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royal authority. Like all supreme magistrates, the king was believed to hold his power from God and to be ultimately answerable to God. He was described as absolute despite the constraints on his powers, because as head of both church and state he was not accountable to any outside potentate. The meshing of religion and politics in the early modern era had a significant theoretical and constitutional impact. The king’s position in the state church meant any alienation from that church could affect his subjects’ loyalty to him. After the pope excommunicated Henry VIII, English Catholics were freed from their oaths of obedience. They were urged to work toward the conversion or overthrow of the Protestant monarch. On the other side of the Christian spectrum, English Presbyterians and Independents desired a more independent, more radical, English church. The Church of England saw itself as a vital prop of the Crown. Its leading clergy were royal appointees. When the Stuart kings began to embrace absolutist notions, clerics who exalted monarchy and preached absolute obedience to the king were promoted. Dissenters of both the Catholic right and the Calvinist left, on the other hand, found it necessary to seek religious and philosophical justification for their religious opposition and, in extremis, for political resistance as well.²⁶

      In ordinary times, the flexibility in the constitution and relative moderation of the church kept government and community in tolerable harmony. But the system had no sure way to prevent a monarch intent upon becoming absolute from doing so, or any remedy for a king who, as James I put it, “leaves to be a king, and degenerates into a tyrant.” It was a dilemma that would haunt the men and women of the 1640s, 1650s, 1660s, and 1680s and force the issue of sovereignty to the fore. Scripture was an uncertain guide. It admonished men to “render unto Caesar the Things that are Caesar’s and unto God the Things that are God’s,” but not what to do when Caesar’s commands opposed God’s. Different Protestant denominations had different answers. English Puritans had inherited a Calvinist “ideological armory” that permitted defense against a godless monarch if it were led by magistrates.²⁷ Of course, if the king behaved like a tyrant, it could be argued he was no longer king. His subjects were then released from their oaths of loyalty, and religious teachings on obedience did not apply. Resistance was not rebellion. This position, royalists would repeatedly point out, resembled the Catholic notion that a monarch could be deposed by the pope and his subjects released from their obedience.

      The Church of England, as befitted an established church, took a different stance. Given both its own remarkable origins under Henry VIII and associated threats to the Crown, one of its emphatic teachings was the necessity for obedience. It was a teaching with profound constitutional resonance, drummed as it was into the ears of thousands of English men and women in numberless Sunday sermons. Looking back the emphasis on political obedience seems excessive. The homily “against Disobedience and willful Rebellion” is not only the longest homily in the Book of Homilies used as the basis for sermons but more than double the length of any other. This is in addition to a separate homily, the “Exhortation to Obedience.”²⁸ Neither gave more than passing reference to obedience to parents and superiors; both concentrated almost exclusively on obedience to the Crown. Without kings, rulers, and judges, the clergy taught, “no man shall ride or go by the highway unrobbed, no man shall sleep in his own house or bed unkilled, no man shall keep his wife, children, and possessions in quietness, all things shall be common.”²⁹ The homily goes on to insist that the power and authority of kings are the ordinances “not of man, but of God.” Christians were not to raise their hands against their rulers or even to think evil of them. While the Elizabethan text was intended to counter the pope’s claimed power to depose kings, the language was drawn, and presumably meant, more broadly.³⁰ The Fifth Commandment was understood to enjoin obedience to one’s political, as well as biological, parent.

      The homily on disobedience and rebellion raised the issue of what subjects should do if faced with a wicked ruler. The answer was emphatic:

      What shall subjects do then? shall they obey valiant, stout, wise, and good princes, and contemn, disobey, and rebel against children being their princes, or against undiscreet and evil governors? God forbid: for first, what a perilous thing were it to commit unto the subjects the judgment, which prince is wise and godly, and his government good, and which is otherwise; as though the foot must judge of the head: an enterprise very heinous, and must needs breed rebellion. ... If therefore all subjects that mislike of their prince should rebel, no realm should ever be without rebellion.³¹

      The homily on obedience explained that if the king or magistrates gave orders contrary to Christian teachings “we must rather obey God than man,” but added “in that case we may not in any wise withstand violently, or rebel against rulers, or make any insurrection, sedition, or tumults … against the anointed of the Lord, or any of his officers; but we must in such case patiently suffer all wrongs and injuries, referring the judgment of our cause only to God.”³² Saints Peter and Paul were cited as proof that kings were to be obeyed “although they abuse their power” for “whosoever withstandeth, shall get to themselves damnation; for whosoever withstandeth, withstandeth the ordinance of God.”³³

      The homily on “disobedience and rebellion” claimed Lucifer as the “first author and founder of rebellion.”³⁴ Congregations were reminded of the biblical admonition “rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,” a violation of all ten commandments. Rather than resist godless and wicked rulers Christians were to rely upon tears, prayers, and, if need be, suffer martyrdom. One of James I’s chaplains, John Rawlinson, neatly distinguished kings from tyrants: “a King makes the law his will, because he wills that which the law wills. But a tyrant makes his will a law, because what he wills, he will have to be law.”³⁵ Nevertheless Rawlinson insisted, if the king were “the very worst that may be, a tyrant; one that will make the law an out-law; yet shall it not be lawfull for any mortall man vindictively to meddle with him.”³⁶ Scripture, as interpreted by the Anglican hierarchy, cared nothing for the ancient constitution, the law, or Magna Carta. Englishmen were enjoined to follow the example of the early Christian martyrs, not King John’s barons.

      English law was scarcely more helpful. The chief legal guidance was the antique maxim “the king can do no wrong.” This was ordinarily understood to mean that if the king gave illegal commands they were not to be obeyed, and ministers who carried them out, though not the king himself, would be subject to punishment.³⁷ But in the course of the century’s quarrels that tenet would be given a variety of interpretations. Royal apologists saw it as proof the king was above the law. His opponents read the tenet as evidence that since a king could do no wrong any king who behaved in an illegal manner was, as James I conceded, no longer king. In any case Charles, rather unwisely, argued that because he could do no wrong, neither could those who acted on his behalf.³⁸ Some jurists, on the other hand, read it to mean that the king’s illegal commands were void on their face and should be ignored. The law had no procedure to hold the king himself accountable. This was not the case for rebellious lords, commons, judges, or bishops. A rebellious parliament could be dissolved by the king. It was only containment of royal power for which there was no accepted remedy.

      THE VOCABULARY OF SOVEREIGNTY

      Even without the king, Parliament, people, or lawyers seeking to enhance their share of power, the English ideal of a balanced government was beset with problems. The interpretations sixteenth-century Continental philosophers had given to “absolute” and “sovereign,” terms Englishmen were accustomed to applying to their kings, were sufficiently influential in England to set political nerves jangling.³⁹ If the definition of sovereign was that power whose actions were not subject to the legal control of another and could not be rendered void by the operation of another human will, it was unclear just who or what was England’s sovereign. If the king was sovereign then he could not be subject to Parliament or the law. The king in Parliament came closer to the definition, but Parliament only met intermittently and in important respects answered to the higher authority of the law. Statutes approved by the king in Parliament were regularly modified by the justices in the royal courts and could even be found to be against law and therefore void.

      Popular understanding of the English constitution was also challenged by the influential sixteenth-century French philosopher Jean Bodin. In his classic study The

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