Divine right of kings

• 1. Answerable To God Alone

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  The divine right of kings is the claim that a monarch answers to God and to nobody on earth. In 1193, Richard I of England gave that claim voice at his trial during the diet at Speyer. He said: "I am born in a rank which recognizes no superior but God, to whom alone I am responsible for my actions." Richard was also the first to use the motto "Dieu et mon droit", meaning "God and my right". The Monarch of the United Kingdom still uses it.

  Richard spoke long before the idea hardened into a full doctrine. That happened in the Age of Absolutism, which ran from about 1610 to 1789. How could any ruler claim to stand beyond the reach of parliaments, nobles and even the Pope? Did the idea belong to Christianity alone, or did other faiths imagine their kings the same way? What had once held rulers back from making the claim? And who dared to answer it, and what finally broke its hold?

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• 2. Kings Among Gods

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  In the Mahabharata, Bhishma describes a time before men had kings, and he calls it a time of chaos. People, he says, destroyed one another like stronger fishes devouring weaker ones in the water. A few gathered and agreed on compacts. Anyone harsh in speech, violent in temper, or given to seduction and theft would be cast out. Then they went to the Grandsire and begged him to appoint a king whom all would worship and who would protect them. The text treats the king as an embodiment of Indra, so loyalty to him is submission to divine authority. It adds that in a land without royal authority, Vedic rituals fail and Agni does not carry sacrificial offerings to the gods.

  The Markandeya Purana asks a king to take five forms: Indra, the Sun, Yama, the Moon and the Wind. Like Indra, who sends showers for four months, he should nourish his people with generous gifts. Like the Sun, which draws up water for eight months, he should collect tolls and dues by subtle means. Like Yama, he should be impartial to friend and foe, to the vicious and the virtuous. Like the full Moon, he should inspire affection where the people live in peace. Like the Wind, he should move unseen among citizens, ministers and relatives, using spies.

  King Vena shows the same tradition turning against a ruler who claimed too much. After the sages inaugurated him, Vena ordered that no worship be performed and no offerings made to the Brahmans. "I, the king," he said, "am the lord of sacrifice." The sages pleaded that Hari, the lord of sacrifice, be worshipped with solemn rites. Vena asked who could possibly be superior to him, and he refused. The enraged sages beat him with blades of holy grass consecrated by prayer, and he died. The doctrine of divine kingship in Hindu terms flourished not in the Indian subcontinent itself but in Hinduised Southeast Asian polities such as Majapahit and Srivijaya. There it went by the name Devaraja.

  In the Iranian world, the concept of Khvarenah, meaning glory, carried the same weight. Kings could never rule unless Khvarenah was with them, and they could never fall unless it left. The idea may stem from early Mesopotamian culture, where kings were often regarded as deities after death. Shulgi of Ur was among the first Mesopotamian rulers to declare himself divine. The Kar-namag of Ardashir tells of Ardashir I of Persia and Artabanus V of Parthia fighting for the throne of Iran. On the road, an enormous ram overtook Artabanus and his contingent, and the same ram was also following Ardashir. Artabanus's religious advisers told him the ram was the glory of the ancient Iranian kings, abandoning him to join his rival.

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• 3. Anointed Kings

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  Deuteronomy 17 imagines the Israelites saying, "I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me." The passage allows it, but only a king whom the Lord chooses, taken from among their own brothers and never a foreigner. Rabbinical Judaism debated the legitimacy of kingship until Maimonides. He drew on 1 Samuel 8, the source of the law of kingship called mishpat ha-melech, and concluded that Judaism supports monarchy. He said the Israelites received three commandments on entering the Promised Land: designate a king, wipe out the memory of Amalek, and build the Temple. The argument centred on the word "designate". Some rabbis read it as a call to elect a leader, which opposes divine right. Others held that God's will becomes manifest through the nation's collective decision, so an appointed king is God's emissary. Jewish law prescribes a blessing on seeing a monarch, thanking God "Who has given from His glory to flesh and blood".

  The Christian version of the idea traces back to the prophet Samuel, who anointed Saul and then David over Israel. Anointing made the monarch inviolable. Even when Saul tried to kill him, David would not raise a hand against him, because "he was the Lord's anointed". Striking a king counted as sacrilege equal to striking God, and as blasphemy. Only a prophet could challenge a king without that accusation, and under Christianity the church took the prophet's place. Catholic thought also found grounds for limited submission in the New Testament. Peter commanded Christians to honour the Roman Emperor, who was still a pagan. Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Romans that rulers are appointed by God. Jesus told Pontius Pilate, in John 19:10-11, that his authority as governor came from heaven.

  Adomnan of Iona preserves one of the earliest written Western medieval examples of divinely backed kingship. He wrote that divine punishment fell on the man who assassinated the Irish king Diarmait mac Cerbaill. Adomnan also recorded a story about Saint Columba. An angel carrying a glass book ordered him to ordain Aedan mac Gabrain as King of Dal Riata. Columba refused, so the angel whipped him. The angel returned on three successive nights, and Columba finally agreed. At the ordination he warned Aedan that no enemy would prevail while he obeyed God's laws. The moment he broke them, the same whip would be turned against him.

  Adomnan's writings most likely influenced other Irish writers, who in turn shaped continental ideas, and Pepin the Short's coronation may owe something to them. The later Roman Empire had already developed the European concept of a divine regent in Late Antiquity, and the Byzantine Empire, beginning with Constantine I, can be seen as its progenitor. That inheritance passed to the Carolingian dynasty and the Holy Roman Emperors, whose reach across Western and Central Europe inspired every later Western idea of kingship.

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• 4. Medieval Limits

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  Excommunication terrified medieval kings because it formally stripped away the legitimacy of their rule. In the order known as the Res publica Christiana, power was decentralised and nobody imagined the absolute monarchy of the 17th and 18th centuries. A regime was legitimate only as far as it followed Eternal Law, the Lex Aeterna, which is the divine blueprint for the world. Rational humans share in that blueprint and so know Natural Law, the Lex Naturalis. Local custom shapes Natural Law into Human Law, the Lex Humana. Thomas Aquinas articulated this ladder most famously. It bound a king to govern by Natural Law and to protect local customs.

  Church leaders judged whether a king kept to Natural Law and so held his Divine Mandation. Excommunication therefore handed the Church leadership a papal power to depose him. Kings also shared power with parliaments, such as the Cortes Generales in Iberia, and with a strong nobility. Church leaders and political theorists encouraged that division. Aquinas himself preferred a constitutional monarchy checked by a strong parliament. Even so, the boundary between royal and church authority was fought over repeatedly. The sharpest English example was the murder of Archbishop Thomas Beckett in 1170.

  Aquinas also wrestled with tyrants. Where nobody higher could judge an invader, he wrote, "he who slays a tyrant to liberate his fatherland is to be praised and receives a reward." But he forbade subjects to overthrow a morally and spiritually legitimate king. His reasoning was that if subjects could judge a superior's laws bad, all lawful authority would be under constant threat. Only the pope could depose such a king. John of Paris argued that kings and bishops held separate jurisdictions, and that kings drew their supreme but non-absolute temporal jurisdiction from popular consent.

  The English theologian John Wycliffe took a harsher line. Injuries a king inflicted on a person were to be borne submissively. Injuries a king inflicted against God were to be resisted patiently, even to death. Gravely sinful kings and popes forfeited their right to obedience and ownership, though Wycliffe still wanted the political order kept. Lollards and Hussites later took up more aggressive versions of his idea. Erasmus of Rotterdam went further in one respect. For him it was the consent of the people that gives and takes away "the purple", not any unchangeable divine mandate.

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• 5. Reformation Absolutism

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  Dei Gratia, Latin for "by the Grace of God", has historically been attached to the titles of certain reigning monarchs. Answering only to God did not by itself make a monarch a sacred king. Nor did it make the monarch's power unlimited. Older notions of rights were hierarchical. A father could expect respect from his son without owing him anything in return, and a king with divine right likewise left his subjects few rights of their own.

  The Reformation, and then the Thirty Years' War, demoted the Church leadership from ultimate political authority. Kings came to be seen as ruling under God alone. Firearms, centralised nation-states and the upheavals of the late 16th and early 17th centuries gave monarchs new reasons to welcome the theory. Henry VIII of England made himself Supreme Head of the Church of England and used the power of the throne more than any predecessor. William Tyndale's Obedience of the Christian Man was the first modern English statement of the doctrine. Historian Gerard Wegemer remarks: "In 1528 Anne Boleyn exacerbated Henry's lust for imperial power by giving him a book that justified everything he would ever want to do."

  Before the Reformation, an anointed king was God's accredited vicar within his realm for secular purposes only. In Protestant states he became God's vicar for religious purposes as well. Martin Luther relied on Paul's Epistle to the Romans in 1525, when he urged the secular authorities to crush the Peasant Rebellion in Germany. He wrote Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants for the purpose.

  In France, the preacher Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet gave a classic statement of the doctrine in a sermon before Louis XIV. "Kings reign by Me, says Eternal Wisdom," he said, quoting the Latin "Per me reges regnant". The Huguenot nobles and clergy had rejected the pope and the Catholic Church. That left them with only the supreme power of the king, whom they taught nobody could judge. In theory divine, natural, customary and constitutional law still bound him. But with no superior spiritual power to enforce it, and with no court of his own able to try him, the king became an absolute power. Historian J. P. Sommerville stresses that this theory was polemic. Its champions magnified royal power, he says, "to protect the state against anarchy and to refute the ideas of resistance theorists".

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• 6. The Scholar King

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  In 1597-1598, James VI of Scotland wrote Basilikon Doron, a manual on the powers of a king, for his four-year-old son Henry Frederick. The book describes a king who "acknowledgeth himself ordained for his people, having received from God a burden of government, whereof he must be countable". Its overriding image was a father and his children. "Just as no misconduct on the part of a father can free his children from obedience to the fifth commandment," the argument ran, so no misconduct frees subjects from obeying their king.

  After becoming James I of England in 1603, he had his Defense of the Right of Kings printed, in the face of English theories of inalienable popular and clerical rights. His boldest statement came in a speech to parliament in 1610. "The state of monarchy is the supremest thing upon earth," he said, "for kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself, they are called gods."

  James offered three comparisons for monarchy. One came from Scripture, where kings are called gods and their power is likened to divine power. Another came from the family, since a king is true parens patriae, the political father of his people. The last came from the body, where the king is the head of the microcosm of a man. His phrase "God's lieutenants" apparently points to Romans 13, where Paul calls rulers "God's ministers". That chapter commands, "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers." It also warns that a ruler "beareth not the sword in vain".

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• 7. Voices Of Resistance

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  In 1598, the Spanish Catholic historian Juan de Mariana published De rege et regis institutione. He argued that society was formed by a pact among all its members. "There can be no doubt that they are able to call a king to account," he wrote. In certain circumstances he thought tyrannicide could be justified. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine shared his belief that Catholics could sometimes lawfully remove a monarch. Bellarmine also "did not believe that the institute of monarchy had any divine sanction".

  Protestants pushed back too, and some of the earliest anti-monarchist writing came from English exiles. In 1553, the Catholic Mary I succeeded her Protestant half-brother Edward VI. She abolished his religious laws in the Statute of Repeal Act, repealed the Protestant laws of Henry VIII, and revived the Heresy Acts in late 1554. Protestants fled abroad. The names later linked to this circle include Ponet, Knox, Goodman and Hales.

  John Ponet was the highest-ranking ecclesiastic among the exiles. When Thomas Wyatt the Younger launched Wyatt's rebellion in early 1554, Ponet allegedly took part. After its defeat he escaped to Strasbourg. The following year he published A Shorte Treatise of Politike Power, which set out a theory of justified opposition to secular rulers. One later assessment calls it the first in a new wave of anti-monarchical writings. It appeared several years before the more brilliantly expressed Huguenot works usually taken to represent Reformation tyrannicide theories. Printers brought Ponet's pamphlet out again on the eve of the execution of Charles I. The American founder John Adams considered it to contain "all the essential principles of liberty, which were afterward dilated on by Sidney and Locke". That included the idea of a three-branched government.

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• 8. Collapse Of The Doctrine

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  Sir Robert Filmer became the most famous exponent of divine right as 17th-century political controversies pushed the doctrine to its most extreme conclusions. It was the main issue to be settled by the English Civil War. The Royalists held that "all Christian kings, princes and governors" take their authority directly from God. The Parliamentarians held that authority comes from a contract, actual or implied, between sovereign and people. If the Royalists were right, the king's power would be unlimited, as in the saying "L'état, c'est moi", which is misattributed to Louis XIV. The execution of Charles I proclaimed the victory of the contract view to the world.

  For a time the doctrine drew strength from the blood of the royal "martyr", and it guided the Anglican Church of the Restoration. Then James II made it impossible for the clergy to obey both their conscience and their king. The Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 ended divine right as a great political force. It left Britain with a Crown held by descent but open to change by parliamentary action. By 1700, an Anglican Archbishop was prepared to assert that kings hold their crowns by law alone, and that the law may forfeit them.

  Opposition to divine right helped to shape modern ideas of liberty, dignity, freedom and equality. John Milton attacked the doctrine in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, and Thomas Paine did the same in Common Sense. John Locke's Essay concerning The True Original, Extent, and End of Civil-Government is one of the two most famous English-language declarations of a right to revolution against tyranny. The other is Thomas Jefferson's phrase in the United States Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal". That rejects the doctrine's focus on one individual monarch, and it also stands against the doctrine's hierarchy.

  The British coronation still carries a trace of the old idea. The Archbishop of Canterbury anoints the monarch with holy oils, and the United Kingdom's sovereign is the only European monarch still crowned in a formal religious coronation. Elsewhere, an oath, inauguration, blessing or simple proclamation usually marks accession. Even Roman Catholic monarchs like Louis XIV never admitted that a coronation by an archbishop formed any part of their title to reign. They treated it as only the consecration of a title they already held.

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