In Our Time - The Divine Right of Kings

Episode Date: October 11, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Divine Right of Kings. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the character Malcolm describes the magical healing powers of the king: “How he solicits heaven, Himself best knows; but strangely-visited people, All swoln and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye, The mere despair of surgery, he cures; Hanging a golden stamp about their necks, Put on with holy prayers...”The idea that a monarch could heal with his touch flowed from the idea that a king was sacred, appointed by God and above the judgement of earthly powers. It was called the Divine Right of Kings. The idea resided deep in the culture of 17th century Britain affecting the pomp of the Stuart Kings, the writings of Milton and Shakespeare and the political works of John Locke. It is a story that involves witches, regicide, scrofula, Macbeth, miraculous portraits and some of the greatest poetry in the English language. With Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London; Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London; Clare Jackson, Lecturer and Director of Studies in History at Trinity Hall, Cambridge

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In Macbeth, Malcolm describes the magical healing powers of the king. How he solicits heaven himself best knows, but strangely visited people all swollen and ulcerous, pitiful to the eye,

the mere despair of surgery he cures, hanging a golden stamp about their necks. The idea that a monarch could heal, with his touch, flowed from the idea that a king was sacred appointed by God and above the judgment of earthly powers. This was called the Divine Right of Kings, and it ended so powerfully into British culture during the 17th century that he shaped the pomp and circumstance of the Stuart Monarchs,

imbued the writing of Shakespeare, provoked the political thinking of Milton and Locke, and helped a regislyde about a century and a half before the French Revolution. With me to discuss the Divine Right of Kings at Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway College University of London, Claire Jackson, lecturer and director of studies in history at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Tom Healy, Professor of Renaissance Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Justin Champion, this is an idea that can be traced back,

the idea of the ruler as a god can be traced back a long way, but it became particularly important in Europe during and after the Reformation in the 16th century. Can you explain why it emerged and became so powerful, at that particular time? I think if we go all the way back to the pre-Reformation period, the idea of divine right monarchy or divine right government is commonplace. It's an assumption, the basic tools really for thinking about politics and obligation and perhaps even sovereignty.

It's a theocratic argument. So it's driven in one sense by Catholic theology. With the Reformation, the fracturing of that carapace of Catholic theology means if you are a Protestant country, You need to think of ways of justifying the authority in your own nation. And the monarchy is the ready way to do that. And we can see, perhaps, for example, in the frontispiece of the Great Bible of 1540, Henry VIII represents himself as being whispered in the ear by God.

The verbam day is striking him on the head. It's a descending theory of government that allows a Protestant community to have direct access to God without going through the papacy. So it's sort of counterintuitive that divine right monarchy, one would think, is a traditional Catholic viewpoint. But in fact, it's invented in a much more profound way by Protestant culture. The idea of a person, a man, it was always was a man, and being divinely inspired, being divinely given the gift to rule. Well, had that been around the discussions in medieval and even earlier times in Europe? Let's stick to Europe for this discussion.

Absolutely. in the earlier period one as a political task wants to know where authority comes from and there are really two ways of thinking about this either political authority ascends from the body of the people from the community and there are all sorts of classical traditions

for thinking about that but the dominant ideology is a descending theory of government government comes from God and inevitably in the medieval period there is a conflict between the sources for that voice of God Is it the papacy, which is the dominant form, or a civil government? So we can think of the political theory in the pre-Reformation period,

perhaps all the way back to the 9th century, as being theocratic, but also being a contest between civil authority, a regnum, and sacred authority, a sacerdotium. So it's priest versus king. And a lot of those debates are, for example, focused on arguments about the coronation. When a king is anointed, does that create his sacred authority? If it does, is it the church that's creating that channel of grace or not? And there are a lot of very technical debates about precisely how authority is divine and how the king himself gets that authority.

But even before the Reformation, we have two camps. I mean, they're not what they become after reformationers who were king versus pope, but there are two camps. There always seem to have been reading for this programme two views about this, the theocratic view and loosely, the anti-theocratic view, the earthly powers and heavenly powers. Absolutely, and I think thinkers like Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham want to recognise in one sense that secular authority has to be the root cause of sovereignty,

although they don't use that word, within a state. Where does obligation come from? Do we obey a king or an institution because it's created by God or because we've in some sense consented to it? So I think there are those two tensions all of the way through. That's theory. We've always got to remember this is practice as well, in any parish or in any community

there will be powerful men who are not only princes and magistrates but are priests so the conflict is one that's not only fought in the mind it's fought out in real life if you like Tom Haley to just to play around with the time before the Reformation

before we get a little longer St Augustine was massively influential in the Middle Ages and right through as a theologian and as a philosopher and as a man whom people followed and so on. Did he, had he planted any ideas in this area which were taken up and were influential in the shaping of the ideas we're going to talk about? Indeed. I mean, you drew attention to this constant tension between the secular and the sacred.

And this is really at the heart of Augustine's most important work, his city of gods, if it has day. And in that Augustine marks out two cities, the city of men. and the city of God. And he suggests that really human activity should be directed at the city of God. And this is ultimately, of course, to the afterlife, to our, where we go after we die.

And to some extent, this means that we should not take too active a view about the conditions that we live under now, that we should, in a sense, be obedient. but it also supports that idea that effectively that God is looking after our interests. He's directing us towards the city of God. So in your sense in Augustine that he is talking about the place of the ruler in all this. In the sense that Justin was referring to that.

Yes, because what happens within Augustine is that the city of God is not just a spiritual domain. It's also something that can be created on the earth. I mean, he feels the city of men fundamentally chaotic. It's tumultuous. It's filled with self-interest, whereas the city of God is interested in higher pursuits. So he posits an earthly life presided over by a ruler or a government who has divine authority and which we fundamentally give up our rights to we agree to be governed by them. and this is a healthy form of government against a healthy form of existence, against that type of chaotic self-interested life that classical antiquity had experienced. So he provides a powerful argument, in a sense, for this model that threw God to the monarch

and then the dispensation down to people. But importantly for the Renaissance, I think, Augustine also contains within his thought, the very kernel that will actually affect a questioning of divine right and divine authority. Because what he's anxious about is if in this tumultuous concerns of the city of men, if excess takes place, if you have a figure who seems to be following his own appetites, is he really a godly ruler? Can actually, although there might be a claim to divine authority, in fact, that might be a false claim.

and that that haunts the Renaissance. That becomes, sorry, please finish, I'm sorry, please finish, that that hanscence, that particularly in the post-Reformation period, that although the king, although technically there's always an acceptance that the monarch

should and can claim divine authority, that individual monarchs might actually either be self-deceiving or particularly deceiving their people, that they are actually treacherous to God and satanic in that model. Again, we have the

sort of reality, almost as divinity is one thing, but absolutism and excess is another thing. Can I just fast forward a thousand years? I'm obviously sorry about this, to Erasmus. And bring us to the year before Luther pinned the notes to the door of the Wittenberg.

Erasmus wrote, the education of a Christian prince came out in 1516, and he is a thinker, theologian, Dutch, humanist, great theologian, so he is a thinker in the process we're going to describe. So can you briefly tell us the place

he occupied and then we'll Well, Erasmus takes up on this model that the true monarch is a Christian monarch, that is someone who follows the teachings of the Bible. So he takes the idea, the classical idea of the

philosopher prince, and he says that a Christian ruler is also a philosophical ruler. So he's in this model of moderate. He seeks justice and the best for his people through his own moderation in his own life and that he becomes a type of ideal model for his people.

So again, that the excesses of appetite are put under control and that that creates a health in himself and as a result a healthy nation. And this is the model that God wishes, that this points us towards true government, which is ultimately interested in our afterlife. pointing us in the direction of heaven. And so he also picks up on this model that is against excessive tyranny

and creates this ideal of what the true prince, the true monarch, who is divinely ordained, should reflect. And then he similarly creates this dilemma. If a monarch is seen to be acting excessively, can he legitimately claim divinity? And the 1517 marks, let us call it the beginning, well it is, the beginning of the Reformation. At the end of that century, James of Scotland, William James, Severson, published two books in 1597, was Basilica on Dauron and the True Law of Freemonicus, in which he declared that kings, even by God himself, are called God. He was a very considerably accomplished a theologian, a great linguist who said he'd read everything of theological value.

every European language. Can you, it's a big move forward, and can you give us the gist of his arguments? Yes, I mean, who better to speak about the divine right of kings than a monarch who thinks he's divinely ordained himself. I mean, I think if we're interested in studying political ideas and the context in which they're written, I think the view of kingship from the throne commands a unique fascination and relevance. And as you say, James published his two major works in the 1590s, while he's still King James

of Sixth of Scotland, the true law of free monarchies, which is more of a theoretical work, and the Basilican Doran, which is more of a manual of kingship in that sort of speculum principious handbook of princes genre. I think to understand where James is coming from ideologically, though, we need to go just back a little bit into Scottish history to understand where his ideological makeup is formed. He's born 1566. He's crowned when he's only 13 months old in 1567, following the forcible deposition of his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots.

And her, well, her abdication, her forced abdication, had been orchestrated by a group of Protestant nobles who included George Buchanan. who thereafter assumes responsibility for James's education. And I think through Buchanan's writing, we get an idea of the kind of intellectual experiences and theories to which James was exposed as a young child. Buchanan also writes two major works on kingship,

the De Uri Regni Apodskotus, which has published 1579. They're probably written in the 1560s, and a history of Scotland. And they're radically desacralised, they're very secular theories. They draw a lot on Ciceroonian stoic ideas. and basically argue that a monarch is there to serve the people, that there's a contract between ruler and ruled that's affirmed by the coronation oath,

and that if by any chance a ruler breaks that contract with the people, that the subjects have a right and actually a duty to remove that monarch. Buchanan tends to see a monarch in the same way as one would see a doctor with responsibility for the health of the body politic. And if the body politic becomes diseased, one changes one's doctor. So this is the kind of theory that's put forward to James. I mean, it's a very incendiary doctrine of tyrannicide that subjects even have the duty to depose a monarch and even kill them. And his history of Scotland outlines exactly for James how this had operated right back through ancient Scottish constitutionalism.

Once he's a series of monarchs who, if they've gone down the route of tyranny, a virtue of citizenry has risen up and removed them. So really, once James achieves his majority and once he begins to rule Scotland, as an adult king from the 1580s onwards, that also coincides with Buchanan's death. His intellectual project really becomes one of legitimating or re-legitimating his own kingship, perhaps rehabilitating the Scottish monarchy with some of the dignity that it had suffered at the hands of Mary Queen of Scots. And that expresses itself most fully in the two works, the True Law Free Monarchy's and the Basilican Doron. They're both very short, they're both very readable, they're quite terse in their construction. I think there's probably four strands to the True Law Free Monarchy.

move forward a bit. So can you just crack on it? Yeah. Just, I mean, very, very four brief points, really. Monarchy is divinely ordained, that kings are accountable to God alone, that hereditary succession governs the monarchy, and that subjects of no right of resistance. And those are the really sort of four points.

When he came to England in 1603, he brought these ideas very forcefully with him, and eventually in 1611, they had a massive effect on the new translation of the Bible. It was King James' Bible. It wasn't gods, really. So did that, the fact that he was on the throne of England, as well as Scotland and Wales, that obviously gave him a position of much greater power. And so he had a thinker, a serious thinker, on the throne in a place of real power,

which had taken a big stand against the alternative of the Pope. And that changed, as it were, if I can use this right phrase, it changed the game in Europe, didn't it, with James being so powerful, in a powerful position now. Well, I think the dynamics of debate is slightly different. In Scotland, his most prominent intellectual enemies have been the Presbyterian Church, who advanced a theocratic theory of kingship. In England, there are the Puritans there, the hotter sorts of Protestants,

but they're not advancing the same kind of pretensions with the same amount of weight behind them as James had experienced in Scotland. James begins to turn his weight to the traditional enemies for the divine right monarchs, the claims of the papacy. He's very quickly met by the gunpowder plot. He then imposes an oath of allegiance

over all of his subjects. And I think historians are still divided about whether or not the divine right theory that James is proposing is primarily just a theory of obligation. It's negatively advanced against the papacy, or whether it's actually something more positive, whether it's actually a theory of sovereignty

that then claims for him all sorts of absolutist powers. Was he being, as I understand it to Justin Chairman, he was being supported by other thinkers at the time. There's the Dutch Protestant living in London called Hadrian A. Saravia. I hope that's how pronounced it. And he wrote about the divine right of kings also.

Could you briefly tell us what he said? Absolutely. Saravia, a man who moved from Leiden to Lambeth in the cause of his career is emblematic in one sense of the intertwined politics between religion and secular politics. Sorabia is a churchman. He's hostile to all of the Protestant theories of resistance that Claire has talked about and wants to authorise divine authority within the British state. And one of the things we can see from his writings is that this this theory, I think we should probably talk about an instinct rather than a theory,

is incredibly bibliocentric. Romans 13, obey the powers that be, various statements in proverbs, you know, you shall obey God, my son and the king. The white noise, if you like, of political discourse comes from scripture. And what theorists like Saravia and others are trying to do is make a connection between the way people live their lives, their religious expectations and conviction and beliefs and the way political authority is constructed. So the strands that go in to create this ideology are not simply propositional and theoretical.

They are social. They're much more part of the routine lives of everyday people. How is this being briefly? How is this being received, Justin? Is this an argument among a very few people? Or is this going through the bishops, is it going through the priests? going to the country, as the country saying, yes. I think especially after the accession of James I first

and the threat of the gunpowder plot, which becomes a great set piece for authorising allegiance and oaths of obligation. Gunpowder prox sounds rather, although the charming and bonfire night, it was a huge terrorist attack which needed blew up. And it gave a massive platform for a huge production of all sorts of political literature, from great set pieces to tiny little pamphlets

and more important, sermons. Every week, every Sunday, more often if you were hot Protestant, you would get these sorts of languages preached and believed. So I think we've always got to recognize that the divine right theory of monarchy or of kingship is a basic instinct for a lot of the community. Certainly on the continent, Roman Catholic theorists from Suarez through to Bellarmine are incredibly hostile. And one of the counterintuitive things about this period is, of course, that it's those thinkers who are much more radical in their constitutionalism. Talk about the community and consent creating authority.

So we have good modern Roman Catholics defending the papacy and old-fashioned English Protestants defending an institution of monarchy. So it's a very odd period. Tom Healy, it comes into drama. Spectacularly, as it were, Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, the first time an English king has been killed on stage, and then we have Shakespeare, Richard II. Out of those two, can you draw us a few conclusions as to what those two playwrights and the literary scene at that time was saying about the divine right, how he took it on and what he did with it?

Well, in both respects, at one level, they question when it becomes legitimate to overthrow a monarch and indeed whether a monarch can or should be overthrown. Both plays deal with kings who are presented at least in the early part of the play to the audience as giving into excessive appetite, particularly Edward II. He's made out to be too much under the control of his lover Gaviston that the relation being homosexual itself causes disquiet amongst his barons. And similarly, in Richard II, Richard is presented. as a weak and often seen as an effeminate king, a figure who is incapable of ruling authoritatively, and again who exceeds his apparent mandate. But what both plays also do as they progress is to have an audience come back

to start questioning this. Is the view of these figures as really excessive, just borne out by what happens throughout the play? Do they actually, is it not a matter that, we see those who oppose them actually creating a view of them in this way and that their authority is more absolute or god-given and unquestioned. And particularly in Richard II, there is a very, very serious issue that arises because Richard, in effect, tries to depose himself.

I mean, he's forced to by Bolingbrook. But technically he resigns the crown. He's not actually forced off the throne. But then in a very long speech and scene, he really questions whether this can actually be done, given that his authority comes from God, whether he can actually give up the crown, whether there isn't something that is invested in him directly.

And the play, I think, ultimately suggests that there is a sense, a wide acceptance within the public, that authority does ultimately emerge from God itself. There is a view that this action in deposing Richard is going to have a very unfortunate legacy. It will lead to the Hundred Years' War. Now, the other issue comes back of whether this is actually coming from God, that God himself is chastising the nation for whatever sinful, unhealthy practices it may be engaging with, and therefore ultimately all of this stems from God rather than from man.

It is ambiguous and you've expressed that very well. Can we just take it a little bit further, Clark Jackson, in Macbeth. We have Regicide in Macbeth, and we have the idea closer that the killing of a king leads to, well, what it'd like to, in Macbeth. And in Hamlet, one of the reasons we are given to understand that Hamlet is prevented from or doesn't kill Claudius is just Claudius as a king, and this will not only be a murder. it'll be an offence against God and so on.

So it's something that the playwrights are battened onto. Do you think they've battled onto it because it's such a good idea? Or because they have, this is what they see as the, well, to take up Justin's word, the feeling, the instinct of the time. I was going to say, I mean, to pick up on Justin's point, I think a lot of the ways in which divine right monarchy manifests itself can be seen in more cultural, sort of symbolic ways. I mean, Macbeth is a very good example. particularly one way of looking at Macbeth is to look at the relationship between a divinely ordained monarch

such as James conceives himself to be the monarch who's watching the play and the use of the sisters and the witches I mean if James, as he very prominently, does regard himself as the lords anointed on earth then he's going to be the biggest enemy that the devil can have either in England or Scotland and James himself takes very seriously

his responsibility as a divinely ordained monarch to eliminate those elements within society i.e. witches who represent the diabolic element So actually that scene where Macbeth goes to go and seek the witches, or the sisters, supernatural powers to see ahead and have their sense of prophecy would have been deeply shocking to a monarch like James who writes on demonology, who takes his own responsibility for eliminating witchcraft very seriously. James himself has presided over witchcraft trials in Scotland as an attempt to eliminate those agents of the devil. I mean, very interesting about Macbeth as well is that, you know, Shakespeare does always provide alternative, more rational explanations for some of the more. unintelligible of the witch's prophecy, things like the camouflaged army that marches to Dunsynne or Macbeth's very unusual, MacDuff's unusual, Searion birth.

And I think the audience would have been just as obliged to adjudicate between the supernatural and the rational. But it is all an indication of the way in which the divine right of kings is reinforced in these other spheres. Would it be true to say, just in the context of this conversation, not in the context of several volumes on the subject, that the idea of divine right was a very, telling factor in the eventual regicide, in eventual public trial of and execution of an anointed

king, which an extraordinary thing to do in the middle of the 17th century, quite extraordinary, and we've got to sort of try to grasp how enormous that was. Absolutely. And was the divine right factor, big there? Absolutely. I mean, one of the problems is those normal Whig narratives about the execution of Charles I

first, or it's some sort of strategic political battle between king and parliament. I think to capture the true horror of that moment, and in contemporary terms, it's equivalent to the planes going into Twin Towers. You know, it fractured all of the cultural certainties of that period around Europe. If we believe in a society where everything is ordained, every hierarchy, every part of social structure, every bit of life within the family, within the church, is given by God. Any deviation from that is blasphemy. Now, Charles I first himself, an odd man, I suspect, a very odd man who wanted to use his majesty and his sacral authority, but unfortunately didn't actually like most of his people, finds himself manoeuvred into a position where he has to claim this anointed quality. I mean, if I give you one perhaps trivial example, kings are therapeutic, they're anointed by God, they can cure, they can do miracles.

And the great miracle in the Stuart period is the Royal Touch, scrofieler, sort of version of tuberculosis, very unpleasant. Kings, traditionally, way back into the medieval period, could cure by touching. Charles I thought this was wonderful. It represented his divine authority, but he didn't actually like doing it because you had to touch infected grubby people. So from the late 1620s, while proclaiming his divinity, he is. issued series after series of proclamations banning these events. But of course, once the civil conflict had broken out in the 1640s, all of his advisors say, you've got to touch as many people as possible.

And we can see in those sort of encounters between divine monarch and ordinary suffering sort of citizen, the power of this theory, I think, the power of that instinct. Sorry, and you were to say... I was going to come in and say that... I think that one of the things that is this destabilizing point that can be come out from a slightly different way in English society, that what happens, I think, is that people become convinced

that Charles is fundamentally rather like Satan, that he who was God's first lieutenant in heaven and became the greatest traitor is, in effect, now similar to the monarch of England, that Charles is satanic. in this way, that he who should have been rightly ruling in God's authority, he has become a traitor to God. And that

then sparks off a wave of what should be done that ultimately leads to his execution. But that's a point well made, but just to move across the cloud, to take on, to keep with Justin's point about the massive fracture

and it's, I mean, one of the most difficult things in history is just remembering, or trying to get a grip or remember, it's not the end of there, getting a grip on how big things were then, because the past, what does it matter, as it were, which is toothache yesterday morning. But it was, he became Charles, the execution, this is the end of the king, the end of a structure that had been going for, as far as most people are concerned, forever and ever and ever, not only in all those,

it immediately started a great cult of Charles as a saint and martyr in this Protestant society, run by Cromwell, everything driven out, and we have Icon Basilica, which you'll tell us about and tell us how, I think there's a big swing away from what Tom was saying. I mean, suddenly Charles moves from being sort of Satan personified to immediately acquiring the saintly status, the image of a martyr within a week, a volume of his meditations, known as Icon Basilica, is published with a very dramatic frontispiece, which shows a kneeling Charles lit by divine rays with a crown of thorns, very much an imitation of Christ.

And a lot of those parallels between Christ's crucifixion and Charles's regicide are exploited by authors. And these are his sayings and his meditations. and sort of prayers and reflections. It's an enormous bestseller. And a lot of more courageous writers in the 1650s start exploiting those parallels. I mean, both Christ and Charles had been God's representatives on earth. Both had been deemed to be above human censure. Both had been deemed never to be able to kind of suffer in this way.

And yet both had suffered at the hands of false witnesses. They'd both been put to death in very public manners. And actually, you could even begin to abbreviate Charles, as was often done in early modern typography with C.H. semicolon, and that could also stand for Christ at the same time. And ironically, or interest or very poignantly, the New Testament lesson for the 30th of January, the date that Charles had actually been executed was 27th chapter of Matthew's Gospel, which discusses Christ's trial and crucifixion. And once the restoration occurs in 1660, the 30th of January becomes a

fast day in the Book of Common Prayer until 1859. Actually, even in the Alternative Service Book of 1980, Charles is reintroduced on the minor festivals. I mean, there's obviously no way of having a canonisation process in the Anglican Church, but that's about as close as you can get to list somebody. But immediately what happens, Justice Chapman, is what you said at the very beginning of the programme, is that the two-headed comes up again, because in Milton writes iconoclasties, which is the emergence of the great Republican writer Milton attacking Icon Basilica, and dismantling it.

Iconiclasties, you know, destroy the image. And there's a long tradition of Republican attacks on Icon Basilicae. I mean, as Claire has pointed out, this is an enormous bestseller. It's reprinted throughout the 17th, 18th and even 19th centuries. And Milton's tradition is one that says, you know, this is idolatry. Not only that, it's probably plagiarized from Sydney's poems. Charles didn't even write it. And that's clearly something that comes out in the 1690s

when the whole Republican experiment is remembered and redesigned. again, Icon Basilicae, Charles's text, has a pur durability of influence that is embodied in the image of the frontispiece. And that again manifests itself in social practice. All of the rumours and folklore about the healing power of Charles' blood, for example, or the little angels that you would get when you were touched by him persist through this period into the 18th century. So we get the invention of a morose. miraculous monarchy. So the irony again is, at the very moment when his head's chopped off, he invents an incredibly powerful, persistent tradition.

Let's just go a little bit further with Milton here, Tom Healy. Can you tell us the references that were in paradise lost to this, the Charlie first? Well, taking up entirely on this idea of the false icon. that what Milton suggests is this model that monarchs or earthly monarchs and Charles particularly can be fundamentally diabolical that when Satan is thrown out of heaven

and lands in hell, one of the first things he starts doing is building his city of pandemonium which has a lot of similarities to Charles's court and so there is a strong presentation that what is happening in those who support Charles and create this image are of this diabolical camp. I mean, this great fracturing point in English society in a way is actually fighting using rather similar tools and similar ideas

but opposed to one another. So to Milton's mind, this type of earthly monarchy it goes back to this idea of excess that this one way that we can recognize its falsity is that it is unstable and excessive it is involved in the city of man

rather than the city of God so it is against one so it goes against this this whole tradition it's doing it is not what Erasmus in the education of the Christian prince tries to outline as a Christian prince should do with his sense of moderation

so Charles is made and the Stuart monarchy in its capitalism is made out to be excessive, given over to its own appetites, not interested in the health of the nation. And yet in 1660, Charles II comes back, and the fact that he comes back seems to be a resurrection of the idea of divine right. He loves to touch for the King's Evil. 100,000 people turn up. It's a great event after event. Easter tide is one of the great events in London, or indeed in European life, in these mass gatherings.

We haven't, alas, much evidence for whether it worked over it. I don't say that. sarcastically we don't seem to have a great deal of evidence but can I come to you another point here Claire Jackson we've got the restoration not only of Stuart Monarchy but of the idea of divine right and at the same time we have a person such as

Locke beginning a very clear attack on that can you tell us what Locke said and that its lock makes it made it very important and its lock actually reacting to the very directly reacting towards these ideas

most I mean the first of the two treatises that published in 1689 is very directly against a work called Patriarcha, published by Sir Robert Filmer. And certainly in the restoration, as you say, the cult of divine monarchy flourishes as it's never flourish before. Robert Filmer's patriarcher is published in 1680, while Filmer had died in 1653. He didn't get permission to publish patriarchar during the Civil Wars because it was seen as more royalist than the king, if you like. It was too extreme. And the reason that Locke chooses it as the target for the two treatises in, the first of the two treatises that he's writing at the beginning of the 1680s is because he says this is the current divinity of the times. What Filmer does is draw a very

direct parallel moves away from a traditional mode of arguing for divine right monarchy of using primarily scriptural texts to actually move onto a much more naturalistic territory and say actually Genesis gives us the evidence that kings are the fathers of their people. It's totally fallacious to say that people are born free. Everybody's born in subjection. Everybody's born into families and the obedience that people owe to their fathers is exactly the same as is owed to their kings. And Locke draws a very clear distinction between James's writings on kingship, he calls him that most wise king who well understood the notion of things, as opposed to this very thoroughgoing, naturalistic argument that actually then does develop into a, or could be

extended into a theory of sovereignty to say that kings must be above the law. And Locke very deliberately collapses the distinction between absolute and arbitrary power. that James had worked so hard to reinforce at the beginning of the 17th century. James had told, in Basilican Dora and James had told his heir that the only way you'll understand what a king is is to know what a tyrant is, and you need to keep those two in a sort of mutual antithesis. And Locke immediately just collapses it and says this is absolute arbitrary power. It's fallacious to say that people are born in subject.

Actually, men are born free. They have inalienable rights. Government is a construct. Kings are appointed for particular offices. And if they fail, then individuals have a right of resistance. And that argument really kind of begins to move the whole debate away from particular text of scripture onto a much more naturalistic utilitarian basis. It's quite interesting, though, Claire, isn't it? That many of the sort of conceptual arguments that Lott puts together there as an antidote to divine right monarchy can actually be seen being rehearsed earlier in those Catholic theories who are opposed to Protestant divine right theories.

So we've got, again, a counterintuitive importation of continental ideas that have already existed. And I think what one therefore sees is the interplay of practice. and politics. I mean, I think the reason that the Catholic arguments have so much can be discredited at the beginning of the century are because of things like the gunpowder plot, and then they immediately come back onto the stage again in the late 1680s.

But the irony is, of course, that Locke against Charles II is because he thinks he's popish, he's Catholic. But he's exploiting, yeah, he's exploiting Catholic ideas. So we've brought in Locke just a little, but we have introduced him into conversation, is the literature still tackling

this idea in any significant quite on. Yes. Marvell, who similarly has this equation between arbitrary power and popery and writes a track on it, also writes a striking poem called Last Instructions to a painter, in which he marks out really the excesses which are taking place in court

as, and particularly the sexual excesses, as being instrumental of the failure of the English state to defend itself in the Dutch wars, that really this excess coming from the monarchy and from the top is really responsible for the failure of the nation. The nation is rendered vulnerable. And there's an astonishingly striking image at the heart of this where England, naked and disheveled,

having been battered around by all these evil kings' counsellors and so forth, comes to the monarch in the dead of night and seeks for soccer, sort of help. England in the shape of a... England in the shape of a naked woman, disheveled and comes penitent to the king, asking to be restored.

And the king rapes her. But what is most unsettling about this is that Marvell suggests that the king finds her very distressed condition, the act which causes his arousal. And this is the most... telling instance that the monarch is really working against the state itself, against the spirit, the whole nation itself.

The monarch is actually finding the collapse of the nation that's in its unhealthy, in its distressed state, attractive to commit rapine on. I mean, this satanic image is really very, very powerful and very distasteful as it's supposed to be. Was it the accession of James II with his Catholic tenets? and the glorious revolution, William Borinch came in and refused to have anything to do with this,

a reasoning Dutch person. Was that, did that mark the end of it? Or had ideas driven it out? I think that's a very tricky question. I mean, the theological premises of society persist right the way through the 18th and perhaps into the 19th century. I mean, the confessional basis of political citizenship is there until 1828.

If you're Catholic, you can't be a good citizen. Clearly, by the end of the sense, 17th century, though, the sorts of instincts, the great statement, no bishop, no king, the Church of England is pretty much disestablished in 1689, so the sort of sacral dimensions of

the monarchy are also undercut. We need perhaps to remember that the rise of science is key here, and even if we took something like the Royal Touch, from the 1660s, physicians associated with the Royal Society start asking questions, how does the Royal Touch

work? Well, perhaps there are a natural causes. So it demystifies, disenchance monarch. And the royal touch is very much, is the outward manifestation of the inner divinity. And William Orange won't have anything to do with. Interestingly, Claire, do you see the glorious revolution, you see William of Orange is bringing it to an effective end?

Well, no, I think, I think, I mean, I think what's very interesting about the way in which resistance to James occurs is the emphasis on non-resistance is very important. Everyone's very keen to distance themselves from any notion that James actually advocated, none of us really resisted anymore. And I think retrospectively, the divine right of kings does acquire this dignity. I mean, it did save England from descending into some sort of popish network of inquisitorial jurisdictions. It did sort of save as all being in some sort of Presbyterian theocracy. And it also sort of identifies

probably a non-utilitarian attachment to government and that perhaps Burke picks up in the late 18th century that you can't just judge government purely on, you know, how good it is, that there has to be a sort of more emotive affection. I think that does reside through the 18th and into the 19th centuries. I think one of the other things we should perhaps emphasize is the Republican tradition continues in the 17th and into the 18th century, but it's a republicanism that takes

the institution of a virtuous monarchy at its core. That sounds very counterintuitive and paradoxical. But even Republicans recognize in the 18th century in England, a Protestant monarchy is the best bulwark against continental popery. Well, thank you very much.

Clare Jackson, Justin Champion, Tom Healy. For me, back to the Lamsips, and next week, Arabian Nights with Sinbad de Sela, Alibaba and the 40 Thieves, and much, much else. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes

about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio 4.