XI, they would immensely increase the power of their
appeal. For there is in every generation a large body of men whose zeal for
reform is largely dependent upon the degree to which it can be referred to
antiquity. If, again, like Locke in the revolution of 1688, they could give to
the vague mass of social theory a stability and firmness which made it
immediately intelligible to the average citizen, they would become that most
deadly of all opponents, a rebellion armed not less with a philosophy than with
cannon. So far, the winds of doctrine had blown with equal force on either
side. In the next years, and until Henry of Navarre became heir to the throne,
the Protestants derived a new strength from their formulation of political
doctrine with which the Roman Catholic party was unable to compete.
That strength is not derived entirely from their own resources. Michel
de l'Hôpital had seen from the first the vast social loss that would be
involved in conflict; once it was apparent that civil war was not destined to
be a mere interlude, the majority of decent-minded Catholics swung round to the
support of his ideas. The Politiques, as they are called, are not purely a
Catholic party, for Hotman, in his Brutum Fulmen, adopted ideas
essentially theirs, and the complicated intrigues of which de la Noue was the
centre had as their object the union of Protestants and Catholics on the basis
of common effort for a peace of moderation. The importance of the Politiques
can hardly be overestimated. It is not merely that their ideas eventually
prevailed. Their plea for religious toleration was the root of the settlement
worked out in the seventeenth century. Their theory of the relation between
church and state was, practically speaking, that through which the state
eventually won its freedom from the trammels of medievalism. Their emphasis
upon passive obedience and indefeasible hereditary right links them up with the
Anglican party of seventeenth-century England. Their literary work is of
enduring significance, and though some of it is later in date than the actual
struggle in France, all of it has in mind the background of that conflict. The
outstanding pamphlets are the Apologia Catholica of Du Bellay which
defends the hereditary claims of Henry of Navarre against the attempt to
pervert the succession in favour of the House of Guise; the Satyre
Ménipée which is not merely a great satire, but a veritable
storehouse of political opinions; the De Regno of Barclay which, while
it seeks to overthrow the whole structure of the Monarchomachs, is not the less
fatal to the extreme Roman claims; the Quatre Excellent Discours of the
Sieur de Fay, the grandson of l'Hôpital, which perhaps best expresses the
general feelings of the party; and, above all, the République of
Bodin which, though in form a general analysis of political science, is
essentially a defence of the position taken up by the Politiques. The speeches
of l'Hôpital are an enduring monument to the temper of the movement;
while lesser works like the Discours of La Noue and the Vindiciae
of Servins are, in a lower rank, illustrative of the diverse aspects possessed
by the party. Few things are more symptomatic of the changing temper induced by
the Reformation than the rise of the Politiques. Here is a party to whom
religion, however individually important, is, socially, a secondary
consideration. They made it their business to vindicate the supreme character
of the civil power against the claims of any competing allegiance whatever.
Their effort was to secure the unity of the state; and they insist that before
the demands of such unity all other demands must give way. Their outlook was
purely utilitarian. They defend indefeasible hereditary right and the duty of
passive obedience simply on the ultimate ground that the community cannot
afford the loss that is implied in the issue to them of a challenge. They
favour toleration, not on the ground of right, but because the cost of
suppressing diversity of opinion is too heavy to be endured. What above all
impresses them is the paramount evil of anarchy; and they insist on the removal
of religion from the sphere of civil policy on the ground that its retention
there breeds an expense that will destroy the state. What they saw clearly was
the fact that religious diversity had come to stay; and they therefore rejected
an ecclesiastical sanction which had ceased to exercise its earlier magic. They
were thus driven back to the ideal of a religiously indifferent state as the
sole territory on which men could continue to act in concert for the public
good. Many, if not most of them, admitted that their ideal was a pis
aller; could persecution have been made to pay, it would have been
desirable as a basis for deepening political unity. But once that had been
proved impossible, they searched for foundations which should secure order,
whatever the cost. This it is which explains their acceptance of divine right,
and their passionate defence of the Salic Law. They insist on the necessity of
monarchy, and they reject, as with Servins, Hotman and Pithou, the notion that
the Pope has the right to control princes. What they established was the
self-sufficient and autocratic state of the Grand Monarch. If, in a sense, that
was the direct high road to 1789, it is probably an adequate reply that the
Reformation had so seriously endangered the foundations of order that their
object could hardly have been achieved in another way. It is true, of course,
that their exaltation of order at the cost of liberty was itself, as with
Barclay, a direct attack upon the Monarchomachs. Here, indeed, their
relationship to the latter is not unlike that of Burke to Thomas Paine. The
attention of the one was concentrated always on the method by which reform was
secured; the attention of the other was directed to the substance of the reform
achieved. The Monarchomachs saw only the direct evils of the tyranny beneath
which they lived; the Politiques emphasised the cost of overthrowing that
tyranny. But they were at one with their antagonists in the root of the problem
which was the removal of the cause which led the Hugenots to resistance. Once
that had been effected, there was little ground of difference between the
protagonists of either party. For the Hugenots did not defend resistance to
tyranny, and therefore liberty, as such. What they defended was their right to
worship God in their own way. Once that had been granted, then substantive
grievance was removed; and the enforcement of their general case was left to
other causes.
But that case was more powerful than they themselves were aware; and
even when its particular occasion had been removed, the record remained to
serve new purposes. Nor is it doubtful that the impression produced by its mere
statement was, at the time, overwhelming. The immense effort made to answer the
chief Hugenot writers is evidence enough that they wrote for a generation which
responded eagerly to their work. The intellectual power engaged upon the
Hugenot side was not the least important lever in its hands; and, in the main,
it derived that importance from two works. Much, indeed, of the effort of the
Politiques is an attempt to answer them; and it is hardly too much to say that
toleration came largely because the Hugenot plea for resistance was the only
possible alternative. Of the two books, the earlier was the
Franco-Gallia of Hotman. It was the first comprehensive attempt to
discover the historical nature of the French monarchy, and therefrom to deduce
the rightness of the Hugenot plea for a limitation of royal power. The
Vindiciae contra Tyrannos, probably by Duplessis-Mornay, though mainly a
brilliant summary of ideas already adumbrated by members of his party,
surpassed all other essays of the time in the vigour and lucidity with which it
restated them.
Neither book has the appearance, or even substance, of a pamphlet with
an immediate purpose. That of Hotman, in particular, with its formidable
apparatus of texts, its careful survey of juristic opinion, its analysis of the
chroniclers, was hardly less an historical work of the first importance, than a
livre de circonstance. It seeks to show that within a time but little
beyond the memory of living men, the monarchy of France was elective and
controlled by the estates. The men who built the ancient monarchy, the Franks,
were in nature, as in name, free. They had sustained their independence against
the attack of Rome. If they created a monarchy, they made of their Kings no
more than the guardians of their liberties, and to this end, they made the
monarchy elective; that was at once a safeguard of good conduct in the monarch
himself, and an assurance that he would educate his sons to be worthy of
succeeding him. But he left to them of right nothing save his personal
patrimony. The matter of his succession was decided by the people. Hereditary
rule had become a custom; but it was directly embodied in no statute, and it
derived its value solely from popular acquiescence. In later editions, indeed,
Hotman went further and explained how novel was the existing system of absolute
monarchy; the title of Majesty, for instance, was accorded to Kings only when
they presided over the national assembly. In the edition of 1586, Hotman admits
that hereditary succession has become an irrevocable method of royal choice;
but since Henry of Navarre had become heir to the French throne in the interval
between that date and the first edition, it is unnecessary to suspect any
profound explanation of the new emphasis.
Kingship for Hotman, then, has its roots in popular right. It is made by
the people, it exists for them. Popular right is not less ample in the
organisation of the kingdom. The best form of government is a mixed
constitution. That which enables the nobility to be a balance between the
competing forces of King and people best secures a régime of
liberty. Already, clearly, we have moved far from the facile echoes of
Seyssel's theories which had, in the half-century before Bartholomew, satisfied
Calvinist writers. This idea of a balance is, in Hotman's view, inherent in the
French system through the periodic convocation of the estates. It is to that
national assembly that final political control is accorded. It is the guardian
of the purpose of the state. Peace and war, the making of laws, nomination to
high office, all such matters as these are within its competence. It has
regulated the succession. It has prevented the undue alienation of the royal
demesne. Without its permission, no King could pardon offenders, or dismiss a
high functionary from office. It is, indeed, true that within more recent times
the age of popular control has passed, and that of government by lawyers has
taken its place. Instead of its national assembly, France is cursed with the
Parliament of Paris, a body which is no more than a usurping instrument of the
royal will, and, above all, an evil which has come to prominence through the
usurping power of Rome. But this is an innovation upon constitutional usage. By
right, the national assembly is the guardian of historic French liberties. It
was, moreover, supported by the existence of definite and large provincial
immunities the protection of which was the purpose of much fundamental law. So,
too, with municipal rights. Wherever, in brief, we find the material of popular
sovereignty, we find the basis of the French constitution. Its institutions are
the channel through which that theory runs; and, where it is obscured, it is
because innovation has thwarted its achievement.
The strength of Hotman's book lies not only in the real learning it
displays, but also in the very great ability with which it conceals the true
object of its polemic. In appearance, it seems to maintain no more than that
French absolutism was an historic novelty, and that the true constitution was
far more democratic in its operation. But in the process of its argument it is
able to buttress every dogma of the Hugenot creed by proving its origin in the
facts of French history. Bad Kings may be deposed; the nobility has a special
place in the political structure; women are excluded from a share in government
by the Salic law — a palpable hit, not only at Catharine de' Medici, but
also at contingent Spanish ambitions; the King must be carefully distinguished
from the state that the interest of the people may not be confounded with his
personal well-being; local autonomy is the root of political freedom —
especially, as in the instance detailed by Hotman, in Languedoc, where
Calvinism was especially strong; such provincial freedoms are safeguarded by
fundamental law. The whole apparatus of the edifice represented a formidable
weapon in the hands of Hotman's party. It made their opponents seem the
innovators, while they themselves appeared as the defenders of historic
constitutionalism.
Nor can the Catholic answers to the book be said to have disturbed its
central positions. Papire Masson, the royalist historian, could find no more
than invective as a retort to its argument.32 Matharel, one of the
writers whose fortune had been made by abject subservience to Catharine de'
Medici, attempted a refutation point by point;33 but he
lacked the knowledge necessary to his task, and was driven to rely upon abuse
of plaintiff's attorney. Zampini did, indeed, make Hotman's intransigent
position upon the Salic law appear an overemphasis; but he was overwhelmed in
the ridicule of Hotman's reply.34 The best answer came from a Paris
lawyer, Turrellus;35 but he could do little more than demonstrate
that Hotman had, in a variety of places, refined unduly. It is not, on the
whole, untrue to say that the Franco-Gallia remained the classic
exposition of early French institutions until, in the second quarter of the
nineteenth century, Augustin Thierry began their scientific study. Attacks in
which Matharel and others sought to show the evil effects of popular rule were,
of course, beside the point; for Hotman had chosen to occupy different
ground.
It was to the question of the validity of popular right that the
Vindiciae contra Tyrannos was addressed. Immediately, it appears
probable that the work of Hotman had more effect; in the long run, the greater
interest of Mornay's pamphlet is as certain as its greater influence. So,
similarly, the scholastic involutions of Occam's Dialogus had interested
his generation far more than the direct brevity of the Defensor Pacis.
But just as the very width of Marsiglio's generalisations gave them a more
permanent influence than the labyrinthine theses of Occam, so because Mornay
summarised the result of the conflict with telling simplicity, it was to his
arguments that a later age turned.
The Vindiciae deals directly with the four great questions of the
time. Are subjects bound to obey princes if they command that which is contrary
to the law of God? Is it lawful to resist a prince who infringes the law of
God, and ruins the Church, and, if so, who ought to resist him, by what means,
and how far should resistance extend? Is it lawful to resist a prince who ruins
the state, and, if so, to whom should the organisation of resistance, its means
and limits, be confided? Are neighbouring princes bound by law to help the
subjects of princes who afflict them either for the cause of religion or in the
practice of tyranny? To the first question, the Vindiciae responds in
the negative. It is clear from the authority of Scripture and the example of
the martyrs that the commands of God merit obedience before any orders from an
earthly prince. Nor is this situation altered by the fact that princes claim to
rule by divine right. The earth is the possession of the Lord, and Kings reign
only by his will; one must then obey them only to the degree that they obey the
commands of their master. The King is a vassal like any other vassal; he is,
therefore, bound by a contract. Should he break its terms, diffidatio
ensues, as it would in any other case. The establishment of Kingship, in fact,
clearly involves a double contract. There is a contract between God, on the one
hand, and the King upon the other; there is a contract also between the King
and the people. Clearly again, therefore, whatever binds the King binds the
people also; and should the King fail in his duty, the people must not -forget
its obligations. To obey its earthly master in preference to obedience from God
is to invoke the punishment of heaven. For when men fail to obey the laws of
God they are expelling him from his Kingdom. The King is instituted only to
secure the better observance of those laws, and, when he fails, his sin ought
not to involve popular acquiescence. That, indeed, is the true rebellion. It is
as though men obeyed an officer rather than the express ordinance of the King
himself. When subjects refuse to give their conscience into evil keeping, they
obey the true source of right. For there are, as Cicero said, degrees of duty,
of which the highest belongs to God, and the second only to one's country; just
as in the civil law treason, though it be a heinous crime, is inferior in
wickedness to wrongdoing. Nor do the Apostles write otherwise. It is one thing
to refuse obedience to a command which infringes the will of God. Whether one
ought to organise resistance to a prince who seeks to infringe it and attack
the Church seems, at first sight, a more difficult and complex question.
Yet in appearance only. For the people have, jointly with the prince,
made a contract with God. They are like a debtor who has a joint obligation to
pay a certain sum; should the other party fail, the entire debt falls upon the
remaining signatory. Just as the Jewish people was bound to God, and was warned
by the prophets of its duty whenever Kings strayed from the divine path, so
also is the Christian people bound. The contract has always involved a popular
obligation. Too much danger was risked in committing the custody of the Church
to a single person. A people affected to true religion will, therefore, feel
itself driven both to reprove, and, if need be, to repress a prince who would
destroy it, for they will know that in neglecting to perform this duty, they
make themselves guilty of the same crime, and will merit, as they will receive,
the same punishment. But to say that a whole people must resist does not mean
that so many headed a monster as the multitude has the duty of revolt. By the
people is meant their chosen magistrates who represent, and mirror within
themselves, the will of the nation. It is their business to restrain the
encroachments of the prince and, in the last instance, to exercise a final
control. Every well-ordered kingdom has an authority of this kind, commissioned
to speak in its name. It is Composed of the natural heads of the state, and,
once they decide to act, whatever they will is good, granted only a worthy
object as the purpose of their decision. Nor need they hesitate to act, even
when, as in the case of the Maccabees, the whole nation is against them. The
contract that binds the whole people binds its parts also, just as in Germany
each prince and free city is separately bound in fealty to the empire. When a
city or a prince refuses obedience in such a case, it absolves itself from
membership of what is, in fact, simply an assembly of brigands rather than of
Christian men. For where there is no justice, there is no commonwealth, since
justice is the virtue which gives to each his own; yet here, by definition, the
prince is depriving God of his heritage. So the Sorbonne and the Parliament of
Paris sanctioned the decision of Philip the Fair to cease connection with the
papacy of Boniface VIII when the latter sought unduly to extend his
prerogative; so, also, the Assembly of the French Church refused to obey the
schismatic pope, Benedict XIII. It is high treason against the divine authority
for men in positions of trust to act otherwise.
But what engages the community as a whole through the persons of its
magistrates does not similarly bind the private citizen. Unless he is
specifically called by authority to revolt, his allotted task is passive
resistance only. For what is required of the whole does not bind each unit of
the whole in its private aspect; what, on the contrary, the Scriptures enjoin
upon the private citizen is that he shall put his sword into his scabbard. He
must do as the faithful did when Jeroboam abolished the service of the true
God, and suffer voluntary exile. It is only when the official call comes that
he is permitted to resist by force. If each man were to follow his own
conscience, there would result not only confusion, but the fatal deception
which comes from man's willingness to mistake his private desire for the will
of heaven. When the call does come, the citizen need not fear that the use of
arms is unlawful. The number of good princes who have by force of arms defended
the service of God against the pagan is infinite. The Apostle himself has told
us that the magistrate does not bear the sword in vain; to what better use
could he devote it than to the service of the true faith? Even more, it is his
duty to take to himself every weapon that may fortify the vine of Christ
against the wild boar of the forest that seeks to uproot and devour it. It is
his business to be armed for virtue.
The case, therefore, is clear, where the interests of God are directly
in question. The magistrates may authorise resistance by force to the prince
who seeks injury against the true church. Are the same principles applicable
when the interests concerned are of a purely temporal character? Here we meet
the central problem of politics — the general nature of the obedience due
to princes. The latter are instituted by God. But they owe their power to the
people, and they exist only that they may bear upon their shoulders the main
burdens of the commonwealth. The choice of a King is a matter everywhere of
popular election; and even though hereditary succession has long been the
general custom, the ceremony of the coronation, in particular its oath, remains
to show that Kingship rests upon popular choice. The King, therefore, is the
delegate of the people for specific functions. The people is greater than the
King, and he can have no power save that which it confers upon him in the
purpose of his institution. The consent of the people is like the base of the
Rhodian Colossus; when it is withdrawn the statue crashes into the dust. And,
as with the prince, so with the officers of the Kingdom. They are the servants,
not of the King, but of the people. Their nomination derives from the authority
of the state, and they are charged to protect, not the personal interest of the
prince, but the public interest of all. Once, indeed, they consulted the whole
people; now they are bound only to obey its representatives. It is true that
officials have, in recent times, seemed to possess only the shadow of their
former power. But the development of princely absolutism is not effective
against popular right; time cannot confer a prescription against the
people.
Popular sovereignty is therefore the basis of royal power. How far does
that power extend? Since an institution is good only to the degree to which it
fulfils the purpose of its existence, it is from the scrutiny of the latter
that the limits of royal authority may be ascertained. But in so speaking we
make absolutism impossible; for it is with limits that we seek the foundations
of power. It is with limits because men are by nature apt to the love of
liberty, and it is sufficiently obvious that Kingship is maintained because,
and only because, they believe in the benefit it confers. What they sought in
its establishment was safety from external attack, on the one hand, and
freedom, on the other, from the internal conflict which results from the
institution of property. The business of the King is thus to make war, if need
be, and to render justice. He must preside over the courts, and see to it that
the law is supreme there. The maintenance of the law is the very soul of his
function. But he does not create it; he merely gives it support. Law is the
embodiment of reason, and so free from the human passions, to which he is
subject. To the law, within which, let it be noted, are comprised the liberties
of towns and provinces, every King must give obedience. Should he abrogate the
law, it can only be on condition that the people, or their natural leaders, are
consulted and acquiesce. He cannot punish, save in accordance with law. He
cannot otherwise pardon. He can dispose of the private property of his subjects
only as the law permits. Nor, similarly, can he alienate the royal demesne; he
has its usufruct, but he is not its owner. He has its usufruct to maintain the
state of his office, just as he has taxes for war and other public needs. He
is, in short, merely the administrator of the royal demesne. He has the same
power over it as a bishop over the property of his diocese. He is the trustee
of a temporary possession, but a trustee who may always be held accountable for
an abuse of trust. Accountability, in fact, is inherent in the nature of his
function; for a people which sought safety would not submit itself, in any
absolute fashion, to the caprice of a man endowed with the same passions as
ordinary humanity. To leave him free to make laws or confiscate private
property at will would make his relations to his subjects that of a conqueror
to the enemies he has laid low.
Every Kingdom, indeed, bears witness to the truth of this conception;
for in every Kingdom there is some sort of covenant between prince and people.
The ancient Kings of Burgundy swore to protect all men in their rights
according to law and justice. The ceremony of coronation in Aragon not only
implied a higher majesty in the commonwealth than in the crown, but also
implied, should the coronation oath be broken, the exemption of the subject
from allegiance. But two sorts of tyrants must be distinguished. There is the
usurper whose power has no basis in right. He invades the country of his
neighbours in the sheer lust for dominion, or he may, by corruption and deceit,
worm his way to the throne. Sometimes the usurper has been, like Julius
Cæsar, a popular general; sometimes it has been a woman who has intruded
her presence into a government from which she is excluded by law. Such a tyrant
may be killed by the simple citizen without the authority of the magistrate;
for in combating one who stands by definition outside all categories of law, it
is life and liberty in their elementary terms that he is concerned to defend.
The second form of tyrant is the prince who, though reigning by legal title,
neglects the contract to which he is bound by the terms of his inception. His
proper treatment is a more difficult matter than in the first case. We must
make allowances for the fact that, being a man, he is likely to err. We must
therefore first seek, by reasonable means, to lead him to the path of right.
The wisdom of a senate may well enable a naturally Weak prince to govern well.
But when, of set purpose, the prince is determined to pervert justice and
equity, force must be used against him; and it is the officers and nobles of
the Kingdom whose business it then is to exact a remedy. That is the reason for
their existence, and if they fail, they share in his crimes. In destroying his
tyranny, they act on behalf of the state. They protect the humble who, in this
instance, have no function save that of resignation, against the wrongs he
would commit. They secure the observance of the contract he has made with the
state. As a general council may be summoned to protect the Church from the
consequence of papal crime, so must the officers of the Kingdom ever remember
that if the King has the first place in the realm, theirs is the second. And
they are a second who may become the first, for they are the reserve power of
the Commonwealth.
There remains the final question of the prince who sees the citizens of
another country oppressed either for religious or political causes. What duty
is laid upon him? In matters of religion, there can be no doubt that he is
morally bound to intervene. For there is only one true Church, of which Jesus
Christ is the head. Should its members be injured, the whole Church
participates in the harm and sorrow which result. And since the care of the
Church is recommended to the charge of Christian princes in general, they must
not merely amplify and extend its boundaries where they can, but also, and in
all places, preserve it against attack. So Josias expelled idolatry from the
Kingdom of Israel, even though he was then in subjection to Assyria; so
Constantine executed Licinius for his persecution of the Christians, so Moses
bound certain tribes beyond the Jordan to aid the Israelites against their
enemies, and pronounced an anathema against them if they should fail. Nor is
the case less clear in civil matters. Princes are, after all, men, and the
duties of humanity are fit and convenient for them. A private citizen is called
upon to help a neighbour who is beset by evil men; how much more, then, is it
incumbent upon a prince to act in similar fashion? If he finds a commonwealth
grovelling upon the floor, let him raise it to its former eminence. It may well
be that his private interest persuades him to stand aside; but nothing so much
becomes a man, even more a prince, so to dispose his actions that his private
interests give place to public need. No prince would hesitate to give
assistance to a brother monarch in distress; how much the more readily, then,
should he aid a whole people, when the affliction of many is so clearly the
cause of a greater pity. Charity challenges him to the relief of the oppressed,
as justice requires that a tyrant be compelled to reason.
IV
In the sixteenth century there are two main forms of political doctrine,
of which the République of Bodin and the Vindiciae of
Duplessis-Mornay are perhaps the best examples. In the one, the main effort is
to find a juristic basis for raison d'etat. The root of political wisdom
is therefore an unlimited sovereignty which makes a command into law by the
mere supremacy of the person from whom it emanates. The true example of law is
therefore that positive enactment which is embodied in legislation. The
essential thing is that the command shall be supreme, irresponsible, and
unhindered by the scrutiny of conditions. It is true that reference is made by
Bodin to laws of nature, of God, and of nations by which the ruler is
bound;36 but, as Hobbes was later to point out, since the prince is
the only person who can, in this context, enforce obedience to them, the
essence of the theory is the unlimited nature of the sovereign power. The real
result is to separate ethics from politics, and thus to complete by theoretical
means the division which Machiavelli had effected on practical grounds. The
state becomes supreme upon its own territory, and the expression of its will is
law. And the attempt to introduce moral limitations upon the exercise of that
will becomes clearly impossible. All associations become contingent upon its
pleasure; and right is to be defined as that which the sovereign permits.
Jus est quod jussum est becomes the definition of the state. The
characteristic of an organised political community is the existence within it
of an authority which is not only habitually obeyed, but is itself beyond the
reach of authority.37 Right becomes, so to speak, pluralised into
rights; it is no longer the reflection of a universal good, but a series of
privileges to be discovered in the statute-book. The state must be obeyed upon
the simple ground that it is a state.
It is easy to understand the attractiveness of this theory to the age
which enunciated it. The medieval prince was only a greater noble whose power
was limited on every side by the special immunities of church and feudalism.
The age of the Renaissance brought changes so swift and catastrophic that men
welcomed any authority which guarded, or seemed to guard, the possibility of
order against the flood tide of anarchy. Its attractiveness was intensified
when, as with Henry VIII, the sovereignty of the state could find its
incarnation in a prince whose power was immediate and obvious. Here was
something, as Barclay always insisted, which, however evil when it entails
tyranny, is nevertheless superior to the evils which insurrection brings in its
train. The theory of Bodin may not have meant the realisation of abstract
right, any more than the existence of the courts implies the realisation of
justice; but it implied the existence of certainty. Men had learned from the
previous age rather to be content with an imperfect good than to seek the
texture of that perfect commonwealth upon the substance of which so few of them
were agreed.
The doctrine of the Vindiciae starts from the antithetic
standpoint. It is with the establishment of abstract right that it is
throughout concerned. By abstract right it means, at bottom, the will of God;
and everything is illegitimate which transgresses its substance. Where Bodin,
therefore, is concerned with the irresponsibility of supreme power,
Duplessis-Mornay is concerned with its limitations. Where Bodin seeks to show
that rights are the creatures of the sovereign will, rights, in the other view,
are the reflection of right and therein is to be found the only true source of
sovereign power. To Bodin, therefore, the thing of main importance is simply
whether the enacting authority is, in the given instance, competent to act in
the way it has acted with the inference that if the authority is the sovereign,
it is competent without further scrutiny. To Duplessis-Mornay, on the other
hand, the crucial point is not the wilier, but the substance of the thing
willed; and if that substance, when it contradicts divine law, is maintained,
it must be resisted at all costs. In the strictly political sense, therefore,
there is really in the Vindiciae no such thing as sovereignty at all. We
are given right and power; and rebellion is interposed to mark the extreme
limit of divergence between them. Power does not carry with it any political
connotation. It is there because God and the people so will it; but the people
which created it is morally obliged to scrutinise its operation, and they must
overthrow it in the event of abuse.
The hold of the Vindiciae upon not merely its own, but the later
generations which absorbed its substance, was, of course, the fact that it gave
an obvious means of resisting what any given group of men might choose to
regard as oppression. Revolution was, in that age, the only weapon to oppose to
religious intolerance; and to men who were being taught by lawyers and learned
men that the fiat of the state was enough, it seemed to place rebellion upon
the ground of right. To the Politiques' cry of convenience it replied with a
plea of moral duty; and when that plea was surrounded by a religious atmosphere
passionately felt, it was sufficient to convince. Nor must it be forgotten
that, in the strict realm of theory, Bodin was the innovator and
Duplessis-Mornay the guardian of traditional doctrine. For his views of the
ground of obedience sprang full-grown from the noble medieval concept of the
world as governed by natural law. What he was doing for his readers was to
refer the actions of the state to the test of an eternal reason which sprang
from God and was instinct with his will; all other laws than this were
therefore secondary because they sprang from fallible men. When Bodin and,
later, Hobbes were striving to make of law simply the command of a sovereign
power, they were running counter, as their opponents at once recognised, to the
whole burden of medieval notions. Duplessis-Mornay was insisting that important
as is civil society, and not a little of his influence comes from his emphasis
upon its importance, there are interests higher than those of the state for
which no sacrifice is too much. Government, for him, is thus ultimately a
theocracy; and it follows that when the human administrator is in conflict with
the divine ruler, the citizen can really have no hesitation as to where his
obedience must lie.
It is, of course, easy to criticise the structure upon which the
Vindiciae depends. It does not explain the origins of the state.
Buchanan and Mariana apart, indeed, it is a capital fault in all the
Monarchomachs that they assume the existence of the state and then explain its
primary assumptions in terms for which they offer no historic warranty. For
their dependence upon the theory of a social contract lays them open to all the
objections raised since the time of Hume to that disastrous hypothesis. Nor is
that all. The whole view of the Vindiciae is built upon the assumption
that it is the duty of the magistrate to represent the popular idea of right;
but it has nowhere any rigorous examination of the representative principle.
The Vindiciae, indeed, makes the people sovereign, but in such a fashion
as to make its supremacy meaningless save where it is governed by a tyrant who
has usurped his power. It is represented by magistrates; but it is admitted
that as a matter of contemporary fact, the magistrate has his commission from
the very ruler he is supposed to control. No one, in fact, can read the
Vindiciae without being impressed by the meagreness of its concessions
to the people. The latter is an originating but not an active agency.
Duplessis-Mornay shares to the full the characteristic Hugenot contempt for the
people. He is like a whig aristocrat of the eighteenth century who welcomes
popular support but does not concede to it a share in government. He identifies
the people with the state; but the only purpose of the people is to serve as an
agency of origin which justifies the resistance of the aristocracy to what they
consider an abuse of power. He is not, like Althusius, writing an ample theory
of the state. Clearly, at the back of his mind there is the single problem of
religious oppression. He sees that the principles he lays down apply to civil
not less than to ecclesiastical problems; but he is not anxious unduly to
enlarge their boundaries. Like all the Hugenots, he uses the Bible as the
obvious source of social truths; and it is not without significance that it is
the discussion of civil problems that is least grounded in biblical authority.
Probably, indeed, the secular aspect of oppression was for him essentially the
derivative of the religious; and it then becomes clear why Duplessis-Mornay
could, on the cessation of the latter, revert like Hotman to a belief in the
divine right of Kings.
Yet these limitations and inconsistencies impair neither the
impressiveness nor the influence of his book. Eighty years after his death a
German publicist could declare that he and Althusius more easily seduced men to
bad principles than any other writers.38 But the more immediate
heirs to his theories were not his friends, but his opponents, even if
democratic government was in a real sense his residuary legatee. For with the
death of the Duke of Anjou in 1584 Henry of Navarre became the heir apparent to
the French throne; and the certainty that a Hugenot King offered a greater
opportunity to the reformed religion than explorations into the realm of the
abstract, turned its adherents into thorough-going supporters of hereditary
right and the Salic Law. The defence of radicalism then passed into the hands
of the League and the Jesuits. What the former was striving to prove was the
theory that no heretic could ever be lawfully King of France; and it relied for
proof upon the doctrines of the Vindiciae. Just as the advocates of
papal dominion had always admitted that a papal heretic can always be deposed,
so do the advocates of the League urge that an heretical King is by definition
a tyrant and therefore by definition inacceptable. The literature in defence of
this position is more remarkable for its quantity than its quality. The
pamphlets of Louis d'Orléans, indeed, have some merit.39 The
sermons of Boucher explore with some eloquence the half-known hinterland of
invective. 40 The Dialogue du Manant et Maheustre shows that
behind the unworthy ambitions of the Guises and the preachers there was,
struggling for survival, a notion of theocracy that is not devoid of nobility.
41 Perhaps the most characteristic product of the Catholic
Monarchomachs is the True Power of a Christian State of Rossaeus. It is
usually attributed to that Rose, the fanatic bishop of Senlis, who is so
severely handled in the Satyre Ménippée; but, as Labitte
has shown, the grounds for any attribution are extremely slender, and it is
better, perhaps also kinder, to leave its authorship in the pale realm of
anonymity. 42
How dependent Rossaeus was upon the substance of the Vindiciae is
apparent from the merest summary of his teaching. He insists upon the
naturalness of civil government, which is inherent in the nature of men. But no
special form of government was established; the constitution of each society
has always been dependent upon the pleasure of the sovereign people. Where it
has established Kingship, it has always been upon the contractual basis of
retaining ultimate power in its own hands and defining that conceded to the
prince by the purpose he is to serve. The people can always modify the
government which depends upon its will; and it can even, if it pleases, abolish
monarchy altogether. The prince has no rights save those he possesses to fulfil
the purpose of his institution; and if he plays the tyrant he must be deposed.
Consultation of the people is fundamental, for the people has not parted with
its original freedom. What it has established, it builds only for the
attainment of good; once the King fails to secure it, his commission is clearly
revoked. But good cannot be secured without religion. Rossaeus does not mean by
religion any form of protestantism; either form is worse than paganism. Any
government, therefore, which fails to establish the Roman Catholic religion is,
ipso facto, illegitimate. A heretic King may, therefore, be deposed,
either by his own subjects, or by a foreign prince; for he is by definition a
tyrant since his heresy is incompatible with the maintenance of virtue.
Nor must the immediate background of Rossaeus be neglected. The
Vindiciae had pointed its moral for contemporary events by the
implications it contained; Rossaeus has no hesitation in saying openly what is
in his mind. Turks and Saracens have more rights than the Hugenots, who are
French only in the sense that a dog is called French. Henry IV can never be a
Christian King. He is the worst of traitors. As an excommunicate he can take no
oath; and the toleration he would establish is the first step on the road that
would lead to the recognition of Mahomedanism. He is a heretic, and all history
and scripture testify that it is legitimate to take up arms against him. He is
a tyrant, and the way to treat him was shown in the noble act of Jacques
Clement when he murdered Henry III in defence of the Church against the wicked
plots of the Politiques. The duty of all Frenchmen is to obey the call of the
League. It is supported by Spain; it has as members the Cardinal of Bourbon,
who is the rightful King, and the House of Lorraine. If Henry IV is maintained
in power, all property will be unsafe. The nobility will be merged in the
populace, and lose all influence and position; for Calvinism is incompatible
with Kingship and aristocracy. Its secret plan, indeed, is to make the
government of France like to that of Switzerland. It is already, in its
ecclesiastical organisation, an imperium in imperio; should it be
tolerated longer, the true France will perish.
Clearly enough, the Catholic and Protestant Monarchomachs approach the
same problem from different sides. Each party was hostile to the absolute state
in the one case because it presaged, in the other because it denied, religious
toleration. Each sought relief from its trammels in considerations of right;
and each sought to defend the maintenance of right by means of a social
contract derived from the sovereignty of the people. Each was at bottom
entirely indifferent to freedom. The Catholics aimed quite definitely at
persecution; and the real effort of the Hugenots was, as Rossaeus himself
pointed out, a desire to found such a Presbyterian tyranny as Calvin
established at Geneva or Knox in Scotland. Both, that is to say, failed to
grasp, as the Politiques had definitely grasped, the notion of the state as a
self-sufficient society of which the ethical roots were to be discovered within
and not without itself. With both, of course, the contingent implications are
far wider than the conscious purpose. Each of them was really puzzled by the
single problem of allegiance. They sought to deny the duty of obedience when it
involved results unfavourable to a given religion. To a philosophic theory of
the state neither could make pretence. Their weapons were too entirely at the
service of their desires for it to be as yet possible for them to attain that
degree of obstruction at which a philosophic view alone becomes possible. Yet
each was making generalisations which, in other hands, would move towards that
end. The Monarchomachs are summed up in Salamonius43 and Althusius
on the one side, and the Society of Jesus on the other. The Monarchomachs may
have failed to realise all the profits of their thought, but at least they
provided the materials for the next generation. The real inheritors of their
work are, in fact, the Jesuits and the English thinkers of the seventeenth
century; for the thought of the time is hardly national, but European, and the
two streams of doctrine blended into a common tradition. The Jesuits, of
course, had a different aim in view. As the chief agents of the
Counter-Reformation, and, in particular, the Spanish theory of it, they were no
more concerned with the roots of freedom than their predecessors. But they were
confronted with a Europe that was religiously heterogeneous; and they used the
Presbyterian hint of two societies, religious and secular, with concurrent
jurisdictions over the same persons as the clue to their purpose. From this
they are able to deduce the view of states as independent, equal, and sovereign
which, in the hands of Grotius, made possible the development of international
law. The independence, indeed, is never real; there is always, as in the famous
book of Bellarmine,44 the indirect power of the pope outside to
destroy its logical result. But they did, the needs of religion apart,
emphasise more completely than any other group of thinkers the fact that civil
society is a natural product of men's dispositions, that power is organised to
serve its purposes, and that power is, as a consequence, always popular in
origin that the purpose of its institution may be preserved. The Jesuits did
not get so far as Althusius in their sense of the corporateness of communities,
with the personality to which that corporateness gives rise, but they did see
that political power is the result of social facts and that it remains the
eternal possession of the people. The prince for them is always the mere
administrator of those institutions which fulfil the end of civil right, and
absolutism is ruled out as a priori impossible. They use the notion of a
social contract, but it has not, with them, as it has in the writings of the
Monarchomachs, anything like a primary importance. Their governing concept is
natural law. Power is always regarded as limited that eternal reason, which
popular sovereignty is held ultimately to embody, may correct the deficiencies
of its exercise.
It is clear that this is in the direct tradition of the
Vindiciae. It retains, of course, an ultimate religious perspective, and
the state is made as subservient to the ends of the Roman Church by the Jesuits
as it was made to minister to Hugenot demands by Beza and his disciples. Its
translation into a predominantly secular theory was mainly the result of the
Seventeenth-century struggle between King and Parliament in England. Of that
evolution John Locke supplied a magistral summary; and he did little, the
theory of toleration apart, but adapt the teachings of the Vindiciae to
an English atmosphere. With him, as with his predecessors, there is the same
suppression of the idea of sovereignty, the same confinement of the law-making
power within a previously defined area of capacity. Like them, too, Locke
thinks of the state as a human, even an artificial contrivance; he cannot
believe that man surrendered his rights to it save in terms of a previously
guaranteed return. Power for him is just as much a trust revocable on abuse, as
it is with the thinkers of the sixteenth century. He has the same dread of
absolutism, the same refusal to make the final nature of Social life depend
upon some naturally inherent and coordinating power in the state. The atomism
of the Vindiciae is, in fact, as notable in Locke as in the earlier
exponents of the contract theory. And not unnaturally, for with him also the
main purpose of the polemic is to set bounds to the power of government. The
absolutism of the sixteenth century was attacked because it was found to be
incompatible with freedom of religious belief, the prerogative of the
seventeenth found opponents in those who sought a larger degree of national
self-determination. But both ages found the defence of their position in the
concept of a state built upon the rights separately surrendered by individuals.
Those rights were a matter of contractual organisation; and for the state to
step outside the boundaries they defined was to deny the character of its
origin.
Practically, this is to say, the theory of the state upon which the
Vindiciae rests determined the character of political speculation from
the end of the sixteenth century until the advent of Rousseau. So long as the
aim of political philosophy was to outline the area of an abstract right
determined a priori as a field subtracted from the rights of
individuals, the Monarchomachic tradition exhausted the requirements of a
liberal outlook. Prynne and Rutherford45 both drew their nourishment
from this source; and the ideas of the Levellers rest upon a kindred
foundation. Through Locke, it is at the base of the thought of Price and
Priestley; through Locke, also, it supplies the perspective of the American
Revolution. And Locke himself derived the substance of his ideas from the
French thinkers of the Counter-Reformation. He drew upon Grotius and
Puffendorf, who are, in turn, dependent upon the Monarchomachic school. The
other great formative influence in Locke is Hooker's Ecclesiastical
Polity; and if its eighth book is an attempt at refutation of the
Vindiciae,46 that is itself sufficient to show that it is an
essential source of early English radicalism.
After Rousseau, the situation changes because the foundation of
political thought is different. That new theories had been born did not, of
course, involve the disappearance of the tradition embodied in the
Vindiciae; but it involved its transformation to new purposes. For the
Social Contract introduces the notion of an organic state; the rights of
the individual are superseded by the theory of corporate personality. That
revival of Platonist doctrine was, in the long run, a death-blow to the atomism
of the earlier school. It made the state not, as with the Vindiciae, the
artificial contrivance of men, but a society which supplied human nature with
its essential penumbra. If Rousseau lays excessive emphasis upon the degree to
which man must be read in a state-context, that was the natural reaction from
the individualism of Locke.
Nor was Rousseau the only corrective that outlook was to receive. With
Hume and Bentham theories of abstract right gave place to theories of concrete
utility; and the idea of a social contract did not survive the assault they
made upon it. The discovery Bentham owed to Holbach that the creative power of
the state lies in legislation — a theory built upon the Esprit des
Lois — added a substance to the theory of politics which had been
previously absent. For legislation meant the possibility of deliberate
innovation, and that nation was qualitatively different from the declaration of
a priori rightness which lies at the bottom of Monarchomachic doctrine.
Utilitarianism, in brief, brought in the time-spirit as the permanent and
conscious background of political philosophy; and there is a chasm which cannot
be bridged between rights regarded as the product of utility, and rights, as
with the Vindiciae, that have their basis in an eternal right which
escapes the categories of space and time.
This does not, indeed, mean that the Monarchomachs were mistaken in the
perception their work enshrines. At the bottom of their argument is an emphasis
which no political philosophy can afford to neglect. In part, it is the
realisation that every state is built upon the consciences of men. Within each
individual mind there are reserves into which no organising power can hope to
penetrate. For the Vindiciae those reserves were, from the nature of its
problem, mainly religious in nature, but the concept is a general one, and it
applies to the spiritual outlook of every citizen. In part, also, it is the
insistence that the state exists to secure for its members some agreed minimum
of civilisation. Wherein that minimum consists will, of course, depend upon the
character of each age. What only is certain is that the deprivation of certain
things deemed good, will, at some given time, lead to the onset of resistance.
Natural rights and a social contract raise, as historic concepts, far more
difficulties than they solve. But it is important to bear in mind that they
are, at the same time, the reflection of ideas upon which the successful
working of every state depends.
They are the attempt, in fact, of men who feel that they are being
deprived of that which gives to social life its meaning, to insist upon the
remedy of their grievance. The social contract is an effort to provide such an
institutional channel as will secure that the consent of the mass, and not the
arbitrary will of a few, is the creative factor in the making of social
tradition. Natural rights are the demands for the fulfilment of certain
conditions without which an important fragment of the state ceases to feel
loyalty to its institutions. However we phrase their substance, an answer to
the problems they raise is integral to an adequate political philosophy. Nor
may we neglect the important sense in which even the atomism of this outlook
has its value. For to whatever degree society may absorb its members, it is, in
their experience, ultimately interstitial in character. No theory of the state
is satisfactory which does not realise that man is a solitary creature not less
than social. The problem of allegiance is, therefore, in any final analyses, an
individual problem. The law may resolve, and attach sanctions to its
resolution; but the decision that is made takes place, if it is a real
decision, separately in the mind of each member of the state. This has, of
course, been seen by all men who have, at periods of crisis, been driven to
challenge the foundations of a social system. It was true of Luther, it was
true of Lamennais, of Dollinger and of Tyrrell. Perhaps, indeed, no better test
of institutional adequacy can be found than the degree in which it leaves room
for the free play of conscience; for no world is worth preserving which cannot
utilise its Athanasius. Some such conclusion as this is, it is clear, implied
in the experience of the sixteenth century. At that time the conscience
involved, the rights demanded, were mainly religious in texture. Yet it is
rather the emphasis than the nature of the problem that has shifted. The
reconciliation of authority with freedom, the decision as to what things a
creative freedom must embody, are not less pressing in the twentieth century
than they were at the time of the Reformation.
V
The authorship of the Vindiciae has been for three centuries a
matter of learned dispute; and it cannot be said that any certainty has been
attained in the matter. Until the publication of Bayle's article in the
Dictionnaire Critique,47 it was usual to assume that
Duplessis-Mornay, the counsellor of Henry IV, was its author, though other
attributions, most notably that to Theodore Beza, were not wanting. The latter,
indeed, was a very popular theory with English royalist writers of the
seventeenth century, since it afforded additional evidence of the natural and
inherent disloyally of the Presbyterians.48 Bayle did not, indeed,
state definitely that Languet was the author of the Vindiciae; but he
constructed an able and impressive case against any other attribution. He
pointed out that Agrippa d'Aubigné, a contemporary witness, definitely
states that Languet was the author; and that where, in his first edition of
1616, he had been discreet, in the second there is simple
affirmation.49 He quotes also a supposed remark of Goulart, an
indefatigable controversialist of the time, to the effect that the work was
Languet's; but this testimony is weakened by the fact that the remark does not
come directly from Goulart, but is attributed to him by Tronchin, the author of
his funeral sermon.50 He points out, further, that if
Duplessis-Mornay was the author of the book, he wrote at an early age an essay
of remarkable ability; the implication being that its composition seems more
suited to the maturity of Languet. Bayle certainly destroys any other
possibility than the alternative between Languet and his younger friend. He
shows clearly that there is no basis whatever for the belief that the
Vindiciae was due to Beza, or Hotman, or, as an English tradition
suggested, the Jesuit Robert Parsons.51 This last theory, indeed,
can only be based upon the assumption that as Parsons wrote many books
anonymously attacking legitimate Kingship, the Vindiciae might
reasonably be laid also to his charge.
Bayle's tentative view held the field for nearly two centuries. At the
end of that time the theory that Duplessis-Mornay was the real author was urged
independently both in France and Germany.52 It was impossible to
deny the positive statement of d'Aubigné. But there was the remark of
Grotius, who, as Bayle says, "knew almost all that passed in the republic of
letters," on the other side.53 And even d'Aubigné's positive
assertion is not beyond doubt, for in the first edition of his work he had
ascribed to "a learned gentleman of the Kingdom," a phrase much more applicable
to Duplessis-Mornay, who was a French subject, than to Languet, who was the
servant of a foreign sovereign. There are, moreover, two pieces of testimony
which go to outweigh any other evidence we have. The Academician Conrart knew
an acquaintance of Duplessis-Mornay. The latter, it appears, kept among his
books a cabinet in which his own writings were preserved; and the friend had
seen the Vindiciae among those writings.54 This can, at the
least, be set against the supposed witness of Goulart; and, as M. Waddington
urges, it is difficult to escape the implications of an express statement of
Madame Duplessis-Mornay. She wrote her reminiscences, as she tells us, that her
son might know what manner of man his father was, and, if her Protestantism is
ardent, the value of her evidence is beyond all question.55 She
writes that her husband was the author of an essay on la puissance
légitime d'un prince sur son peuple, which is practically the title
of the translation of the Vindiciae issued in French in
1581.56 There is no other work of Duplessis-Mornay's to which this
can refer. There was no special point, at the time when Madame Duplessis-Mornay
prepared her reminiscences, in claiming authorship for her husband; rather, in
the circumstances of the period, it was an invitation to calumny if she
intended her work to be published. If, still more, she wrote only for the eyes
of her son, it is even clearer that she had no motive in not telling the truth.
Until, then, evidence of equal weight be produced upon the other side, the
balance of probability would appear to lean decisively towards the authorship
of Duplessis-Mornay.
Nor can there be any doubt of his literary capacity for the work. His
theological writing apart, his statesmanlike insight into the problems of his
time made him, Sully apart, the most trusted of Henry IV's advisers. His
ability to write under an aspect not his own is shown by his Exhortation
à la Paix of 1574, written as an appeal by a moderate Catholic to
his co-religionists;57 and his Remonstrance aux Estats of
1576, a plea to the Estates of Blois for peace, was published under a similar
guise.58 He may, indeed, almost be called the professional advocate
of Henry IV; and if the tone of the Vindiciae is markedly different from
his other writings, it may be suggested that, theology apart, it was the only
essay addressed to the Hugenots, and the only one in which his effort was
rather to encourage his friends than to persuade his opponents. Evidence of
style is notoriously deceptive; but the stern eloquence of the Vindiciae
seems to fit, not merely his other polemical works, but also the rugged
severity of his character. Nor is it worthless to note that, like much else of
his work, the Vindiciae displays in quotation a profound acquaintance
with Scripture. That is a trait markedly absent from the writings of Languet.
The latter's polished Latinity is very different from the simplicity of the
Vindiciae's diction.
The translation here reprinted was published in London by Robert Baldwin
in 1689. It is an anonymous translation, and appears to be an exact
reproduction of an earlier one published in the not less significant year of
1648. Its Latin dress apart, indeed, the Vindiciae has a fairly
consecutive English history which bears testimony to the favour with which it
was received. It was printed entire in 158159 and 1589; in 1588 the
fourth question appeared separately as A short Apologie for Christian
Soldiers — obviously as a defence of English assistance to the Dutch
rebels. A translation appeared in 1622, and a reprint of 1631 appears as
Vindiciae Religionis, perhaps as an invitation to English Puritans to
throw off the yoke of Stuart despotism. There were further editions in 1648,
1660, and 1689. In a century, that is, the Vindiciae was reprinted,
either in whole or in part, no less than eight times; and each year of its
appearance has a special import directly related to its text. No translator of
any of these editions is known. Yet it is perhaps a service due to a
picturesque legend to note that the copy in the British Museum of the edition
of 1648 attributes the work to one William Walker of Darnel, near Sheffield,
who cut off the head of Charles I.60 The anonymous commentator was
perhaps drawing upon a fervid imagination; but the destruction of the Stuarts
was not unconnected with the Vindiciae contra Tyrannos.
1 A short Treatise of Politique
Power.
2 De jure Regni Apud
Scotos.
3Cf. my Authority in the Modern
State, p. 367.
4Cf. Lippmann, Public Opinion,
pp. 79 ff.
5Cf. my Political Thought from
Locke to Bentham, pp. 147 ff.
6Cf. C. H. McIlwain, Political
Works of James I. Introduction.
7Bk. IV, c. i. Cf. Bk. V, c.
xvii-xix.
8 La Grande Monarchie de
France.
9 Premier et Second Livre des
Dignités (ed. cf. 1560), p. 4. This is only one of many
similar works on royal authority, of which those of Budé, Bréche,
and d'Espence are the best known. Their publication continued right through the
civil wars.
10Mémoires de Condé, I,
p. 353. Epistée envoiée au Tigre de la France.
11Mémoires de Condé,
II, p. 424.
12Réponse aux Remontrances
(1561).
13Tommaseo, Relations des Ambassadeurs
Vénitiens, I, p. 537.
14Cf. Labitte, La
Démocratie chez les Prédicateurs de la Ligue, for the best
discussion of their influence.
15Cassander, De officio pu
tranquillitatis (1561).
16Conseil à la France
Désolée (1562).
17La Papimanie de France
(1567).
18Mémoires des occasions de la
guerre (1567).
19Remontrance salutaire aux
dévoyés (1567).
20Avertissement à la Noblesse
(1568).
21Commentaires, II, p.
362.
22Discours sur la Pacification
(1568).
23Mémoires, Vol. II (1824), p.
70.
24See Lord Acton's magistral article, The
History of Freedom, p. 161.
25On the whole question of the Contr'
Un see D'Annaingaud: Montaigne Pamphlétaire.
26On this book and its influence see A.
Cartier, in Bull. Soc. d'Hist. et d'Archéol. de Genève,
II, iv, 1900.
27Discours sur les moyens de bien
gouverner (1579).
28Mémoires sur l'état de
France sous Charles IX, II, p. 239.
29On this and the following pamphlets see
the bibliographical details in H. Hauser, Les Sources de l'Histoire de
France, VIII, pp. 247 f.
30Cf. Hauser, op. cit., p.
250.
31Ibid.
32Judicium Papiri Massont de libello
Hotmanni.
33Ad Franco-Galliam Responsio
(1575).
34Monitoriale adversus ... anti
francogalliam (1575).
35Contra Othomani Francogalliam
libellus (1576).
36Bodin also refers to a limitation induced
by leges imperii and refers to the Salic Law as an example of them.
These also, he argues, the prince cannot touch. It is difficult to see why; and
it is probable that Bodin is merely making an inconsistent concession to the
controversies of the moment. See some good remarks in Dunning, Political
Theories from Luther to Montesquieu, p. 101; also Pollock, History of
the Science of Politics (1912), p. 54.
37 Cf. my Foundations of
Sovereignty, Chapter I, esp. pp. 16 f.
38In 1661 Archbishop Bramhall was making a
similar attack. See the Serpent Salve: Collected Works, III, pp. 388
ff., esp. pp. 301, 325, 395.
39See especially his Premier et Second
Avertissements (1586).
40Sermons de la Simulée
Conversion (1594), and compare with these Portals, Cinq Sermons de la
Simulée Conversion (1594).
41Cf. Figgis, From Gerson to
Grotius, Lect. V; and Tilley, Studies m the French Renaissance, p.
315.
42Cf. Labitte, op. cit., p.
295-304.
43Patritii Romani de principatus,
lib, VI (1578). See Figgis in Proc. Roy. Hist. Soc. (1897), Vol. XI,
p. 89.
44De Romano Pontifice; Tractatus de
Potestate Summi Pontificis. Cf. McIlwain, op. cit., pp. 32 ff.
45In his Lex Rex (1644).
46Cf. Works, Vol. II (ed. of 1845),
esp. pp. 499 f.
47(Edition of 1820) Vol. XV, pp. 124
ff.
48Cf. for instance Philanax
Anglicus — Showing Plainly that it is impossible to be at the same time
Presbyterians and not Rebels. By T. B., 1663, pp. 15 f.
49Histoire Universelle, 11, 17, 124;
11, 2, 3, p. 670.
50Voetius, Selectarum Disputationum,
1667, IV, pp. 231-4.
51See Bayle, op. cit., Vol. XV, p.
145, N. xx.
52Waddington in Revue Historique
(1893), Vol. LI; Lossen, Les Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, 1887. See also
A. Elkan, Die Publizistik der Bartholomausnacht, 1904, for a full
discussion of the whole matter.
53Opera (ed. of 1679), V, p.
949.
54Opera, p. 328.
55See Hauser, Les Sources de l'Histoire
de France, VIII, pp. 59-60.
56The exact French title is De la
puissance légitime sur le peuple. I do not discuss here the vexed
question of the date of composition (probably 1574-6), or of publication which
Lossen has shown was almost certainly 1579.
57Cf. Elkan, op.
cit.
58Reprinted in Mémoires de
Ligue, 11, 113. Many other pamphlets by him are scattered over the volumes
of this collection.
59This edition seems to have been printed in
Amsterdam.
60This William Walker seems unknown to any
authority; and I cannot find any trace of him in Yorkshire
histories.
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