The Divine Right of Kings free essay sample

The seventeenth Century Spanish notion of kingship which is reflected in the national drama of the Golden Age is in dissimilarity to the historical realism of the authority and prestige of medieval rulers. Lope de Vega invests even medieval rulers with the status and rights enjoyed by Hapsburg monarchs; he stated that because the king is the only authority to whom a private resident may appear for redress of the authoritarian overlord, so God is the only one who can judge or punish a king. The consequence is the appearance of medieval proceedings and personality taken out of their own political structure and understood in the light of the Golden Age principles and seventeenth century political theory. Moreover, medieval political speculation symbolizes a mixture of political morals inherited from the ancient world and a lot of customs and traditions of the barbarian people which directed to a close association with the medieval politics and divinity. We will write a custom essay sample on The Divine Right of Kings or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page According to St. Augustine, in order to keep the ancient view of the origin in human civilization and management as a divine solution for the fall of man, he visualized the rulers as an instrument of God. Therefore, an evil ruler might be given by him to bad people as a punishment in order to give out divine justice more efficiently. Also, the inherited right of the individual ruler was hence conceived to develop directly from God without an intervention of popular will. Base on St. Paul’s letter to the Romans, he says that civil government is of divine motivation and to oppose, it is to resist God. Consequently, there is a religious obligation by the Christian to obey civil authority; Pope Gregory VII therefore stated that good people will not resist a wicked ruler. As a result of this view, supporters quoted it later of the theory of the Divine Right of Kings which was very different from the medieval principle of the supremacy of the law. According to this theory, the institution of monarchy is of divine origin; hereditary right may not be questioned and resistance to the king is sinful; the king is accountable only to God. Moreover, the later view of the Divine Right of Kings accredited to the individual prince the authority which had in the past belonged to the monarchy as a whole. The nobleman Jacinto states openly the idea of the Divine Right of Kings by saying: â€Å"since the ruler is God’s representative on earth, the king commands the absolute obedience of his subjects. English divine-right theorists’ did not commonly support a theory of absolute monarchy that saw the king as somebody who made the laws binding each person in the kingdom but the monarch. On the other hand, the divine-right theorists in England could and regularly did argue the king could not make laws without the approval of the citizens, however if the monarch did so, he still could not be resisted. At the same time as the theories of royal absolutism include the divine-right concept, the theories of divine right do not essentially integrate the concept of royal absolutism. They both were given a new lease of life by the Reformation, but it was not at all times the case that they went hand in hand in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consequently, the divine-right theory was built up to disprove the resistance theorists; it was a theory of duty in which both the leader and subjects had obligations before God rather than a theory of sovereignty or unlimited royal authority. James I delivered an illustrious words to his Lords and Commons at Whitehall in 1609 and since then they have been the subjects of discussion: â€Å"The State of Monarchie is the supremest thing upon earth: For Kings are not onely Gods Lieutenants upon earth, and sit upon Gods throne, but even by God himself they are called Gods. He distinguished among the theoretical and real powers of a king; the difference was higher as part of the argument of a political discourse by one of his bishops. He also disputed that general statements of the divine right should not be interpreted as building claims about certain royal powers in any particular kingdom. James mentioned that even to discuss the authority of kings in the theoretical was incorrect; the counterpart to discuss what God could and could not do. According to John Neville Figgies’ study of the divine right of kings, he discarded the belief that the divine right of kings was a collection of merely absurd suggestions perversely preached by a servile church. Rather, he alleged the profound medieval roots of the theory, and saw how it was built up to handle with real political problems created as consequences of the Reformation. First of all, the divine right theory was important for its protection of the rights of monarchy against the political claims of the papacy; and then later, it was evenly useful against the similar claims of Presbyterians. But possibly the most important of the interpretative alleges made by Figgis was that the divine right of kings had a vital place in the development of Western political theory: it allowed the establishment of a right theory of power. Therefore, it was essential as a conversion stage among medieval and modern politics because it functioned as the popular type of illustration for the theory of sovereignty. Conversely, Conrad Russell disputes instead that divine right theory even the belief that kings derived their authority directly from God; it was completely compatible with the view that kings were also restricted by the law. In other words, he alerts the people against deducing too much from the unclear words of divine right theorists, except if they said clearly that kings could make, or ignore laws, at their satisfaction, people should not presume that this is what they meant because generally speaking, they did not say this. The divine right sermons were occasionally explicitly but most of the times implicitly, typically cautious not to ignore the constitutional susceptibilities of the English political elite. Moreover, there were two vital areas in which those constitutional sensibilities were most greatly implicated: the principal of taxation by permission and the difference among the claim upon the subjects’ obedience legally made by a divine right ruler, and the obligation of that ruler to rule properly through identified and stated laws. Therefore, it continues true that no divine right philosopher believed coercive sanction could be presented for this duty because that would have been irreconcilable with the denial of arguments for resistance. Furthermore, a related argument can be built with reference to the claims made by divine right theorists about the connection among the king and the law. The assertion that all law was the king’s law, and that it was him who made law, was in all-purpose conditions completely unexceptionable. A lot more fascinated, however, than these commonplaces were an extra area in which divine right theory appears to have had a tolerable place: ecclesiology. A lot of the majority discussed expressions of the divine right of kings were in reality apart in works dedicated to issues of Episcopal authority and church government. To end this discussion, it is essential to try to identify something of the regulations governing the uncontroversial use of the theory of the divine right of kings in early Stuart England, and its relationships with other forms of political discussion originated in the period. The divine right of kings was an uncontroversial theory, and was not seen as threatening to usual constitutional practice, provided that it was used within particular tacitly-recognized limits and restricted to a place on the border of civil politics. Therefore, the theory of the divine right had a variety of accepted uses; the first was to prove, as an end of divinity, the responsibility that subjects had to obey their rulers. The ideological position of the divine right of kings’ theory was to condemn bad behavior, or more mainly revolution, not to take away the king from all need to watch his own laws. One time that is established it turns into significant that divine right theorists almost all looked for vary of maintaining the kings’ obligation to rule legally, even whereas releasing him from other human authorities. Therefore, the divine right theorists were cautious to evade stepping across the line that separated the acceptable generalization from the unacceptably specific claim. A near assessment of most of the statements of the divine right of kings illustrates that they were in reality statements of a general duty to follow, or to make duty voluntarily, and avoided specific suggestion of what that might involve. There is also proof, as we have seen, that support of the divine right of kings did not prevent belief in the view that kings should govern through the common law. There was a speech presented by King James I of England on March 21, 1609, regarding the divine right of kings; His view that kings have the function of Gods on earth and how they are to be regulated by laws and a relationship with the people. This is what he said: â€Å"Kings are justly called Gods, for that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider the attributes to God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king. God hath power to create, or destroy, make or unmake at his pleasure, to give life or send death, to judge all, and to be neither judged nor accountable to none. To raise low things, and to make high things low at his pleasure, and to God are both soul and body due. And the like power have Kings: they make and unmake their subjects: they have power of rising, and casting down: of life and of death: judges over all their subjects, and in all causes, and yet accountable to none but God only. They have power to exalt low things, and abase high things, and make of their subjects like men at the chess. A pawn to take a bishop or a knight, and to cry up or down any of their subjects, as they do their money; And to the king is due both the affection of the soul, and the service of the body of his subjects. † â€Å"A king governing in a settled kingdom, leaves to be a king, and degenerates into a tyrant as soon as he leaves off to rule according to his laws. In which case the kings conscience may speak unto him, as the oor widow said to Philip of Macedon; either govern according to your law, Aut ne Rex sis. And though no Christian man ought to allow rebellion of people against their prince, yet doth God never leave kings unpunished when they transgress these limits; for in that same psalm where God saith to kings, Vos dii estis, he immediately thereafter concludes, but ye shall die like men. † â€Å"The higher we are placed, the greater shall our fall be. Ut casu s sic dolor: the taller the trees be, the more in danger of the wind; and the tempest beats forest upon the highest mountains. Therefore all kings that are not tyrants, or perjured, will be glad to bound themselves within the limits of their laws; and they that persuade them the contrary, are vipers, and pests, both against them and the commonwealth. For it is a great difference between a kings government in a settled state, and what kings in their original power might do in Individual vago. As for my part, I thank God; I have ever given good proof, that I never had intention to the contrary. And I am sure to go to my grave with that reputation and comfort, that never king was in all his time more careful to have his laws duly observed, and himself to govern thereafter, than I. † â€Å"I conclude then this point touching the power of kings with this axiom of divinity, that as to dispute what God may do, is blasphemy, but quid vult Deus, that divines may lawfully, and do ordinarily dispute and discuss; for to dispute A posse ad esse is both against logic and divinity: so is it sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power. But just kings will ever be willing to declare what they will do, if they will not incur the curse of God. I will not be content that my power be disputed upon, but I shall ever be willing to make the reason appear of all my doings, and rule my actions according to my laws. † On the other hand, Hobbes, an English philosopher developed his own political viewpoint of the divine right of kings where he disputed from a mechanistic analysis that life is merely the movements of the organism and that man is by nature an egoistically individualistic animal at frequent war with all other men.