The Divine Right of Kings Reconsidered

Abstract

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 himselfe they are called Gods.' 1 James I delivered these famous words to his Lords and Commons at Whitehall on 21 March 1609/10, and they have been the subject of debate ever since. In recent times that debate has been amongst historians, once rather shocked by James's un-English words, but more recently inclined to probe with increased subtlety the mental world that underlay them. Even those more recent attempts, however, have told us more about the ancestry of James's ideas, and rather less about their place in the general structure of early Stuart political discourse. It is to the latter subject that this essay is addressed, in the belief that a history of the origins and sources of a set of ideas is never by itself able to provide a complete account of the uses to which those ideas can be put.