Swearing Allegiance: Consent and Divine Right in Jacobean Political Thought

Abstract

Historians of political thought frequently describe the seventeenth century as the site of a debate between two competing theories of political obligation: the theory of the divine right of kings and social contract theory. In these accounts, King James VI and I is described as the paradigmatic proponent of divine right monarchy; his iure divino ideas of absolute obedience to kings are understood to be the antithesis of the secularized, consent-based theories of later seventeenth-century contractarians, such as Hobbes and Locke. This dissertation argues that this understanding of James as a doctrinaire proponent of a theory of “the divine right of kings” mischaracterizes Jacobean political thought. Its first contention is that the political theology that James develops across his published works, speeches, and correspondence departs from the standard logic of theories of the “divine right of kings.” Neither James’s elevation of monarchy nor his prohibition of popular resistance amounts to a defense of the idea that God, by a particular grant of providence, ordains the institution of monarchy in general or the right and title of individual kings in particular.

The second major contention of this dissertation is that reading James in this traditional way—as a straightforward divine right theorist—misses what is interesting in Jacobean political thought. Read without the distorting lens of his reputation, James’s political works evince a sensitivity to the role of the people, first in shaping the original institution of government, and then in confirming and reifying the authority and title of individual kings. This dissertation calls attention to James’s emphases on the role of the people and recovers two related insights of Jacobean political thought. The first is the extent to which James traces the unconditional obedience that subjects owe their king back to the role of the people in the original institutions of monarchies. The second insight is in James’s use of oaths as a device to confirm popular recognition of the right and title of individual kings. This dissertation argues that James’s solution to the problem of establishing the right of individual kings is to be found not in a simple assertion of divine right, but rather in his novel theory and legislative use of oaths of allegiance, both tacit and explicit.

The first chapter of this dissertation surveys the historiography of the divine right of kings in early Stuart England. It first recounts a twentieth-century debate between “traditional” and “revisionist” views of Jacobean divine right theory, and then it turns to what is common to both. The following two chapters examine James’s published works, speeches, and correspondence to reconstruct his theory of the origin of royal authority, first in the original establishment of monarchies and then in the succession of subsequent kings. These chapters demonstrate how James’s theory lacks or outright denies certain essential elements of a distinctive theory of the “divine right of kings.” The final two chapters take up James’s defense of oaths of allegiance in the context of the controversy surrounding the 1606 Oath of Allegiance. The Oath produced an explosion of tracts both in England and on the continent about the nature of royal authority and subjects’ obligations to kings. These chapters reexamine the controversy surrounding the Oath and argue against the view that the conflict laid bare a clash between Jacobean theories of the divine right of kings and rival expressions of natural law, contractarian resistance theories. Both chapters propose an alternative interpretation of the controversy. The fourth chapter examines how Jacobean contributions to the controversy defend the Oath of Allegiance as necessary for ratifying and particularizing natural political obligation. The fifth chapter argues that James’s debate against Jesuit critics of the Oath revolved not around popular resistance but instead around papal jurisdiction over temporal government. Motivated to deny papal authority, James’s portrayal of royal authority in this debate is purposefully secularized; far from elevating the king as ruling by divine right, James insists on a “merely civil,” “natural allegiance” from his subjects.